Trinh Minh-ha is a Vietnamese writer and filmmaker. This essay is primarily concerned with raising questions about the idea of a stable identity is constructed, and how we might theorize other ways of understanding identity as "destabilized," as provisional or as relative.

I asked the class to discuss what they already know about the words "identity," "self," and "subject;" we came up with some distinctions between the notion of selfhood and subjecthood, largely based on the difference between humanist ideas of self and Lacan and Althusser's notions of subject positions within a structure. We talked about "identity" as something related to, but not the same as, "self" or "subject;" we defined "identity" as the set of representations one creates to signify a concept of selfhood or subjecthood.

This is some of the same material that Trinh examines in her essay. She begins by stating that "identity...has long been a notion that relies on the concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden to one's consciousness and that requires the elimination of all that is considered foreign or not true to the self, that is to say, not-I, other." What makes you who you are is primarily that there is a "not-you" out there; each self is defined by having a not-self, an other, who enables one to occupy the "self" position. This way of thinking should be fairly familiar, by this point in the semester; it's drawing on the same logic as Saussure's negative relations of value and Derrida's binary oppositions.

Thus the concept "self" or "identity" is held in place, is stabilized, by being paired with its binary opposite, "other." Being a self requires establishing a boundary between self and other, and maintaining/enforcing that boundary at all costs. Thus an equation is set up, whereby Subject A is invested in having a stable identity, and achieves that (in part) by casting itself as not-B. Subject A then wants B to be not-A consistently and constantly. B then achieves a stable position (in relation to A, and in terms set by A), but usually doesn't have that position recognized as "self" or "subject" in the way A does. A then needs some form of power to keep B in the position A desires B to stay in. A uses that power to dictate the terms in which B can make claims to identity or selfhood.

The obvious problem, as Trinh and other theorists point out, is that B never gets to become a self, since B is always kept by A in the position of being other, so that A can be a self. B's place and social function is thus always relative to A's selfhood. But this is also a problem for A, who is just as structured by this binary opposition as B is.

Trinh wants to find some other way to theorize identity than through a binary opposition self/other. She wants to find new ways to think about difference, so that "difference" doesn't form a binary opposite to "sameness." If difference, or "otherness," doesn't define the possibilities for "sameness," or identity, then we can come up with new ways of thinking about the relations between sameness and difference, selfhood and otherness.

Trinh looks at 3 notions of "difference", or practices defined as forms of "difference" or "otherness" in Western culture. The first is wearing a veil, as many Islamic women do. Western feminists look at this practice from their own perspective, seeing it as different from what we do, and then assuming that they know what the practice means: that it's a form of patriarchal oppression. What they don't do is attribute sameness to the women who wear the veil. In other words, Western feminists don't look at women wearing a veil and say, she's just like me, she's choosing to do this, she's thought about it, it's part of her religious beliefs, she is expressing herself in this practice. Rather, by defining the veil-wearing woman as different, as difference itself, Western feminists maintain their own identities as subjects (as selves with agency and autonomy) and keep veil-wearing women as "other." But, Trinh argues, were Western women to think of Islamic women as "selves," as "subjects," they would have to think about what the practice of wearing the veil means for those women, and not just what it means to Western feminists. They would have to see these "others" as "subjects," and that would destabilize the binary opposition self/other. She makes similar arguments using the examples of silence and subjectivity.

Trinh also looks at another way to deconstruct the self/other binary opposition, which is to be both a participant and an observer of one's own culture--to be, for example, a Vietnamese woman who makes ethnographic films about her own culture. Another example of this is Zora Neale Hurston, who studied anthropology with Franz Boas, and who became what Boas called a "participant-observer" in her own community of Eatonville, Florida. She was both "self" and "other" in her relations with the people of Eatonville: self, insofar as she had grown up there, and was part of the culture; other, insofar as she was collecting data and making analytical observations there. You might read how Trinh describes this position of not-self/other on pp. 374-375.

Finally, Trinh talks about another way to rethink concepts of identity so that they don't rely on a self/other dichotomy. She discusses the idea of the "inappropriate other," the "others" who refuse that position of otherness, and insist on speaking and acting as subjects, despite the efforts of (usually Western) "selves" to make them be "other" to maintain the stable self/other structure. An "inappropriate other" acts out, refuses to behave correctly. As such, an "inappropriate other" also becomes an "inappropriated other," a subject whose being cannot be appropriated by another to serve another's purposes. An "inappropriate(d) other" has agency, is capable of resisting appropriation and of recognizing and negotiating her situations, including her own subjectivity/identity.