In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Mart?n Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate. Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Mart?n Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Mart?n Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.
The book explores the material infrastructure of gendered identity, and the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites.
Overall, its breaking of disciplinary isolation, enhancing of mutual understanding, and laying out of a transdisciplinary platform makes this Handbook a milestone in identity studies.
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Brown's proximity to hermeneutic philosophy can be witnessed in the way she criticizes feminist standpoint theories for assuming that an individual is able to have clarity and distinctness about her own experience. On Brown's reading ...
By using Croatians and Slovenians in Australia as examples this book examines the extent to which migrants are influenced by historical and contemporary processes of migration mediated through political and cultural symbolism.
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See United States Military Academy at West Point “When Keeping It Real Goes Right” (NiaOnline), 102 When Work Disappears (Wilson), 104 White, B. Jack, 28, 137n1 Whitehead, John, 5, 59 Whyte, William Foote, 101, 149n20 Williams, ...
Once considered the province of “New Age” groups, the self-esteem movement has been catapulted into the American mainstream, with a California task force and other groups now claiming that raising...
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This book explores the invisibility and invalidation of bisexuality from the past to the present and is unique in extending the discussion to focus on contemporary and emerging identities.