The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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Susan J. Brison

It is a truism to say that selves exist in relation to other selves. What is more controversial is the view, defended by many feminist philosophers, that selves exist only in relation to other selves, that is, that they are fundamentally relational entities. On this view, persons or selves—I shall be using these terms interchangeably—are what Annette Baier has called “second persons.” On her account, “[a] person, perhaps, is best seen as someone who was long enough dependent on other persons to acquire the essential arts of personhood. Persons are essentially second persons who grow up with other persons” (Baier 1985: 84). Another way of putting this is to say that selves are constituted in relationship with other selves.

Precursors to the idea of a relational self may be found in the history of philosophy: Aristotle, for example, held that, in cases of the most genuine friendship, a friend is a second self, and Hegel argued that selves become aware of themselves only though the presence of others. Feminist theorists have articulated, elaborated, and defended the view that the self is essentially relational in a variety of new ways in several philosophical subfields. While much feminist writing about the relational self has come in response to the individualism of the liberal political ideal of autonomy, different theories of the relational self have been developed for different philosophical purposes.

There is no one answer to the question “what is a self?” unless perhaps it is another question: “who wants to know?” The account of the self sought by someone looking for a criterion for personal identity that will enable us to re-identify individuals in changed conditions over time differs from that sought by someone who is interested in the nature of a person’s mental states, or in moral personhood, or in how selves are socially constructed. In this chapter, I discuss different approaches to the idea of the relational self that have been taken by feminist philosophers working in ethics, social/political/legal philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics.

In Western philosophical traditions, virtually all of those theorizing about the self were, until recently, white men whose primary preoccupations concerning personal identity were: (1) what makes someone the same unique individual over time—for example, possession of the same body or the same memories or character traits; and (2) what distinguishes human beings from non-human animals—for example, the ability to think or to use language or the possession of an immortal soul. Little attention was paid to the question of how we become persons.

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Women and people of color have, historically, not been the ones doing the philosophizing and have been either left out or viewed as “other” and devalued to the extent we were seen as deviating from the (white male) norm. That philosophy has traditionally been done primarily by white men is not surprising, given that doing philosophy in the way it’s traditionally been done is a luxury, not merely in the obvious material sense that it can be done only if one’s basic needs are met, but also in a psychological sense. If one is dealing with racial, sexual, or other group-based harassment or assault, with discrimination, with all-consuming dependency care, or even with a surfeit of empathy that makes the suffering of others unbearably vivid and demoralizing, it is virtually impossible to have the sustained concentration needed to solve philosophical problems. Add to this the realities of epistemic and discursive injustice against marginalized groups plus the fact that indifference to real-world concerns is valorized and academically rewarded in the discipline of philosophy—and it is not surprising that certain demographics have been underrepresented in the discipline.

But as more people from underrepresented groups have entered the profession, the discipline has begun to change and new perspectives on the self have emerged. Women philosophers have experienced some form or other of feminine socialization as girls and continue to confront gender-based stereotypes as adults, and so are conscious of the constraints of societal expectations of us. Furthermore, because women have traditionally been the ones caring for children and for others who cannot care for themselves, we have been keenly aware of the extent to which people are dependent on other people for their very survival.

Care Ethics and the Relational Self

In ethics, as well as in social, political, and legal philosophy, the relational self has been defended as an alternative to what Lorraine Code has dubbed “autonomous man” who “is the undoubted hero of philosophical moral and political discourse” (1991: 73).

Autonomous man is—and should be—self-sufficient, independent, and self-reliant, a self-realizing individual who directs his efforts toward maximizing his personal gains. His independence is under constant threat from other (equally self-serving) individuals: hence he devises rules to protect himself from intrusion.

(1991: 77)

Code acknowledges that “autonomous man” is an abstraction, but one that nonetheless “occupies the position of a character ideal in Western affluent societies” (1991: 78).

Seyla Benhabib criticizes social contract theorists, such as Hobbes and Locke, for regarding the sphere of justice as “the domain wherein independent, male heads of household transact with one another,” wheareas

[a]n entire domain of human activity, namely, nurture, reproduction, love, and care . . . the woman’s lot in the course of the development of modern, bourgeois society, is excluded from moral and political considerations, and confined to the realm of “nature.”

