Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer and editor currently living in Seattle. She writes a monthly column at Full Stop that explores America's emotional condition.

Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer and editor currently living in Seattle. She writes a monthly column at Full Stop that explores America’s emotional condition.

A society that insists on labels practically demands that its citizens find power in them. The labels denote that we are the other, not the default, and pride is part of the action we take against imposed narratives. Every label carries with it a host of associations, most of them negative, and to embrace a label as part of one’s identity is to overturn those associations, to take charge of them. Race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability level, labeled by the world outside, become our own. Because they are now ours, they are a means by which we draw strength.

Except that it doesn’t always work that way, especially when pride is its own imposed narrative. Where there is an agreed-upon identity, there are a host of characteristics by which we are supposed to recognize that identity. These assumptions can be as confining as discrimination if enforced strongly enough, and there’s something uniquely jarring about feeling alienated in spaces supposedly designed to empower you. The word empowerment itself, ironically, suggests a space of powerlessness into which other people must inject power. Somehow, the idea sounds so intoxicating that it’s easy to believe we know what someone else’s empowerment looks like. Often, we take the historical route: elevate the marginalized labels. That will make everyone feel accepted, strong, heard. But what about those of us for whom labels feel confining not because of their associations, but because of the act of labeling itself?

I once embraced labels for myself, some more readily than others. I was far more excited, for instance, about being queer than I was about being disabled. As a feminist, I was certainly more enthusiastic about being a woman than about coming from a middle-class background, and I was even more thrilled to learn that there are circles of disability activists who identify themselves as body-queer. It was easy to shout these things in marches and from stages in performance art. The problem is, I never actually accepted my own body by taking on that label and fostering pride in it.

I’d been so wrapped up in the empowerment narrative that I’d forgotten to actually interrogate those internal spaces in which I’d actually felt powerless. I couldn’t even begin to interrogate them until I did that which identity politics’ approach generally discourages: questioned my personal experiences and the feelings behind them. I had to subject my emotions to analysis, even to objective criticism, in order to figure out what I actually believed. Historically, objective criticism has been the exclusive property of wealthy white males. The empowerment narrative generally concludes that because this approach has always belonged to the privileged, it has no place in compassionate discussions in which we seek to understand other people. But why not democratize objective criticism? Analysis and emotional understanding need not be opposed.

As an identity, “disabled” essentially dictates that a person is defined by their limitations. I was uncomfortable with this label in part because it gave me no means of challenging those limitations. Much as the sociological concept of labeling suggests, I began to see anything I wanted to change about myself, even that which had nothing to do with the physical, as a limit, a disability, something I was born with that I could not change. Wanting to escape the constricting label disabled, then, doesn’t have the same gravity as, for example, the desire to escape blackness might. But this supposed weight only exists if we’ve been conditioned to believe that there is a relationship between comfort with a label and comfort with oneself. A desire to escape societal confines has no relationship to self-acceptance, and we’ve done ourselves a disservice by insisting on a dichotomy between pride and shame. If we’re not eager to talk about that those qualities that render us as other, we must be reluctant to discuss them. This assumes a uniformity to self-acceptance that, like labels themselves, drastically undermines the immensity of being human.

Ironically, the same culture that tells us to choose between pride and shame also suggests that we shut down discussion about that which we might actually feel ashamed. Class, for example, remains a wildly fraught topic even among circles where it’s encouraged to understand everyone’s opinion from their personal perspective. If there is shame associated with talking about class, but pride in discussing other aspects of identity, shouldn’t we be discussing why that is? To really evaluate where our ideas are coming from, we have to be able to push past any initial discomfort to get to larger questions.

One crucial component of identity politics is the assertion that all individuals recognize and understand their own needs, and these needs, if we are to foster understanding between people, must be accommodated. This kind of accommodation, though, can actually replace self-acceptance if it’s implemented without question as part of what a person decides they need. My need was, for too long, to never to think about my own body. I didn’t want to acknowledge the way I walked, the way I sat. The fact that I physically existed could, depending on my mood, set me on edge. I was most comfortable when I wasn’t made to think about it, when I could forget my body and talk, forget my body and write — I didn’t force myself to get comfortable with my physical reality. I was convinced that it was my right to forget. For years, no one argued with me — who are they, non-disabled people, to offer a counterpoint to my own understanding of my needs?

But it turned out that I actually needed an outside perspective, along with thoughtful questions about where exactly this need came from. Having my assessment of myself accepted at face value only undermined my ability to recognize what I could control. Identity politics never taught me to question my conclusions about myself, and they certainly never prepared me for the notion that someone outside my particular marginalized group could have an understanding of my physical situation that I’d been denying myself for almost a lifetime. When I brought these new understandings into activist circles, I was assured that I didn’t actually have to change anything about my behavior, my body was my body and everything was fine. This was the opposite of what I needed to hear, and to this day is the opposite from what I derive any kind of strength or power from. Identity and self-improvement are not inherently opposed, but disability is a potentially tricky position to approach because it is, fundamentally, based upon what must be worked around and adapted; what can be expanded but not changed.

Asking these questions was scary. It still is. Being an activist in denial of my actual self image was a relatively comfortable position, if only because it was one that for so many years I knew. But I’ve come away from these ideas thinking that there must be a respectful way to ask questions about our personal experience, questions that don’t assume in their asking that the inquirer must be “right.” Too often we equate what happened with how what happened made us feel. Forming all of our ideas on the basis of feelings looks, on the surface, like compassion, but this approach ultimately limits us. Compassion, after all, is meaningless if we’re not listening, and sometimes listening yields details that the storyteller hasn’t considered important before. Can we bring up those details, ask those questions, with the understanding that we’re not trying to put anyone on the defense?

Remaining open to perspectives outside of our own means it’s imperative that we separate our identity from our ideas. As it stands, certain topics are understood to be bound up in a person’s notion of who they are, and to question their worldview is to question the validity of their every thought, their mind itself. By this definition, questions are threats. Defensiveness, then, is acceptable, because an inquiry is a form of attack.

This assumes, however, that anyone who’s ever felt defensive has only done so righteously: aren’t we all too human for that? To withstand a well-thought-out argument, we also have to look critically at the person we have the capacity to be in an argument. If defensiveness is acceptable, than we never have to take a thoroughly honest look at who we become when provoked, when pressed, or even if certain ideas simply aren’t approached in a specific way. By elevating our emotional reaction over an objective idea itself, we absolve ourselves of responsibility for how we react to that idea. How far can we truly get, in conversation, if we accept this? And how generative are our examinations going to be if a discussion has to shut down at the first sign of discomfort?

Making ourselves, and each other, stronger, will not be achieved by identity politics, because identity politics are concerned with what’s already there, not what could be. Certainly we all have strengths. But that which we’re afraid to acknowledge can’t remain unspoken for fear that it feels un-powerful to bring it to the forefront. We have to understand where our weaknesses are, not out of shame, but determination. Any step we take toward understanding each other can only go so far if we equate respect with a refusal to analyze any ideas that have already been declared good. To genuinely progress in our understanding, we have to trust ourselves and each other to invite the thoughtful questions that show we’ve been paying attention.


 
 
Become a Patron!

This post may contain affiliate links.