On the nature of identities

First off, I apologise for the rambling in this post; I'm not sure how much of it is necessary, because this is a topic I have very mixed and confused thoughts on. There is a tl;dr version at the bottom of this post. Now, without further ado:

We're not English, we are Scouse
We're not English, we are Scouse
We're not English, we're not English
We're not English, we are Scouse

I'll stop there, partly because I'm not a Scouser and partly because I'd probably have to thump my own OP for derailing if I advised you to stick the royal family anywhere.

So, why that song? Bit of a joke? Maybe. But I chose that quotation for two reasons. Firstly, because I think it highlights just how complex and seemingly contradictory the question of identity can be, and secondly, because I see Liverpool football fans as being highly relevant to this topic, as are other fandoms of all varieties.

OK, first, some context for this thread. Anyone who's seen a few of my posts will probably know that I talk about identity a lot - possibly too much. It's something I sometimes feel I shouldn't care about, but how can I not when, as a culture, we're collectively obsessed with it? I don't know if this is to do with nationalism or individualism or some other ideology, or indeed, something more primal, but whatever the reason, we seem to spend a lot of time talking about who we are, and tellingly, who we aren't. We define other people much the same way. You can even see it on this forum, in the attitudes towards avatars, posting styles, other sites, and of course, the never-ending sequence of threads posing questions: how tall are you? How old are you? What is your sex/gender? What is your ethnicity? Your sexual orientation? Your religion? Your first name? In short, who - or what - exactly are you?

Anyway, recently I had a lecture on the subject of gender as pertains to Jackie Kay's novel, Trumpet. A point which was emphasised throughout was that identity, including gender identity, is not innate, but performative. The philosopher Judith Butler was quoted as having said, "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results."

Now, I was struck by how much this completely contradicts my understanding of gender which is primarily derived from the various gender threads on this site, which have led me to believe that gender identity is something specific to each individual, and is distinct from outward gender performance.

Which raises a funny (or alternatively, a horrible) question: can you be one thing and behave like another? If you identify as a liberal American woman but were born in Britain, are male and look like a skinhead, can you still be a liberal American woman, or are you deluding yourself?

But we needn't go that far. At a less extreme level, when does one stop acting like a bitch and become a bitch? When does one stop acting like an idiot and become an idiot? When does one stop acting like a nerd and become a nerd?

After all, our perceptions of other people's identities are certainly related to how they are perceived to act. Consider the following statements:

Judith Butler is Jewish.

Judith Butler is American.

Judith Butler is a postmodernist.

Judith Butler is a feminist.

Judith Butler is a queer theorist.

Judith Butler is a professor at UC Berkeley.

Now imagine that, instead of referring to her as a "philosopher" above, I'd used one of those words. Would that have given you a different impression of her? I suspect for many people, the answer is yes. It's not normal to make a distinction between what a person is and how a person behaves.

That brings up the pretty well-established point that identity is a multi-faceted thing. One may be both English and Liverpudlian. One may be both American and Russian, or Polish, or German, or Scottish. Which I think is interesting because it means that one may describe their ethnicity as Scottish, but talk, think and act like an American.

Compare how an Internet user might post "*huggles u* <3" on one site and "kill yourself, faggot" on another. Are those different personas? Different identities? Can they be reconciled?

It's also pretty well established that identity is pretty clearly related to cultural norms. For example, in the 19th Century, blue was a feminine colour and pink was a masculine colour. In many Asian cultures, girls are assumed to be better at harder sciences than the more emotional and creative boys.

So if gender is cultural, how can it be innate? Alternatively, if gender is changeable, why do people tend to stick to one or the other?

We can also apply this to race. For example, is it possible to be black, but not act black? Is it possible to act black but not act like (please forgive me) a nigger? What do these words actually mean? In Renaissance Europe, prior to modern conceptions of race, it was considered entirely possible for a white person to "become" a Moor (a term which could denote a black or Middle Eastern person) by behaving like one. Since race is a cultural construct with no scientific basis, who's to say the Renaissance Europeans were wrong and modern Westerners are right?

There are, of course, some labels which are taken less seriously than others, and where they are concerned the above question probably seems much less strange. Nobody would argue that a emo cannot become a hipster, or that a soldier cannot become a businessman. In the modern age, the statement that a Muslim can become a Christian is probably similarly uncontroversial. So can a man become a woman? Can a black person become white? Can a gay person become straight? The latter, in particular, is probably an uncomfortable question for many, since it calls to mind the ex-gay movement, which to a modern Western liberal is a horrible thing - a movement which seeks to remove and stigmatise part of a person's identity, rather than just curtail a particular behaviour.

