IDENTITY
From the beginning of our lives, we form and shape our identity. From the sounds we hear, the rhythms we feel, the flavors we taste, the scents we smell, the forms we visually shape; everything is potential and possible in influencing our preferences that contribute to our identity. Through our development and understanding of what we like, we continue to form and shape who we are. We look around us to our school, media, and our home to get inspiration for what we are attracted to, what we believe, what makes us laugh, what keeps our attention and interest. As we grow and become more aware of our presence within society and the impact that our presence has on humanity, we begin to include within our identity ways in which we would like to see the world. Visual, auditory, theoretical, psychological, and philosophical references found within our daily lives shape our personality: how we act, what we say, how we think. On a superficial level with or without ethical reflection, we use visual and tangible references to determine how we want to look: how we will dress, how we transform our body language, to how we will style our hair. These references can dictate if and how we define beauty, what we are attracted to in friends, and attributes we look for in interpersonal relationships. Our teenage years, filled with hormones, puberty, new responsibilities, and relationships, are a barrage of experiences and experimentations testing out what we like, what works, and what are total fails. We recreate old perceptions of ourselves that we outgrow or that we no longer need to define ourselves. Parts of ourselves stay with us forever. They may hibernate for years to be woken up again years later. Some people stick with what they know and where they are comfortable within their comfort zone. Some will constantly develop and display new transformations and variations of themselves as they regularly shift with their internal and external influences. Sometimes developing identity can be difficult. Identity formation can feel like a riptide of force directing our instincts away from what we know and feel goes against our beliefs and is inaccurate to our moral groundings. Identity can also appear through acts of unconscious ambiguity in mimicry and justification and idolization of our ideals. True identity is formed through self-reflection and action. Questioning every thought, act, belief, visual representation presents actualization of the self. True morality comes from questions about the origins and formations of these acts and representations. Are they honest and equitable or manifested from a system of dominance? How we choose to dress, act, love, and think are all aspects of our identity. They are political choices that reflect who we are and what we believe. Therefore, one can take these fixed and mutable social categories and be critical and conscientious. How one chooses to represent themselves is a choice that is unattached and free. Through exposure to the vast possibilities, opportunities, and experiences of life can we truly learn about ourselves. Through deep conversations that challenge our previous beliefs, ideas, and notions of that which is identity, can we truly learn to define ourselves, our values, our virtues, and hopes and dreams.
As much as our identity is a manifestation of our own political choices and instinctual practices, and as much as it is beneficial to be self-reflective and critically conscientious, there is a part of our identity that is pressed upon us by society. Labels of race, gender, class, and sexuality are all asked of us and inflicted upon us with and without our permission. Higginbotham writes, “Race is a highly contested representation of relations of power between social categories by which individuals are identified and identify themselves.”7 This connection of identification by which one identifies is a superimposition of an ideal must be then agreed upon or resisted. These categories that divide and define individuals and groups within society by society is created out of a need for hierarchy to create a dominant power. As much as we may or may not agree with the identity placed upon us by society, there is a part of that identity that then is our identity that we must accept or reject. Higginbotham argues that how we identify is both a choice and an imposition. As society categorizes us whether we agree or not, there is a part of us that does acknowledge these labels as a part of our identity. Whether we chose to acknowledge, embody, or contest these fabricated divisions is our choice. We can contest and demand for our rights for privacy, acceptance, and choice through law and cultural climate; however, the true means for dissolution of such impositions is by educating people for the removal of harmful labels and the need to superimpose; to increase acceptance that identity, appearance, and behavior is the way that it is without need to justify or explain within a label or category; and the removal of the hierarchy that requires and causes such divisions.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS
Social constructs are beliefs about human actions and appearances that form from power relations of dominance and for the need of control and self-recognition. Social constructs are beliefs about how to define gender and sexuality, how to dress in a certain class, how women should act, how children should be raised, and how men should take care of their families. All of these ideas are contrived, not necessary, or accurate in contemporary culture for defining how people can behave and look in specific social categories. However, like socially imposed identity these social constructions make their way into our thought processes and require for us to make considerations about how we choose to conform or stray from their impressions. Daily thought processes that are influenced by social constructs are ideologies around beauty, fashion, education, politics, lifestyle, occupation, leisure, luxury, commodities, family, domesticity, business, healthcare, and interpersonal relationships. Social constructs contribute to healthy and unhealthy interpretations of the self and can impose false pressures on individuals to meet certain fictitious and artificially contrived standards. When examining oneself and one’s identity, social constructs that can be detrimental are often deceiving as they are often established by popular persuasion and opinion.
Institutions within society, on a microscopic level: families, social gatherings, and friends; on a macroscopic level: schools, corporations, and media, all play a role in the construction and decimation of beliefs for etiquette around social categories that inform identity. Social constructions are projections, reflections, establishments, and reinforcements about what society under a white male heteronormative imperialist patriarchy “should” look like. Projecting images and defining language, using overt and covert subliminal reinforcements of persuasion to cultivate and establish how people think, feel, and act as individuals, groups, organizations, corporations, governments, nations, countries, and the world. Our exposure, absorption, and reflection of these culminating constructions are how society forces us to identify within their framework while they identify us within their social categorizations. Awareness of these social relations and institutional racialized discrepancies allow individuals and groups the ability to make political choices for how they allow themselves to be defined by society and determine where they stand on these injustices.