(Benhabib 1987: 160)

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On this view, “in the beginning man was alone,” as Benhabib construes Hobbes to be saying in this passage: “‘Let us consider men . . . if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other.’” Benhabib argues that this “vision of men as mushrooms”— an “ultimate picture of autonomy”—involves “the denial of being born of woman” and thus “frees the male ego from the most natural and basic bond of dependence” (1987: 161). As Christine Di Stefano points out:

In the state of nature scene being considered here, which we might subtitle the Case of the Missing Mother, the issue is not whether infants would survive untended in the wild. Hobbes . . . never intended self-sufficiency in this sense . . . The issue concerns instead the ways in which early maternal and parental care provide a social, intersubjective context for the development of particular capacities in children—emotive, social and cognitive capacities.

(1983: 638)

Such capacities are required in order for beings in the state of nature to be capable of forming and implementing contracts with one another, but no account is given, by Hobbes or other contract theorists, of how these capacities, which are essential to personhood, are acquired.

The concept of the relational self in feminist ethics has its roots in Carol Gilligan’s (1982) psychological research on moral development, Nel Noddings’s (1986) account of moral education, Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) sociological and psychoanalytic study of children’s identity formation, and Sara Ruddick’s (1989) account of maternal thinking, drawn from women’s lived experience as mothers (see Chapters 19 and 43 in this volume). In their groundbreaking anthology, Women and Moral Theory, Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (1987), along with other feminist philosophers, articulate and defend a relational view of the self underlying this distinctively feminist moral theory—the ethics of care.

Although some feminist theorists reject the concept of autonomy because of its perceived commitment to the ideal of the self-sufficient individual and its neglect of the facts—and values—of care and interdependence, others reconceive of autonomy as compatible with the view that persons are constituted by interpersonal relations to others. On this view, autonomy itself is relational, a competency or capacity developed only through interpersonal, societal, and institutional relations of the right sort (Brison 1997; 2000; Friedman 1997; 2003; Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000; Meyers 1989; 1997; Nedelsky 2011; West 1997; see also Chapter 41 in this volume).

Some theorists have rejected the valorization of maternal thinking in an ethics of care because “participation in nurturing and mothering activities, and the social ideologies and institutions that support them, have been instrumental in maintaining women’s subordination, oppression, and economic dependence” (Code 1991: 92). Catharine MacKinnon has argued that “[w]omen value care because men have valued us according to the care we give them” and that “we think in relational terms because our existence is defined in relation to men” (1987: 39).

Lorraine Code has proposed friendship as a preferable model for the relational self since “[f]riendships are created around an implicit recognition that persons are essentially (i.e., essential to their continued sense of self and well-being) ‘second persons’ throughout their lives.” She considers it to be an advantage of the friendship model that it “does not even implicitly exclude women who do not mother or who do not mother well” (1991: 95). In addition, it can more easily acknowledge the value of this kind of relationship for men than can Ruddick’s claim that men, too, can be mothers.

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Taking friendship between equals as the paradigmatic human relation, however, obscures the fact that we are all, at some point or other in our lives, utterly dependent on others, requiring the care of those Eva Feder Kittay has labeled “dependency workers” (1999). Some of us are dependent on others throughout our lives. The self of a dependency worker, unlike “the self represented as participating as an equal in the social relations of liberal political theory,” must be “a self through whom the needs of another are discerned, a self that, when it looks to gauge its own needs, sees first the needs of another” (Kittay 1999: 51). Kittay argues that a just society has an obligation to meet the needs of dependency workers, since “[w]hether or not it is desirable to be a relational, giving self, . . . the moral requirements of dependency work . . . make such a self indispensable” (1999: 51).

Anti-Individualism in Philosophy of Mind

Traditional philosophy of mind has presupposed an individualistic view of the self. As Naomi Scheman defines it, individualism is “the assumption that my pain, anger, beliefs, intuitions, and so on are particular, (in theory) identifiable states that I am in, which enter as particulars into causal relationships” (Scheman, 1983: 226). Scheman argues that individualism in philosophy of mind has been almost universally accepted because apparently it: (1) is demanded by physicalism; (2) follows from our assumed privileged access to our own inner states; and (3) is presupposed by liberal political ideology. In addition, she argues, it accords with male socialization and a male view of the self that is taken to be the norm.

On Scheman’s alternative, relational, account of the mind, mental states, or the objects of psychology, are “objects only with respect to socially embodied norms” (1983: 228). As a result, “we are responsible for the meaning of each other’s inner lives” (1983: 241).

