Book Discussion of Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self by Linda Martín Alcoff

Discussants: Guadalupe Carrillo and Jillian Hess

Thursday, March 2, 2006
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, 4:00-6:00 PM

Reading: Our discussion will focus on the following chapters: "Introduction: Identity and Visibility," "Chapter 7: The Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment," "Chapter 8: Racism and Visible Race," "Chapter 11: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary," and "Conclusion." For an electronic copy of the readings, please contact Julie Minich at jminich@stanford.edu.

Abstract: In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. In this theoretically sophisticated and elegantly written book, Martín Alcoff offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Over the course of the book, Martín Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martín Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy, Women's Studies and Political Science and currently the Director of Women's Studies at Syracuse University. Her previous books and anthologies include Feminist Epistemologies (Routledge, 1993), Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory (Cornell, 1996), Epistemology: The Big Questions (Blackwell, 1998), Thinking From the Underside of History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), and most recently Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). She has written over fifty articles on topics concerning Foucault, sexual violence, the politics of knowledge, Latino/a identity, and gender and race identity. Last year, Professor Alcoff was named the "Distinguished Woman in Philosophy for 2005" by the Society for Women in Philosophy.

Guadalupe Carrillo and Jillian Hess are both first-year doctoral students in the Department of English at Stanford University.