The Language Trap of Identity
Language
Language is fundamentally a system used to distinguish disconnected elements. If someone takes the 10 am train, it is the 10 am train. Every train car may be different. The engineer may be different. All the people on the train may be different. The time the train arrives may be different. It is the 10 am train, because despite all the differences, the use of the language of “10 am train” helps us identify it and distinguish it. It is a train that is generally close enough to 10 am, despite other methods of transport and other trains. The language can act as a signifier (it indicates) a signified (something being indicated).
This puts language as categorical in its nature. We have categories for everything. I am a man, I generally feel like a man, and I present as a man. I have a perception of masculinity. Based on my perspective on my life, I believe I broadly fit into these categories. Others generally believe the same, though if put through further scrutiny, others’ perspectives of me put me in are different per person, and the same applies to what categories they consider being masculine. This changes what categories of masculinity describe me. The language used in descriptions of myself and masculinity are both fractured in their nature. If someone categorizes me as masculine, the fractured signifiers of their perception of the signified masculinity overlap with the fractured signifiers of their perception of the signified me in such a way that resolves with them categorizing me as masculine.
Identity
This already shows an issue. I am a subject that can be experienced directly be someone. People may not have a full understanding of me, but they can achieve a level of faith in their understanding of me to feel confident in their language used to describe me. This language they use builds up over time through experiencing me. The same cannot be said about masculinity. Masculinity is a widely contested and abstract concept that cannot be concretely experienced. Instead of language coming from experiencing it, masculinity is learned through assigning traits to it. These traits then come back in affirming a socially constructed definition of masculinity built up through social replication of more people assigning similar traits a similar category of masculine. The idea of masculinity does not start as masculinity – it starts as nothing. It has no inherent meaning or experience, no inherent value. I am me. Masculinity is what? Masculine is manly, but that is only because masculinity defines manly. There is no concrete element. What we assign as a concrete element of masculinity is something not that masculinity is defined by, but something that matches many elements in retrospect. The same logic can broadly follow for femininity.
Broadly, there are two categories that people are often assigned: masculine and feminine. There is an understood spectrum here. There are masculine men and feminine women, but also masculine women and feminine men. This concept of classification moves deeper when we consider that there are people who identify with neither. We can ask what they are defining themselves against. If different people have different perceptions of what masculinity and femininity are, would someone not be able to classify themselves as masculine or feminine and adjust their own perception of masculinity or femininity to match one or the other well enough? There are definitely different types of masculine and feminine. Could they not assign themselves a certain type of masculine or feminine?
This seems possible, even easy, on its own. Unfortunately, the language traps it. As people categorize using language to distinguish these elements, one must generally boil down a part of their identity to becoming a widely understood category of the above. Since the language becomes a part of our socially assigned identity, to have it easily come into question brings the entire identity of someone into question. If I am a social being, and those around me do not understand what I am, what am I? Is the answer to select different random features to use to describe you instead as a replacement? Would these features then assign a masculinity or femininity by proxy? It could be that they see enough features that could broadly fall under both that they could be seen as both or neither.
I have seen much of identifying as neither, if you don’t like the game you can try to reject it, but why not both? There would appear to be a greater conflict in both than neither, as despite both being broad umbrellas, they are seemingly defined negatively against each other rather than positively and within themselves. Masculinity is often seen, at least under a broadly patriarchal society, as acting in a way that fits the current cultural ideal of a man, not in a way that could be feminine. Femininity is defined in response as not doing what is masculine, doing instead what helps support the masculine to be feminine. This circular logic in defining masculinity and femininity seems to not only describe the dynamic and history of how masculinity and femininity are perceived (at least in the vvest) but explains why both seems to be more strange than neither. Unfortunately, it also completely fails at truly defining or aiding in understanding either as their own concepts.
The only way, it seems, to truly define masculinity or femininity is to have an understanding of the phenomenological experiences of being masculine or feminine outside of the environment of a society which has ingrained power structures surrounding masculinity and femininity. This is a complete dead end for two reasons. The first is the complete lack of a broader understanding of phenomenology. The other is what I broadly consider being one of the large stumbling points of the feminist movement. Liberal feminism, instead of being able to abolish the power structures surrounding men and women, ended up resolving its movement by allowing women greater access to the patriarchal power structures surrounding them.
