Allison Weir

How can we think about identities in the wake of feminist critiques of identity and identity politics? In Identities and Freedom, Allison Weir rethinks conceptions of identity – both individual identity and the collective identity of “women” – in relation to freedom. Drawing on Taylor and Foucault, Butler, Zerilli, Mahmood, Mohanty, Young, and others, Weir develops a complex and nuanced account of identities that takes seriously the ways in which identity categories are bound up with power relations, with processes of subjection and exclusion, yet argues that identities are also sources of important values, and of freedom, for they are shaped and sustained by relations of interdependence and solidarity. Moving out of the paradox of identity and freedom requires understanding identities as effects of multiple contesting relations of power and relations of interdependence. Weir argues that our identities are best understood as our connections: to each other, to ourselves, and to ideals. And she argues that our freedom is found in these connections. If the question of identity is “to whom and to what am I importantly connected?” the question of freedom is about the nature of those connections: how do the relationships that hold us together constitute not just shackles but sources of freedom? Identities are sources of freedom if they are understood not as static categories but as practices: hence Weir leads us from a notion of identity as a fixed epistemological category to identity as an ongoing, dynamically unfolding practical-political process of identification. And she envisions a politics of transformative identifications: practices that risk the difficult work of connection through conflict, openness and change. Her account of transformative identity politics as a politics of identification thus moves beyond mere strategic essentialism to articulate a more coherent basis for feminist politics.

In her recent analysis of Islamic feminist philosophies, Aysha Hidayatullah concludes that Islamic feminists need to embrace radical uncertainty, in a path toward freedom. Amina Wadud, on the other hand, argues for a conception of individual freedom as engaged surrender, in which the moral agent is critically engaged in a relationship of trust with God, in the service of social justice. I argue that while openness to uncertainty and transgression of limits are guiding normative principles of western secularism, the attachment to this negative form of freedom can also serve as a form of closure to alternative discourses of freedom, in which freedom is understood as engagement in relationship. I suggest that the ideal of engaged surrender could be taken up as an exemplary form of agency and individual freedom for an understanding of freedom of speech that includes receptivity and listening.

In the Indigenous resistance movement that came to be known as “Idle No More,” round dances played a central role. From the beginning of the movement in western Canada in the winter of 2012–13, and as it spread across Turtle Island (North America) and throughout the world, round dances served to bring together Indigenous and non‐Indigenous activists with people in the streets. “At almost every event, we collectively embodied our diverse and ancient traditions in the round dance by taking the movement to the streets, malls and highways across Turtle Island” (The Kino‐nda‐niimi Collective 2014, 24). But why was the round dance important, and how does the dance work to support political resistance?

Abstract Charles Taylor and Michel Foucault offer two very different descriptions and analyses of modern identities. While it can be argued that Taylor and Foucault are thematizing two very different aspects of identity – Taylor is focusing on first-person, subjective, affirmed ...

In her book, T&dquo;he Bonds of Love: L'sychoanalysis, feminism, and the Prob-lem of Domination, Jessica Benjamin sets out to understand gender relations through an intersubjective theory of the development of the self. For Benjamin, this entails an understanding of self-...

One of the most pressing issues for feminists today is what Arlie Russell Hochschild, drawing on the work of Rhacel Parrefias, has called “global care chains”: relatively well-off western and northern women have been “freed” to work in the paid workforce by employing poor ...