On this view, referred to as “semantic externalism,” meanings aren’t in the head; they are not self-contained internal thoughts that get expressed to others via speech. The meanings of words are a function of their use by linguistic communities. So the contents of our thoughts are not in our heads, not introspectible, and not “up to us.” Scheman argues that not only are meanings not in the head, but neither are such psychological states as emotions.

Although Scheman draws primarily on the semantic externalism of Tyler Burge (1979) and Hilary Putnam (1975) and a Wittgenstinian use theory of meaning in arguing against individualism in philosophy of mind, she also considers individualism to be “a piece of ideology,” one “connected with particular features of the psychosexual development of males mothered by women in a patriarchal society, with the development of the ego and of ego-boundaries” (Scheman 1983: 226).

Scheman’s view that such individualism is a piece of patriarchal ideology has its feminist critics. For example, Louise Antony (1995a; 1995b) argues that “[p]sychological individualism is perfectly compatible with and may even be required by feminist political theory” (1995a: 157). Scheman’s responses to Antony’s objections and those of other critics can be found in 1996a and 1996b.

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It is important to note that many of us live, simultaneously, in different linguistic communities and cultural contexts, which, on a relational view of the self, has implications for who we are. For, as María Lugones writes, “[a]s outsiders to the mainstream, women of color in the US practice ‘world’-travelling, mostly out of necessity” (1987: 3), having different attributes in different “worlds.” On her view, one can inhabit more than one world at a time and, thus, can have and not have an attribute (e.g., playfulness) simultaneously. “In describing my sense of a ‘world,’” Lugones writes, “I [am] offering something that is true to experience even if it is ontologically problematic,” adding that “any account of identity that could not be true to the experience of outsiders to the mainstream would be faulty even if ontologically unproblematic” (1987: 11).

Another issue in philosophy of mind on which the idea of a relational self bears is that of extended cognition. Clark and Chalmers (1988) have argued for a kind of “active externalism” that goes beyond semantic externalism. On this view, the mind—the locus of cognition—extends beyond an individual’s physical boundaries and can include artifacts such as notebooks and iPhones provided certain conditions are met (Clark 2008). As James Lindemann Nelson notes, “externalism allows, at least in principle, that our minds may extend not only into artifacts, but into other people as well” (2010: 235). Clark, Chalmers, and Nelson focus on extended cognition and the question of what beliefs a person can correctly be said to have, but, in addition, a person’s emotions and other mental states can be seen to consist, at least in part, in relations to other persons. Sustained by such relations, even someone with advanced Alzheimer’s disease can be “held” in personhood by those who know and care for her, in spite of severe mental decline (Lindemann 2010, 2014; Nelson 2010).

Personal Identity and Lived Experience

Philosophers—including those writing about something as personal as the self—have tended to agree with Bertrand Russell that

the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they reveal.

(1969: 160)

In contrast, feminist proponents of relational accounts of the self (including Baier 1985 and Held 1993) agree with critical race theorists, such as Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1993) that we all theorize from a positioned perspective—and many of us from multiple perspectives—and that it is important to acknowledge one’s own background and experiences. This focus on the actual lives of real people has not only expanded the subject matter considered appropriate for philosophical analysis, but also introduced new methods such as consciousness-raising and the use of first-person narratives into philosophy. As Matsuda writes, “I can take on the cloak of the detached universal, but it is an uncomfortable garment. It is not me, and I do not do my best work wearing it” (1996: 14).

Traditional philosophical discussions of personal identity have tended to rely on either abstract reasoning about the nature of the self or, alternatively, thought experiments to test our intuitions about the criterion or criteria for whether a person continues to exist over time. As I note in “Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity,”

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Philosophers writing about the self, at least since Locke, have puzzled over such question as whether persons can survive the loss or exchange of their minds, brains, consciousness, memories, characters, and/or bodies. In recent years, increasingly gruesome and high-tech thought experiments involving fusion, fission, freezing, dissolution, reconstitution, and/or teletransportation of an individual have been devised to test our intuitions about who, if anyone, survives which permutations.