Now, this topic is simultaneously about religion, race, gender, nationality, teen subcultures, personality traits and fandoms. I'm going to talk about the latter for a bit since they're something that has puzzled me for some time. I don't feel that I belong to any fandoms. I am not a Whovian. I like Doctor Who, but I've never felt comfortable calling myself a Whovian. It seems to me to imply a sense of belonging to a whole culture of fans with their own differing ideas of what it means to be a fan (or a "true fan") of the show.

But what, exactly, is a Whovian? And what is a Trekkie, and what is an X-Phile, and what is a Brony? What exactly is a fan, and how does it differ from a person-who-enjoys?

One term I have never had any problem identifying as is a "troper", because it's clearly true; I have edited TV Tropes Wiki. This is, indeed, probably the only thing I have in common with other tropers such as Matrix, Nornagest, Madrugada, Barkey, Myrmidon and Deboss. So that would imply that my identity as a troper is performative. Yet, I have a deviantART page, and a You Tube account; I've edited Wikipedia and the Doctor Who wiki, and I've made posts on 4chan - yet I don't identify by any of those sites in the same way that I'd call myself a troper, even though I honestly am not sure what the difference is.

tl;dr version is, what is identity? When do we stop acting like something and actually become that something? And are these things performative, or innate?

Input on any and all aspects of personal identity welcome. I only ask that we keep this civil, because I realise I've gone and combined a number of the most potentially explosive topics possible into one thread.

Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text-Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The Staff

So this is what Madrugada was talking about. Your alchemy will yeild something of great beauty and horror, no doubt the ultimate thread, as we can understand it, is before us, yet merely the beggining.

But what's this? A glimmer of hope? A young man stands alone in your avatar box, his presence a signal? I shall alert the others at once.

-ahem.-

Yeah, Identity is a big deal, and it's probably at the root of most of our discussion.

edited 23rd Mar '11 3:42:18 PM by HungryJoe

Charlie Tunoku is a lover and a fighter.

Identity is a fluid concept at best. It starts when you're born, then continues as you get older, then grows wildly out of control once you die and people keep you in memories.

We might define someone to help clarify a subject or an idea, and we can usually define by what is opposite of it. But identity has always been a rather vague topic, and once I found that only I can identify myself as "me", life because a hell of a lot more simple.

There's a whole can of metaphysical worms at the bottom of this too.

If I identify, and believe myself to be something I am clearly not and incapable of becoming, am I that thing?

I just finished watching Psycho for the first time in film studies, so this is actually hitting me at a good time.

Charlie Tunoku is a lover and a fighter.

IMO, a useful concept of identity is that an individual will match templates to more or lesser degrees. "Jewish","American", "postmodernist", "feminist", "queer theorist" and "professor" are all templates, some of which are more well-defined than others, and all individuals will match them to some degree or another.

edited 23rd Mar '11 3:04:40 PM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

In your mind you are, though in the minds of others you are not.

I think that identity is relative. For example:

• I am everything that is collectively me (from my nationality down to that stupid thing I did in eighth grade) to myself
• I am "that Polish-American troper who uses her own original characters as avatars and is obsessed with Beowulf, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Norse mythology" on TV Tropes
• at some other forum I go to I am "Conne, that reg who's writing an epic story about Jack Clive and Project 154 and draws lots of pictures of said Jack Clive, and likes thunder thighs on dudes"
• that weird small girl with the short hair and wears the same sweater every day to some kids at school
• that transvestite girl who's really loud and to other kids at school
• my precious granddaughter who has an interest in many things, but does little to my grandmother (among other things, she's known me for a long time)
• that weird but kind of fun to talk to kid in my class who shares my sense of humor to many of my acquaintances

the list can go on and on...

Basically, though I am everything I am to myself, I am a different person to different people.

edited 23rd Mar '11 3:09:54 PM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

You're the poor soul stuck in New Britain to me, anne. :V

Charlie Tunoku is a lover and a fighter.

I'm actually not in New Britain anymore. =P

And see, I'm not even a New Britainite to many people, simply because they don't know that I am from there.

edited 23rd Mar '11 3:10:47 PM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

Than you're just a soul.

