Gender, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity

Many antiessentialist critiques have been made of ethnic, gender, racial, and national conceptions of identity. In fact, some of most dynamic areas of feminist theorizing have interrogated concepts such as women, men, the feminine, masculine subjectivity, and sex as falsely unifying heterogeneous groups of people (Butler, 1990, 1993; Fausto Sterling, 1997; Garber, 1993). What, then, is need for a further debate about identity? The concept of identity, however flawed, is, nevertheless, obviously still useful to those engaged in grassroots social movements. Rather than abandon concept of identity, Stuart Hall proposes that we continue to think with it in a detotalized and deconstructed form. He also proposes that we focus on process of identification, which he sees as a construction, a process never completed. In end, identification is conditional, lodged in contingency. Once secured, it does not obliterate difference.... Identification is, then, a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption.... And since as a process it operates across difference, it entails discursive work, binding and marking of symbolic boundaries, production of 'frontier-effects' (Hall, 1996a: 2-3). While it is clear to women in grassroots movements that participation is a constant process of negotiating difference, need to create unitary names, symbols, and goals can result in essentialization of women as mothers, as in case of El Salvador's CO-MADRES, or as Indians, as in case of indigenous women participating in and supporting struggle of Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation-EZLN) and, more broadly, Mexico's national movement for indigenous autonomy. Organizing requires projection of sameness to outsiders. Strategically, demands must stem from a coherent social location understandable to those who are audience for them-often institutions of