Jessica :
Don’t get me started. I am knee deep in Louise Antony’s essentialism debate with Martha Nussbaum at the moment.

Not sure whether this counts as inciting you to start, but is this something new, or the at-least-10-year-old dogpile about essentialism, feminism, logic, subjectivity, etc, etc, ad infinitum?

I would certainly not want to have the body I’ve got if I was given a choice about it but the truth is I don’t know who I am now without this CI identity, eg. I know my own strength through pain and loss and I like that about myself. I struggle with stuff always, with who I want to be and how I would like to be eg. I have a job and not a career because I can’t make the commitment needed for that. But the self who actually makes it in to work is dong pretty well and I am proud of her. I have also in a sense had to choose being ‘in’ or ‘out’ re my health and chronic illness. Because it affects my life so much I am forced to be ‘out’ so the language of identity in this discussion really resonates with my experience.

I didn’t mean this to be so confessional but I realised recently that I am reading more and more BDSM themed fiction. This discussion has helped me realise some of the why.

@ Jessica your thoughts on the werecreature/shifters led me to remember a radio show I heard last year. A philosopher called Mark Rowlands was interviewed about his book ‘the philospher and the wolf – lessons from the wild on love, death and happiness’ pub by Granta. He lived with a pet wolf ‘Brenin’ for 11 years. The whole inerview is interesting as it riffs over what does it mean to live in time, the meaning of death and the notion of immortality and where does human intelligence come from. He says the book is about moral contracts, decpetion and power. Aren’t these constant themes in our romance genre? The link with the wolf comes in what he says he learnt by being in close proximity with Brenin. Eg. that the most important things you learn are not things you consciously think, that there is a basic, visceral level of learning that emerges later in action. The interview ends with a story about Brenin showing him that it is the way you conduct yourself in the knowledge you are doomed that matters, that it is not about not having a hope but it is how to behave when in fact there is no hope.

I can’t get the links to work so hope you can follow the info below!
http://www.abc.net.au Philosophers Zone 1 August 2009 – The Philosopher and the Wolf
http://search.abc.net.au/search/click.cgi?url=http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2009/2640128.htm&rank=1&collection=rnhttp://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2009/2640128.htm

@Emmie:

but just wanted to let you know I agree — sometimes erotic romance rocks!

Thank you!

@RfP:

You think this is sort of a “black is beautiful” moment? Bearing in mind that there’s a magazine called Essence

Don’t get me started. I am knee deep in Louise Antony’s essentialism debate with Martha Nussbaum at the moment.

I love the occasional category romance, but sometimes the alpha heroes are SO alpha as to be ridiculous. I like alpha heroes, definitely, though, and I would probably be unlikely to read a story with a male sub.

Sorry, not adding a lot to your fascinating debate about sexual identity, but just wanted to let you know I agree — sometimes erotic romance rocks!

Yes, its like a conversion experience. An overwhelming shift in the way that you see the world. It’s hard not to be blinded by the light.

I think my subliminated maternal instincts just make me want to cuddle those people who are between two selves or groups. It is a extraordinarily lonely place to be. To be wrong on one end and inauthentic on the other, merely because one made a choice that does not sit well with either group, has to feel isolating, especially when it feels inauthentic to deny either aspect of yourself, publicly or privately.

Like say for example, if you were a socially liberal Christian in academia. You’d probably constantly be defending the one group to the other and feeling like a fool in the process. . . . hypothetically, of course.

But when you’ve been struggling either with denying your own sexuality OR with defining it because it has previously been undefinable to you, being able to name it and act on it and find other people to talk to about it or find a partner who complements you in it, THEN it FEELS like authenticity, it feels like coming home and finding yourself, it feels like being real and true and brave. And your previous self, in comparison, feels fake and inauthentic and weak and cowardly and not able to be true to a relationship. Which is not to say that anyone still back in their own closet is any of those things, necessarily, but it’s really such a huge sea-change in one’s perspective. It really changes the world, that having gone through it, it’s difficult not to proselytize the benefits and demonize anyone who chooses not to do it, for whatever reason.

Hypothetically, of course.

I think this is what I would say in answer to your earlier comments Angela; that no relationship can be authentic if there is stuff that is unowned and hidden away. That simply means that you are not fully present to yourself or the other person so you can’t be fully in the relationship.

Yeah, I don’t buy that. Identity is complex and fluid. What is hidden is sometimes revealed and what is revealed is sometimes hidden, even from ourselves. I do not doubt that there is power and peace in claiming an identity, especially if it is one that has been troubling you for a long time. There is power in naming things. But different aspects of people’s identity dominate at different times, depending upon their experiences, their upbringing, their values, their . . . let’s call it spirit and their temperament. All serve to coalesce into identity. Who I am today is not who am I yesterday nor 50 years from now, nor when I was 5. If there is some fundamental, essential self (and I think that there is), it is not something that is easily gotten at. The frog at the bottom of the beer glass and all that. It is unnameable. You can only name the parts, you cannot every really name the whole because the whole is not something you can see.

Nor do I think that things hidden necessitate an inauthenticity of being or some kind of bad faith. Nobody is ever fully present. They can’t be because they exist in time. If I were to actually be fully present in a moment all my past selves and my future selves would have to be there and they just aren’t. They can’t be. It is exhausting to be fully present, not to mention impossible. I am always myself but I am never entirely myself because even I cannot know who I am completely.

People reject the idea that masks need to be worn, that performances need to made in order to get on in the world. But they do. They are necessary. Even in a romantic relationship. In the words of Bataille “In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that does no know why he is himself instead of the body he touches”. Even if I sat in bed with my lover and said all the things I could say about myself, reveal everything that was hidden, they would still not know me, not be me and I would not be them. There would be lines between us. My words, my claims would be meaningless not because they are not true, not because they don’t have meaning but because they fail to describe who am I.

If I say I’m straight, I’m not telling the full story of my identity anymore than if I say I’m gay. There are parts of me that cannot be described by those words. If I’m gay and I decide to go into the priesthood and take a vow of chastity, am I denying my homosexuality or am I identifying myself more by my spirituality than my sexuality? Some people would say yes, but they are making a judgment based on their own expectations of what is authentic. They have no idea how this person came to this decision. The interiority of the other is always, utterly beyond comprehension, beyond comparison because it cannot be known.

Look. It isn’t as if I don’t understand what it means to claim something about yourself that is not culturally appropriate. I do. It’s empowering. But conversely I do not believe that because a person does not claim something about themselves openly, publicly that that makes a) it any less true b) them inauthentic or c) them capable of being in a relationship or d) them weak and cowardly.

And that was really long, off topic and tangential but there you go.