Knowledge
I am looking at knowledge as a way to understand identity, both of self and others. At first I was not sure if this applied, because identity is so subjective, but then I realized that knowledge is also subjective. Taking the science wars for example, knowing what information is considered knowledge and where/what important knowledge is/comes from is dependent on many things (where you are from, religious views, political views, educational upbringing, etc). I have thought about this in the context of my Pacific Rim Cities class, where we talked about the geography of knowledge produced. What we saw was that most of the scholarly information recorded today was produced in northern, powerful, (often) white countries. This has really shaped the way that information is taught and believed in. Similarly, science and math are often used to explain things in our everyday life, yet these modes of knowledge are both socially constructed ways of understanding our world (see Travis’s theory to learn more about empiricism and rationalism).
In regards to binaries of identity, knowledge helps us to make sense of identities that we give ourselves (through context, socially accepted understandings), and also helps us to define natural identities that we can rationalize through various modes of knowledges (gender, race, etc). Knowledge plays an interesting role in identity because although it can help someone understand their own identity and others’ around them, it can also be used as a tool to dismiss or rationalize against identities that they do not agree with. In continuation with the example of gender and transgendered-ness, a popular argument to dismiss transgendered people is that the genitalia that you are born with decides your gender because science and religion tell us so. This argument can use multiple forms of knowledge to either impose an identity on someone that they do not want, or to dismiss the identity that they have chosen and given to themselves.
An interesting way of learning more about what identity is or is perceived to be is to type the word into Google. When doing so, the first thing that comes up is a definition: “1. the fact of being who or what a person or thing is; 2. a close similarity or affinity.” These two definitions are interesting because they can be argued as representing natural or self-given identity. The first definition even begins with claiming identity as fact, which is a phrasing that implies different things about different identities. To claim a self-identity as fact is often a way to reinforce an identity to the world, perhaps in response to opposition. To claim an identity of someone else as fact, however, has the potential to be problematic. Such phrasing can lend to arguments like the one mentioned about, where the gender you are born with is your only gender and that is a fact.
The first image that shows up for identity is:
