Feel like helping out a pathetic Masters student who is having a label crisis?
For those who’ve just joined the discussion, my thesis is about ‘subjectivity’ (how we come to call ourselves ‘I’ and what that means, who we think we ‘are’) in multiply marginal people (that is, people who have more than one thing in their lives that makes them a minority… they could be black and gay or asian and deaf or a pagan queer with a jewish-ukrainian-dutch background and an invisible disability (ooh, was that me I just mentioned? Nope, couldn’t be, I refuse to use labels like that.)). Until now, I’ve been calling these people ‘edge identities’ but there’s a big debate in the theoretical world about this word ‘identity’. I’m firmly in agreement with these criticisms of identity. I think ‘identity’ is a huge problem which leads to us versus them style issues. I’m trying to focus on people’s actions rather than their identity, that is, I think that subjectivity relates more to what people do (have sex with men, keep kosher) than what they supposedly are (gay, jewish).
Given all that, how the hell do I describe these people I’m talking about without labelling them?