ID Politics: The Violence of Modernity

Abstract

Scholarship in feminism, anticolonialism, Disability and Mad studies, have repositioned storytelling as instructive to the present and to the ethics of care. Emplotted with time and space, like the acts and lives of others, stories make discernible those everyday encounters, sites of practices, and material conditions that usher power and pain. They destabilize essentialism, so, too, the asymmetries that ensue, and are therefore pivotal in the politics toward self-definition. It has even been argued that the concept of the story garners much of the attention once assigned to that of identity. But here, I juxtapose, I entwine, no, I exbody competing multivalent social scripts, each a verse in itself, to nuance—albeit creatively—the story in this current age of governmentality and concomitant surveillance technologies. Paying homage to Patricia Hill Collins, I evoke intersectionality and endeavour to bring us back to identity politics … analytically.