But the point remains, a simple fact can alter perception quite greatly.

The "basics" are often central.

Charlie Tunoku is a lover and a fighter.

What anne said with the addition that your identity is always changing. Usually in small ways. Sometimes in large ones. It's a fluid thing.

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

I think Hegel's Dialectic actually makes a lot of sense if applied to people instead of history.

We have our Idea, we're presented with New Info, and we get a New Idea. Which can than be continuously updated in the same manner..

Charlie Tunoku is a lover and a fighter.

what are the basics, though?

To me, a fundamental part of my identity is my name and its meaning, which is why I like translating it into so many languages. If my name wasn't "favored by god", I would probably be somewhat of a different person because I'd have a different name meaning to think about and subconsciously apply to myself.

Most people in the world who see me though, don't even know what my name is, and those that do know what my name is may not know what it means and how important the etymology of my name is to me.

So is my name one of the "basics"?

---

Aondeug: It's true that your identity changes, but that wasn't exactly the point I was making. The point I was making was that the same person is viewed differently by different people, so that person's identity is perceived differently, and thus, identity is relative.

edited 23rd Mar '11 3:18:31 PM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

I can see my name being a big part of my identity in that that is part of how I identify myself personally, but not the meaning. I didn't even know the meaning for many years. The sounds in the name mean more than the meaning to me.

edited 23rd Mar '11 3:19:23 PM by Aondeug

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

For you. For the identity everybody else has set up for you, it may not be.

The identities we pick out for eachother are also unique in that they often lack a distinct visual aspect. Your identity in real life is largely communicated through dress. Here? Not so much.

It's also one of the reasons why we can't be "friends" soley in this context. It's a limited medium, and can only carry certain aspects.

Ya know, unless you post in photos, but I ain't down wi't dat.

Charlie Tunoku is a lover and a fighter.

How are we defining friends because I am fine with being friends with someone I have never seen?

edited 23rd Mar '11 3:23:20 PM by Aondeug

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

To me friends can be many things: there are internet friends, and fun-people-to-talk-to friends, and then there's my Nakama.

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

I have similar categories for friends though some of the friends I know mostly online and met online have moved up the ranks.

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

For me, my identity is whatever that would naturally follow after the words "I am...". It's something I think of regularly in my head, since my identity is particularly fluid. When my gender is female, the idea of "I am a girl" is one that comes naturally to me. Otherwise, it does not, and I intuitively know that it is wrong. This is all regardless of what I am physically.

Racially/Ethnically, I do not feel that "I am Japanese" despite being born of two Japanese parents. I was not born in Japan, nor have I lived there for any extended amount of time. Still, I say that because I don't have anything else to say in regards to that. I feel related to the Japanese, but not really being Japanese myself.

Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.

Belief is a form of belief structure, much as faith is. It's irrelevant if I believe myself to be a purple dragon if I identify myself as something different; just because I believe in something, or believe myself to be something or identify with something doesn't necessitate my identification with said something.

It's hard for me to correctly describe identification, but the best I can do right now is to correlate it to words and language. A word's identity is the idea that it conveys. However, there are many words that convey the same kind of idea, and possibly share the same identity. In order to better understand them, we define these words, usually defining them according to the idea they convey, as well as what they don't convey.

Identity works in a similar fashion. We can identify with a general concept of who we are as humans, but we can't necessarily define it for one reason or another (either we can understand our identity but can't explain it, or we can't understand our identity but can explain it, or we can't understand our identity and can't explain it), in a manner that's easy to understand.

Edit:

No, that means that perception is relative. Identity is simultaneously a fluid and concrete conceptual construct.

edited 23rd Mar '11 3:40:09 PM by Newfable

I no longer have a desire to identify as a philospher.

Jounralism offers much less confusing writing.

Yet, I identify as a would-be writer.

Charlie Tunoku is a lover and a fighter.

My natural tendency is to think of identities in terms of rules and restrictions—e.g., if your identity is straight, you can't have sex with men. Because of this, I have never felt fully comfortable with any of the identities I've picked or been assigned by those around me, ranging from "transhumanist" to "Social Democrat" to even "male" (with the exception of "gamer," which I feel I fit.) I'm beginning to think that this approach is improper, however.

