Accounting for Identity with Alcoff and Butler

Felder, Francesca

Accounting for Identity with Alcoff and Butler

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Date

2017

Authors

Felder, Francesca

Advisor

Miller, Jerry

Department

Haverford College. Department of Philosophy

Type

Thesis

Award

The Charles Schwartz Memorial Prize in Philosophy

Language

eng

Access Restrictions

Open Access

Terms of Use

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Abstract

What is the problem with identity? A genre of academic articles has emerged out of concern over the use of identity in various political and social contexts. These articles worry that social identities such as race, gender, and ethnicity limit the freedom of the individual if we assume them to be real or a priori distinctions. They implicitly retain a modern view of the subject that counterposes pre-social individual agency against the imposition of social identity. This modern view of the subject generates the very problem with identity they try to solve. In contrast, the works of Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990) and Linda Alcoff (Visible Identities, 2006) aim to overcome the modern view of the subject by articulating a self that is socially constituted by its identities. Despite the vast differences in their accounts, each continues to employ a split between a pre-social self and the social in which agency can always overcome one’s social identity. I argue that an account of identity must not aim to solve the modern problem with identity, but instead show that such a problem only arises when agency and identity are understood to be mutually exclusive. Identities function as the apparent authorizing origins of the social norms that produce them. But because identities inevitably fail to ever fully justify those norms, they are not inherently reifying.

Permanent URL

http://hdl.handle.net/10066/19402

Collections

Philosophy

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