2001-02 Seminar
HISTORICIZING IDENTITIES: RACE, GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Professors Cynthia Herrup and Lee Baker, Co-Conveners
Research and writing about identity are conducted in all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Taking many forms, such practices can be conducted clinically by psychologists exploring human development or pursued enthusiastically by scholar-activists fighting the culture-wars; such work can emphasize individual subjectivity or the shaping power of institutions. Although writers and researchers have produced mountains of material on identity politics and the politics of identity, we seek to complicate and historicize notions of identity, which are so central to the quotidian lives of people all over the world.
The very notion of identity is a slippery concept and particularly amorphous. Individual or group identity can change over historical periods, through the life cycle, or simply after 5:00pm. Yet that amorphous thing called identity has been at the heart of great triumphs, like the Civil Rights Movement, and horrendous atrocities like the Jewish Holocaust.
Despite the concept’s complexities, notions of identity emerge as tangible loci to explore how groups and individuals are shaped by or shape history, and accommodate or resist structures of power. Identities not only play out within history; they themselves have histories. Exploring identities within historical contexts provides a very productive way to demonstrate how people engage their own agency as individuals and/or as members of groups.
Gender, race, and sexuality are integral to the way that many people understand identity. Feminists within the academy have worked hard to establish the critical social element in the construction of gender. Despite agreement that race and sexuality also have histories, scholarship about sexuality and race in particular too often treats these as stable categories. This seminar seeks to explore questions around race, gender, and sexuality as they relate to the identities of groups and individuals-through space and time.
The questions we pose about identities will not have easy answers, nor are we proposing to pin down these notoriously slippery concepts. Frankly, we want to get messy, to complicate an already complicated set of assumptions. We invite you to join us in a yearlong critical assessment of the history of gender, sexual and racial identities.
Without precluding other approaches, there are a number of questions and issues surrounding so-called identities that we are eager to explore.
The very notion of identity is tethered to identification. What are the tensions between identity and identification? Who identifies whom, and how? How do individuals balance their multiple identities? How do identities become commodified stereotypes that further shape recognition and exclusion? How have these categories become subjects of academic study, and what impact does that have on university communities?
Race, sexuality, and gender are policed and legislated in similar ways, and often this legislation turns on performing one’s identity in appropriate ways. How have institutions such as law, medicine and various social sciences curtailed resistance and promoted cultural values of “acting appropriately?” What has been the stake for individuals or groups who refuse to perform in expected ways, and how have these “deviants” changed their respective societies and the definition of group identities? Through what processes do the multiple identities of individuals become radicalized so that one facet of identification becomes the self’s political core and/or public persona?
Part of the reason that race, gender, and sexuality are difficult to explain as they relate to identity is the fact that race is so closely tied to ethnicity, racism, and culture, while sexuality and gender are so closely tied to reproduction, sexism, and homophobia. What are the dimensions of these relationships and how do national borders, structures of the state, and history shape those dimensions?
This seminar builds logically on the previous seminars hosted by the John Hope Franklin Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies. The first explored “Race and Nation-Building in the Americas,” and the second explored “Race, Religion, and Globalization.” By focusing on identity, we can look at how individuals incorporate religion, nationalism, and race as they stitch together a complex identity that embraces gender and sexuality. We will also pay particular attention to class, stratification, and hierarchies of power as we explore the many processes of identity formation. In a period of rapid globalization and volatile identity politics, sexual, racial, and gendered identities are quite often negotiated and reconstituted in real time. Are identities in a “global village” fundamentally distinct from their predecessors?
We are eager to have a mix of scholars willing to consider not only the historical contingency of particular identities, but also the comparative dimension of identity formations. We are interested in both the similarities and differences (as well as the challenges) that historical contexts provide for this exploration.
About the Conveners
Lee D. Baker is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology. His research explores the coterminous discourse of law and science and how it shapes notions of race and structures racial inequality. He is author of From Savage To Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (UC Press 1998). While his main research explores the history of anthropology in the U.S., he is also interested in the Aboriginal experience in Australia and the African American experience in the U.S.
Cynthia Herrup is Professor of History and Law. Her research explores the relationship between law (particularly criminal law) and culture and the ways in which legal forms and social force are in constant dialogue, with a particular focus on England in the seventeenth century. Her numerous research fellowships include the NEH; the Guggenheim Foundation; the Folger Shakespeare Library; the British Academy; and, most recently, the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellowship at the Huntington Library. Her publications include: A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law and the 2nd Early of Castlehaven (1999); The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth Century England (1987); and When Mercy Seasons Justice: Royal Pardons and Royal Power in Seventeenth Century England (forthcoming).
2001-2002 Franklin Seminar Fellows
Faculty Co-Conveners
Lee D. Baker, Cultural Anthropology
Cynthia Herrup, History and LawFaculty Fellows
Tom Brothers, Music
Trina Jones, Law
Richard Powell, Art and Art History
Laurie Shannon, English
Priscilla Wald, English
Maurice Wallace, English/African and African-American StudiesLibrary Fellow
Melissa Delbridge, Archivist in Special CollectionsGraduate Fellows
Erica James, Art and Art History
Ada Norris, EnglishPost-Doctoral Fellow
Amy Ongiri, EnglishMellon Lecturing Fellows
Maria Susana Castellanos, English
Wendy Erisman, Cultural Anthropology
Michael Petit, English