Deliberation, Marginalized Identity, and Legibility

• In Event: Gender, Desire, and Freedom

Abstract

How do practices of judgment and persuasion shape the way marginalized social identities move from being developed within groups to publicly legible? I argue that practices of judgment within sub-communities allow for groups to construct and transform their understanding of collective identities, resisting oppressive or degrading scripts that others have applied to them using bottom-up reasoning. However, there are challenges in moving from an in-community process of building up an emancipatory conception of yourself to making that conception publicly legible to the broader society. In particular, I point to two problems. The first of these is of the self-reinforcing nature of oppressive scripts. These are structured in ways that make it difficult to disavow demeaning characterizations, because disavowals as well as the disavower are treated as suspect; this produces a particularly insidious structure of epistemic oppression. The second is the gap between the visibility of an identity and respect for it. As we have seen in cases such as the ongoing anti-trans moral panic, visibility does not equate to either understanding or safety, and can additionally restructure the material practices surrounding an identity for the worse.


What does this show us about the limits and abilities of persuasion as a strategy? Are there ways in which identity legibility can work against a group’s emancipatory goals? How does the limit on the ways identities can become public shape or constrain the ways in which groups develop their own self-conceptions? In order to make this argument, I engage with Arendtian theories of judgment including Nedelsky’s writings on communities of judgment, theories of social scripts, and scholarship on persuasion. I also engage with queer theory approaches to the question of identity and legibility, such as Butler.

Author

• Aberdeen Berry, McGill University