Higginbotham writes, “in societies where racial demarcation is endemic to their sociocultural fabric and heritage—to their laws and economy, to their institutionalized structures and discourses, and to their epistemologies and everyday customs—gender identity is inextricably linked to and even determined by racial identity.”8 Higginbotham gives an example of a societal infrastructure that establishes a harmful racialized categorization that impedes upon the creation and identification of all additional social categorizations. This societal infrastructure is a product fabricated by society with the explicit intentions for establishing a hierarchy of power, creating domination for the institutions that create such an infrastructure. Before 1960s in the Jim Crow South, young black girls knew to recognize and occupy bathrooms labeled “black women” and not “white ladies.” The language and connotations surrounding “women” versus “ladies” state clearly class distinctions that polarize and dichotomize strictly to demarcate gender and class within the determinant of race. The social category, race, is fabricated and “artificially and arbitrarily contrived”—to produce and maintain relations of power and subordination” by systemic and institutionalized power relations.9 The fabrication of race is envisioned by the same patriarchy that fabricates gender, class, and sexuality. Racialization and race are located at the origin of social categorizing and a final determinant for the other categorical constructions. These forced labels must be recognized as false, fictitious, and invented facets for identity. Higginbotham writes, “To argue that race is a myth and that it is an ideological rather than a biological fact does not deny that ideology has real effects on people’s lives.”10 These bigoted denunciations, created by specific laws within the heritage of American society “historically rooted in the context of slavery,” continue to be challenged and change by law, activism, and cultural persuasion.11 Human rights activism continues to speak and act to disseminate information and the acquisition of true moral and ethical knowledge for listeners of change, thus allowing individuals to create healthy interpretations, personas, and identities of the self. Fashion, film, art, literature, and music additionally challenging these false perceptions of “norms,” moving towards a more open-minded, accepting, diverse, creative, and unique society.
RACE
Race is a social construct created as a tool for oppression. Throughout history, groups of people have intentionally created social constructs to establish norms that meet their beliefs and intentions to maintain a superior advantage. White male patriarchy is one example of relations of power towards women and race. These intentional social constructs were created to establish and maintain a hierarchy within society. During colonization, racist representations of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) through story, sermon, text, visual imagery, metaphor, and connections to literature, such as the Bible, were used to justify slavery and the assimilation of indigenous people.
INTERSECTIONALITY
Intersectionality is the intersection and interweaving of all parts of one's identity: the characteristics created by the individual, the collective, those that are place upon us within societal categorizations, those that choose we accept, and those that are imposed. Each area layers and interconnects to create one unified identity filled with areas of advantage and disadvantage within the dominant social hierarchy.
VOICE
Through historical context, we will look at theorists to determine our own consciousness on topics of how race, gender, class, and sexuality impact our lives. We will apply these critical theories to our art-practice. Through intention and artistic language, we will narrate our own experiences, share our stories, and give respect to ourselves and our collective.
MYTHS AND FACILITIES
Students have many questions relating to definitions, beliefs, and imagery that are depicted as inaccurate due to false representations present within images of the media. Therefore, while continuing our analysis of race as a metalanguage for gender, sexuality, and class, we will separate representation and categorizations into fact and fiction.
Topics include
- Myth Science
- Essentialist biological and genetic explanations
- Chromosome research: falsities of genotypic and phenotypic difference
- Eugenics
- Manichean opposition: good versus evil
- Feminism: Homogeneous “Womanhood”
- Metaphoric and Metonymic Identification: Welfare & Drugs
- Census Bureau
SAFE SPACE
In the beginning of the school year, we will establish guidelines for cultivating a classroom that is inclusive, open-minded, supportive, and safe. Creating art, discussing art, and talking about topics that involve the mind, identity, and the self can be very vulnerable for all students. The creative process of making art can be very emotional and comes from an incredibly personal space. A critique or comment can shut a person down indefinitely. Therefore, establishing positive methods as a collective that we can continue to build on, when necessary, establishes a space that students can trust and know that it is okay to make mistakes and that we can grow and build from them if they arrive.
Starting guidelines that we will establish, exercise, reference, and reassure in the beginning of the school year.
- Calling someone in instead of calling someone out.
- Allowing personal space and choice for sharing about self, especially vulnerable topics.
- Start the year by sharing pronouns, upfront and being open-minded for transitions and fluidity.
- Aware of coping mechanisms, share ways to cope with emotions: meditation, exercise, nature, a friend, art, fresh air, new environment or change of space
- Warn before possible triggering information. Follow all experiences with a debrief for thoughts, opinions, emotions, suggestions, and questions about content, context, and community support. Continue emotional check-ins with students throughout the day, week, month, and year.
- Learn to be aware of emotions. It is okay to feel vulnerable emotions. It is healthy to notice and identify how one’s body is changing: from hot, cold, chaotic, dizzy, nauseous. It is good to alter others of how you are feeling. When our emotions change, others are not to blame. We chose how to think, act, alter and address our feelings. We can choice how we react. Letting a teacher, peers, or family member know how you feel can be helpful for both emotional catharsis and to navigate systems of support.
- Whole body listening; patient and active listener.
- Supportive questioning.
- Acknowledging when wrong.
As some of the topics presented about race, gender, sexuality, and class may be triggering or send students off in an unnavigated direction, setting up healthy boundaries and support systems in advance will create preventative measures to establish a setting that is open-minded, supportive, cathartic, nurturing, and a space to germinate self-discovery.