(Brison, 1997: 13)

Kathleen Wilkes (1988) was, until recently, one of the few to argue that students of personal identity should eschew thought experiments and, instead, pay attention to scientific research on real people who undergo sometimes stranger-than-fiction transformations of the self. She takes a third-person approach to the self, arguing that we can gain insights into what it is to have a self by studying scientific findings. In contrast, I argue that paying attention to first-person narratives is essential for understanding the self. I pay particular attention to first-person narratives of survivors of trauma who frequently remark that they are not the same people they were before they were traumatized.

Of course, some traditional white male philosophers have purported to use first-person narratives—as did Descartes in his Meditations. His argument for his own existence as a thinking thing only works when stated in the first person. But, for Descartes, the I was fungible. Any I would do, because, qua thinking thing engaged in rational thought, each I was the same as every other.

What’s different about the I in genuine first-person narratives in philosophy is that it is embodied, situated in multiple, ever-shifting contexts, so it can’t speak for everyone. However, politically significant first person narratives (of discrimination, of oppression, of trauma) involve an I speaking as a member of a larger, politically significant group.

What led me to a relational view of the self was the experience of having a self shattered by being degraded by just one other person (in a context facilitating and perpetuating that degradation) and then rebuilt only with the help of other persons. In July of 1990, a man assaulted me while I was on a morning walk by myself on a country road in the south of France. He jumped me from behind, threw me into the underbrush, beat me, raped me, strangled me into unconsciousness several times, and then dragged me into a ravine, hit me on the head with a rock, and left me for dead (Brison, 2002).

For a while, it seemed to me that I had failed to survive the assault—that I had somehow managed to outlive myself. This didn’t make any sense, but, then, at the time, nothing did. When, a few months after the assault, I sat down at my computer to write about it for the first time, all I could come up with was a list of paradoxes.

Things had stopped making sense. I thought it was quite possible that I was brain-damaged as a result of the head injuries I had sustained. Or perhaps the heightened lucidity I had experienced during the assault remained, giving me a clearer, although profoundly disorienting, picture of the world.

(Brison 2002: ix)

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I wanted—needed—to know what a self was in order to figure out what had happened to my old one and whether I could get a new one. I was pretty clear that the old one was in pieces and could not be put back together again. In reading others’ first-person accounts of trauma I realized I wasn’t alone in feeling this. At the time, there were very few first-person narratives of rape, but there was a whole genre of testimonies by Holocaust survivors as well as third-person narratives by psychotherapists who treated them and other trauma survivors. I came to learn that survivors of trauma frequently remark that they are not the same people they were before they were traumatized.

Philosophers who have written about the self (with some notable exceptions, including Hume and Nietzsche) have tended to be confident that they had selves and to feel pretty good about them—good enough, anyway, that their chief concern was “how long can this good thing last?” Plato, in the Phaedo, portrays Socrates as taking the hemlock with equanimity, looking forward to his soul’s continued existence after his self-administered execution. Descartes comforted himself with the thought that he was, essentially, a thinking thing who would survive the death of his body. More contemporary philosophers writing about the self have wanted to know whether the person one currently clearly is (and is obviously quite attached to) would continue to exist through transformations of various kinds.

My problem was quite the opposite: It seemed I had lost my self and not only was I not sure how to put it back together again or acquire a new one, I wasn’t always entirely sure that carrying on—with a new or revamped self—would be a desirable or worthwhile endeavor. It was only after I lost my self that I felt a need to come up with a theory of the self. We so often learn about how things work by studying what happens when they break down, and there’s nothing like having a self shattered to make you wonder just what it was you once had.

Following Judith Herman (1992) and others, I defined a traumatic event as one in which a person feels utterly helpless in the face of a force that is perceived to be life-threatening. The immediate psychological responses to such trauma include terror, loss of control, and intense fear of annihilation. Long-term effects include the physiological responses of hypervigilance, heightened startle response, sleep disorders, and the more psychological, yet still involuntary, responses of depression, inability to concentrate, lack of interest in activities that used to give life meaning, and a sense of a foreshortened future. When the trauma is of human origin and is intentionally inflicted, the kind I discussed in Aftermath, it not only shatters one’s fundamental assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it, but also severs sustaining connections between the self and the rest of humanity. Victims of human-inflicted trauma are reduced to mere objects by their tormenters: their subjectivity is rendered useless and viewed as worthless. As Herman observes, “The traumatic event thus destroys the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others” (1992: 53). Without this belief one can no longer be oneself even to oneself, since the self exists fundamentally in relation to others.

