Who am I? Who are you?
Who is anyone, anyway?
And who gets to define who I am, or who you, or they, or we are? Don’t we get to define ourselves? Or do some believe they have the right to define who we are based on who they want us to be regardless of our own understanding of our identity?
Just what is identity? A single thing? Or a multivariate thing, a thing of diverse diversities, a thing of both intersection and difference?
Are any one of us merely one person with a single specific definitional identity that trumps anything else we might be, or are we, to quote Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, “a complex being inhabited by a multiplicity of beings in continuous motion”?
How cool is that? Continuous motion! A multiplicity! I can go for that.
We change across time, of course: we grow, we age, we may reproduce, the people with whom we have relationships may change.
But we’re also not definable as any one chief characteristic.
Is the most important thing about me that I am female? That I have white skin? That I grew up in an ethnic household with an immigrant mother, so we ate special food and used foreign words and practiced odd customs? That I write? That I write and read and view sff? That I’m a bit of a jock? That I am a parent? A mother of twins? And a singleton daughter! That I’m Jewish? That I paddle outrigger canoes? That I own a schnauzer? That I’m married? To a cisgendered male? That I have hearing loss? That I voted for (insert secret ballot here)? That I’m an American citizen? That I once (no, never mind, I don’t want to be defined as that).
I would go so far as to say that the only time we are defined as “one specific over-riding identity” is when we are being defined from the outside by people or groups who have a reason to want or need to limit our multiplicity.
