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Life Stories, Law's Stories: Subjectivity and Responsibility in the Politicization of the Discourse of “ Identity ”
Author(s) -
Greenhouse Carol J.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
polar: political and legal anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.529
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1555-2934
pISSN - 1081-6976
DOI - 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2008.00002.x
Subject(s) - subjectivity , politics , identity (music) , sociology , assertion , identity politics , political science , law , gender studies , aesthetics , epistemology , philosophy , computer science , programming language
In this essay, my focus is on the politicization of “identity” as an aspect of political competition within the U.S. government at critical moments in the modern making (and unmaking) of rights. I draw on a comparison of two textual examples: transcripts of the hearings that yielded the Civil Rights Act of 1990 and a reading of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Their antithetical visions of identity offer a “way in” to a particular moment in the recent U.S. past when race was resignified in public policy debates that clarified the emergent political dominance of the conservative movement—and then partially reclaimed with the assertion of identity as a theoretical object in anthropology and adjacent academic fields.