I argued that the undoing of a self in trauma—and the remaking of a self in trauma’s aftermath—reveals the fundamentally relational and embodied nature of the self. As Catriona Mackenzie puts it “[t]o be a person is to be a temporally extended embodied subject whose identity is constituted in and through one’s lived bodily engagement with the world and with others” (2009: 119). To see this, we need to adopt a first-person perspective on embodiment; our experienced bodies are not just biological entities, things we have or are attached to. Our lived bodies are not just objects for our examination; they are saturated with meaning and they are the grounds and limits of our agency.

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Trauma survivors who claim not to be the same persons they once were don’t typically lose their memories of their pasts. What they lose is a past that makes sufficient sense cognitively and is bearable enough emotionally to provide a basis for projecting themselves into the future. And yet they often eventually find ways to reconstruct themselves and carry on with reconfigured lives. Working through, or re-mastering, traumatic memory (in the case of human-inflicted trauma, anyway), I’ve argued, involves a shift from being the object or medium of someone else’s (the perpetrator’s) speech (or other expressive behavior) to being the subject of one’s own. The act of bearing witness to the trauma can help to facilitate this shift, not only by reintegrating the survivor into a community, re-establishing connections essential to selfhood, but also by transforming traumatic memory into a narrative that can then be worked into the survivor’s sense of self and view of the world.

Being able to carry on after a self-shattering event is facilitated by our being in the right sorts of relations to others. For, as Cheshire Calhoun notes,

[o]ur having a reason to go on at all—our being “motivationally rooted” in our lives in such a way that we are propelled toward the future—may depend on our being able to sustain deep attachments [among other things].

(2008: 197)

This is why traditional thought experiments analyzed by personal identity theorists may make no sense to those holding a relational view of the self. For what would be there, after arriving, via teletransportation in a distant galaxy? Even if one’s intuition is that one would be numerically the same individual, why would one care about that person or look forward to being that person if none of the people one cared about would also be there?

Social Construction and Narrative Self-Constitution

Whereas traditional philosophical discussions of personal identity have focused on what Marya Schechtman (1996) calls the reidentification question—what makes a person numerically the same over time?—Schechtman and others have argued that the account of the self that can helpfully address our ethical and other practical concerns is one that answers the question “Who am I?” One such account, developed by Shechtman and others (Brison 1997; Butler 2003; Cavarero 2000), is that the self is a kind of narrative.

Although calling the self a narrative—or noting that it is constituted by some sort of narrative structure—might seem to suggest that individuals construct themselves by themselves in the solitary seclusion of a Cartesian dreamer, this is far from the case. If the self is a narrative, it is made up of social constructs and relations, out of words (whose meanings aren’t in the head), tropes, schemas, and narrative trajectories. It is “discursively constructed,” to use Sally Haslanger’s terminology, which means that “it is (to a significant extent) the way it is because of what is attributed to it or how it is classified” (2012: 123). Although Haslanger’s focus is on the discursive construction of social kinds (e.g., gender and race), her account is also relevant to our discussion of relational selves. For, as she notes, “[e]ach of us is socially constructed in this sense because we are (to a significant extent) the individuals we are today as a result of what has been attributed (and self-attributed) to us.” She adds, however, that

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to say an entity is “discursively constructed” is not to say that language or discourse brings a material object into existence de novo. Rather something in existence comes to have—partly as a result of having been categorized in a certain way—a set of features that qualify it as a member of a certain kind or sort.

(Haslanger 2012: 123; see also Chapter 13 in this volume)

To say that selves are socially constructed, however, is not to say that they don’t exist. “The socially interconnected nature of human community, however, does not give a sufficient reason for denying the existence of selves,” as Marilyn Friedman notes, for “[i]n the midst of social interconnection stands the curious character of embodiment” (2003: 32). Even though I am embodied in a particular body, however, I am a self by virtue of my relations to others—and I am the particular self I am by virtue of my relations to particular persons.

On my account, a self is an embodied, socially constructed narrative. On this view, selves are relational in Baier’s sense of “second persons,” able to be brought into existence as persons only through interactions with a care provider. In addition, others provide the self-in-formation with instruction in language and social norms and skills. Persons do not arise ex nihilo and cannot be generated from human beings—that is, biological entities—in isolation. Given that personhood is a social/legal/moral construct, this may be obvious.

