Blog Post 8 - Identity & Belonging

This week, we discussed the topic of social change and communication ethics. These concepts were further expanded upon by three communication scholars who studied identity, culture, and community. One reading in particular that stood out to me was entitled "Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation" and written by Aimee Marie Carrillo Rowe. The author opens their text by recounting this idea of "home". They translate the tangible and abstract parts of this "home" into our personal and communal identities. Carrillo argues that the two are intertwined and malleable with the evolution of one's surroundings yet warns readers of the uncertainties of abandoning their self-reflection. "“Home, once interrogated, is a place we’ve never been before.” Kamala Visweswaran (1994) wrote this in her meditation on feminist ethnography as failure. She urges us to sit patiently with moments of failure to know more about who we are. Because who we are is always inseparable from the theory we create. And the theory we create allows us to live in new and more just ways. Our “homework” is to examine these connections—between self and community, between community and theory, between theory and justice. Doing our homework is about making the familiar strange, of revisiting home to unearth what is at stake in its making." (Carrillo Rowe 15-16). The majority of us would be able to identify a space we would interpret as home, even if it was not a long-term, permanent residence. Carrillo forms this image of a safe space and presents her vision for her study regarding the importance of critically observing and challenging our "home".

As I was diving deeper into her text and this idea of "home", I was reminded yet again of the shifts I made as I transitioned out of my fundamentalist high school education into an independent, free-thinking adult. Shortly after graduating and leaving school, I had many opportunities to travel and enrich my life with diversity, culture, and first-hand experience. In addition to this time away from home, I had been able to create my own safe space to explore my personal identity in relation to my previous and present surroundings. Since leaving the fundamentalist system I was indoctrinated into, I have had many opportunities to question my identity and where that identity comes from. As it relates to Carrillo's argument, I found great value in challenging the identity and community I had known to be a safe space for the majority of my youth. Without "making the familiar strange" as the author writes in their previous statement, I would not have been able to reexamine and shift my identity. 

Carrillo also makes a point further into this text where they highlight this idea of "compulsory heterosexuality" and how it influences how women develop a sense of belonging. "Compulsory heterosexuality positions women to compete with each other for male attention and approval. Thus the desire to belong to and with men functions to discourage communities of belonging to and with other women. How many doors will we slam on our “sisters” in our efforts to see and be seen by men in power? As with whiteness, heterosexuality conditions women’s accountability to men, which demands that we not be accountable to each other. If, as Audre Lorde says, women fail to meet the challenges that face us as women seeking to forge alliances with other women, it is a failure of the imagination. Compulsory heterosexuality disciplines our imaginations. It teaches women to decode each other’s bodies as sites of competition and comparison, as opposed to compassion, community, and belonging." (Carrillo 30-31). This idea of pursuing "belonging" to one group at the expense of abandoning another raises challenges in the quest for social change and creating equity. 

This reminds me of a dispute Roxane Gay addressed in her book "Bad Feminist". She is consistently critiquing her identity and her desire for belonging in her short essays and is quick to remind her readers that she is, indeed, a "bad feminist". However, it is not in the way audiences may expect. She shares her internal struggles of caving to social and subconscious expectations and urges to maintain a communal identity that is acceptable in a public, cultural sphere. While those spaces may enable her to exist in a "safe space", there is no evolution of society when we stay in those spaces. Gay admits to her own shortcomings but reminds readers that the human experience is not designed for perfection but for progression. 

Gay, Roxane. Bad Feminist : Essays. First edition, Harper Perennial, 2014.

Rowe, Aimee Marie Carrillo. “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation.” Feminist Formations, vol. 17, no. 2, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. 15–46.

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