The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk

The key to doing better, she argued, was to embrace identity markers that could prove useful in practice even if they might be suspect in theory. “I think we have to choose again strategically,” she suggested, “not universal discourse but essentialist discourse. . . . I must say I am an essentialist from time to time.” Spivak’s interlocutor seemed surprised and perhaps a little confused by this proposition. How, she asked, is it possible to use essentialist concepts without becoming committed to them? “My search is not a search for coherence,” Spivak replied. In theoretical terms, she admitted, “it’s absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism. . . . But strategically we cannot.” To clear up the confusion, Spivak gave a concrete example. On theoretical grounds, she admitted, it might be wrong to say that women are defined by having a clitoris. But because “the other side [defines] us genitally,” it made sense, for practical purposes, to make the fact of having a clitoris the basis for a common self-definition as women: “You pick up the universal that will give you the power to fight against the other side.” Though doing so involves giving up on one’s “theoretical purity,” it’s a price worth paying to avoid becoming unwittingly complicit in the West’s “narratives of exploitation.”