I argue for the less obvious view that other persons also constitute me as who I am; that is, they participate in the ongoing process of my self-constitution. By “self-constitution,” I mean, not the constitution of a self all by itself, but rather the process by which a self is constituted, however that happens. On my view, other selves are essential to this process. More specifically, what others do with words plays a crucial role in my self-constitution.

For example, how others use the term “woman” (and employ the concept woman) affects my self-constitution as a woman. If the concept of a woman is, among other things, the concept of someone who is rapeable with impunity, this is an inescapable part of my self-definition, whether I like it or not. I would go so far as to say that even those aspects of others’ definition of “woman” of which I am not aware can affect who I am. For to the extent that we say (or conceive) anything about ourselves, we are using language to categorize ourselves as members of groups and as bearers of properties.

What I am arguing is that the way we are constructed is both constrained and facilitated by how others use the words (and images) we use to constitute ourselves. For example, it wasn’t possible to constitute oneself as a homosexual before the term “homosexuality”—and the category it denoted—came into existence. And even the introductions of new labels that don’t apply to us can change our identities. The existence of individuals who identify as transgender men and women changes the identity of cisgender men and women by giving rise to a new, cisgender identity (Shotwell and Sangrey 2009).

There are significant constraints on narrative self-construction, and self-reconstruction, and these have been discussed in (among other places) Schechtman (1996) and Nelson (2001). The main obstacle to self-reconstruction after trauma that I focused on in Aftermath was the difficulty of re-establishing bonds of trust with others. But now it is clearer to me that even when one is able to re-establish trust with the help of empathic listeners, there are significant obstacles to overcome, namely the facticity of one’s past—the brute facts about what happened, neurological constraints and linguistic constraints, including the fact that there is only a limited stock of tropes and metaphors and other narratives available with which to make sense of one’s experience and the fact that the meanings of the words one uses in composing a narrative are socially constructed.

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The first two obstacles to self-reconstruction, not only after a discrete traumatic event, but also in the face of ongoing oppression—the givenness of one’s past and of one’s neurochemistry—might seem to pose the most extreme, unyielding constraints on the narrative reconstruction of a self. But at least sometimes it is the third—the representational constraint imposed by the culturally available means of expression—that actually presents the most difficult obstacles for a trauma survivor to overcome.

Why might this be so? Strangely enough, to the extent that we are stories we tell ourselves, we are not in control of our self-definition, because the meanings of the words with which we construct our self-narratives are not in our heads, whereas, to the extent that we are our neurochemistry, we are (at least at times and to some extent) in control of our self-definition, provided we have at least the minimal motivation necessary to follow a therapeutic regimen of, say, taking medications (or meditating or exercising or using some other strategy to alter one’s brain chemistry).

But, as noted above, we are not in control of the linguistic means with which we construct our selves narratively. This is another way in which we are fundamentally relational beings. How other people use words constrains our self-narratives.

Conclusion

Let me conclude by discussing two of the puzzles that remain for the view that selves are fundamentally relational. First, how are we to reconcile the view of the self as embodied with the view that it is socially constructed and embedded in larger structures? How is it that we are made up of both meanings and molecules (Brison 2002: 77–83)? This is not, however, a problem peculiar to the relational account of the self. It is nothing less than the intractable mind-body problem that vexes any account of the self.

Second, how are we to account for freedom in narrative self-constitution if the self—and the categories that make it up—are social constructs? If our selves are socially constructed, in ways that are, to a significant extent, out of our control, how do we account for our (admittedly constrained) ability to choose how to narratively constitute ourselves? How are we able to resist “oppressive self-concepts” (Khader 2011) and how can we narratively repair “damaged identities” (Nelson 2001)?

Nelson (2001) discusses the means by which what she calls “counterstories” can refigure personal identities. And although Serene Khader observes that “oppression marks people as particular types of beings; it shapes people’s senses of who they are,” she notes that even severely oppressed people are often able to respond with “internal resistance to oppressive self-concepts” (2011: 122). Even in oppressive societies, Khader argues, opportunities for cultivating positive self-images exist in what she calls “resistant social spaces” (2011: 124). This does not relieve others of the responsibility to eradicate oppression. On the contrary, it is, as Scheman urges, up to all of us to pay attention to “how we make each other up, especially across lines of privilege,” and to “how we create the possibilities of meaningfulness in each other’s lives” (1996a: 234).

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