A more proper approach might be "your identity is composed of the things such that if you lost them you would no longer consider yourself to be yourself." This means that different people have different components in their identities—some people, for instance, bond so fully to their homes that they no longer feel the same if they're forced to leave, while others like myself consider our locations completely irrelevant.

Edit: Come to think of it, the "straightjacket" approach might be why I'm so hostile to Deaf culture, particularly to the idea that having cochlear implants is a form of treachery. To me, everyone should have a choice in what they want to be. (By this same token, of course, I ought to be more respectful of those who choose not to get the implants.)

edited 23rd Mar '11 8:59:47 PM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

'Deaf culture' is a bit of a Berserk Button of mine as well.

hashtagsarestupid

@Bobby: This is the thread I've been trying and failing to create for months because this issue bugs me so much. Thanks.

I got concerned when I found that, out of bitterness, I was believing this idea more than I was all that comfortable with. Not about gender, though, but more about morality. For instance, do one's good intentions redeem them even if the outward expression of them goes wrong and ends up hurting others? Do said intentions mean anything at all? I'm going to give up the old assumptions I slipped into and say I don't know yet.

Unfortunately, since this is my question, too, I can't give any great insights on it yet.

whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion

An identifier is a term created or adopted by a community to describe its members. It is as such both inclusive (it encompasses everyone part of the community regardless of other differences they may possess) and exclusive (it establishes an "other", creating or reinforcing an us vs. them mentality). In the modern day, almost everyone will describe themselves with a number of such identifiers, both for the purpose of strengthening their ties to members of their preferred social group and to keep out others of whom they disapprove.

Identity is thus a natural consequence of humans' social nature; and it is both the reason why humanity survived as long as it has, and a basic existential threat that could eventually cause humanity's self-destruction. Nature's self-correcting that way.

edited 24th Mar '11 3:13:22 AM by aishkiz

I have devised a most marvelous signature, which this signature line is too narrow to contain.

That's one big topic. It's also one where I can't provide real answers - I doubt anyone can -, but only perspectives. And random thoughts. And a small wall of text.

As you started with a song, I will start with a personal anecdote: I was born on the left bank of the Rhine, but I lived there for only four years of my life, and left nearly 23 years ago. But whenever I am in the area, I feel strangely at home, in a sense I've never really been able to define. Of all the defining innate traits I could've chosen chose - heterosexual, male, white, etc. - the only one that I, for a lack of better word, feel as being part of my identity is my birthplace.

But returning to the question at hand, whenever I see binary distinctions, I tend to get sceptical. Innate v. performative is one of them, especially since it sounds a little bit like a fancy variation of genetics v. behaviourism. Now, if your question is 'When do we stop acting like something and actually become that something?', my answer would be 'in the moment we participate in something.'

Participation, or the German version of it, Teilhabe, is a word my therapist implanted in my brain, actually. It is the counterpart of performance. Imagine adopting a child. In the beginning, you will be performing a role - parent. You will consciously do so, for a few weeks or months, trying to match your performance'' with your expectations. It stops being perfomance the day you stop playing a part and instead become a part of it. It starts feeling right instead of necessary.

Participation is, for me at least, one of the most important parts of identity, a) because it can be both an innate result (kids naturally trust their parents) or trained behaviour, and b) it can change. Kids in puberty might realize that they don't feel comfortable with what is expected of them - what was participation becomes performance.

I've got the same problem you have - I don't like defining myself by terms like Whovian, Trekkie (Niner, actually), Browncoat etc. Defining myself by something I passively enjoy doesn't feel right, I could as well call myself a Sunrisian or Pastaphile. The same applies to some activities - just because I sometimes repair computers for money doesn't make me IT technician. It's a role I perform - a part I play -, not something I am a part of.

Thus, where you say 'that would imply that my identity as a troper is performative', I'd say your identity on wikipedia or deviant is, whereas your identity as a troper is 'participatory'.

To end with another personal statement: I've actively taken part in internet communities for over fifteen years now, and I've never made more than a cursory attempt to hide my real identity. kurushio is my handle in nearly every community, but it is a name I have been using in real life even longer, and anyone with the necessary curiosity and google can find out my real name in about ten seconds. I do that because I want to be accountable for my words and actions online - what you see here might only be glimpses of me, but they're all real snapshots, no photoshopping involved. I don't feel comfortable performing on the net.

edited 24th Mar '11 3:54:42 AM by kurushio