Note: I want to be abundantly clear. This is not a talking point saying that previous feminist movements failed or were bad. This is a feminist talking point used as a point towards the continuation and future goals of the feminist movement, particularly under who I would broadly categorize as communist feminists, modern and historical. I got this from bell hooks, who used it describing how the power structures still change our understanding of love.
Un-identity
I decided if I wanted to discuss more of the phenomenological points of masculinity, I had to look inwardly at myself and what I consider makes me masculine. Truly masculine, outside of what society imposes as masculine. Given that I have above already described masculine as socially constructed, continually shifting, and built through its contradictory/circular logic around femininity, the conclusion that I arrived at makes sense. There is nothing that inherently makes me feel masculine. There is only what makes me feel as though I am me, and I can later broadly classify some of those as masculine, but only if I decide to. This decision in feeling masculine based on how one feels could be conscious, as it now must be for me, or subconscious, widely assigned to a person by the structures surrounding them. As they grow up and come to create their definitions of masculinity or femininity, they must also grow towards fitting themselves into the one they assign to themselves.
From here, if I found that there was nothing that made me feel truly masculine, but I did find that there was a sense of me I experienced, I wondered if I could just identify simply as me. There is no better way for me to signify myself than to use the signifier of me myself. I assumed that if others were to try to truly discover themselves as well, if gender is a social construct, they would, broadly speaking, find the same too. Here I realized that through reading two pages of a book and a train analogy, I had managed to think myself into being some kind of non-binary gender abolitionist. There was another realization deepening the rabbit hole when I realized that non-binary was also based on the definitions of masculine and feminine. It was, therefore, still a socially constructed identity definition category circularly defined against masculinity, but now also femininity.
Symbolic Identity
There is no social way to un-identify. We communicate with language, and language is a tool of categorization. Identity is a categorization that results from the need to describe using language. The use of language traps us into an understanding of identity that is fundamentally limited by our ability to communicate in itself.
Language, in distinguishing disconnected elements, must have a subject and an object. Someone must be speaking, and it must be to someone, even if that is to oneself. Using language, we create a model of ourselves as language, which acts as an extension of our true selves; in creating this language model, it is finding identity not for oneself, but for the reception of others. Done on its own, the person is appealing to an ideal ego, an expression of an actualized self. This ideal ego looks back, the ego ideal, a symbolic self that one must appease and aim towards becoming. This ideal ego, being actualized, must have a sense of self and identity which the subject is looking for, so the person whose identity has now been lost is doing a performative dance of identity finding to an othered version of themselves that is seeing them.
This dynamic creates a sense of self directly subject to the symbolic order, which is oppressive to the true self. Identity is no longer your identity but rather a language formation that must be abided by or else the language, the synthesis of identity and no identity, will be rejected and the subject left stranded. Once again, they would be missing a bedrock of identity to understand themselves. Unable to simply exist as oneself, existence becomes a self-categorization under language designed as a performative display for others, whether or not others even actually exist to perceive the performative self-categorization. It finds and categorizes identity, but only insofar as no identity is found.
Language Abandonment
If we were searching purely within ourselves, finding identity would be through personal reflection alone and un-identifying would be possible. Language is the signifier of something that is being signified. The words we use to describe our identity signify what our lived experience with our identity truly is, but there is an inherent disconnect between the language used and our lived experience. This disconnect is sourced from different people’s perspectives. I can describe how I feel to be me, and others can listen and do their best to connect with it, but they cannot experience my experiences or understanding of them. When we try to explain what it feels like to feel like ourselves, the use of language goes from extremely limited in its ability to completely unusable. How can I begin to explain what it is like to be me if the words used in my explanation are built through from my experience being me? To borrow from Buddhism, to even begin to attempt to give people an idea of what it is like to be me, I must be able to describe my form, sensations, perceptions, mental activity, and consciousness. Can you truly say you are aware of all of these? Would you say you have mastery and understanding? I reckon that even if someone did, they would understand that language is fundamentally flawed in conveying it.
There is a pain that can come from the dissociation from the language itself. The affliction is in a shattered understanding of self. The symptom of the affliction is the language. The relief from the pain comes from the abandonment of language altogether. To abandon the language would be through meditative practice and learning a greater understanding of one’s being. No number of signifiers is able to be compiled into a universal understanding of one’s lived experience, but one may be able to reconcile their experience for themself.
Tryna tell you
I’m only human baby
or am I
Oncle