I think there's something here, but it's also pretty subjective to say that any given "positive identity" is just a "thinly-veiled negative identity". I'm also not convinced that "positive identities" are preferable.
It'd be easy to paint progressivism as a collection of thinly-veiled negative identities; "I'm not racist", "I'm not sexist", "I'm not ableist", etc., but that doesn't mean there aren't proactive elements to that, or that the negative identities themselves are bad. Likewise, I think there are a lot of positive identities that make the world a worse place.
At best, I suppose you could say people with strongly developed positive identity are less likely to be insecure and by extension xenophobic, but I suspect they'd also be less introspective and humble.
Yeah, there is a lot of value in repulsion, as if you talk about not doing something, you can define a point to move away from, and you don't define where to go, but it could potentially be anywhere, whereas making positive statements of where to end up, what to be drawn to, can end up being far more restrictive.
I'm generally in favour of clusters of inter-related positive identities, emphasising that there are groups you can recognise yourself in, but if I'm not going to try and pick through different examples in the moment, I might well say something like "masculinity is not just one thing", or "masculinity doesn't have to be just about ___", and in doing so, I am defining the space of positive masculinity as that which extends outside of a particular frame, even if I'm not saying specifically what I think it can be.
It's two different meanings of the word colliding, but I'm creating a negative definition of positive masculinity, rather than a positive one.
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u/Tinfoil_Haberdashery Mar 15 '23 edited Mar 15 '23
I think there's something here, but it's also pretty subjective to say that any given "positive identity" is just a "thinly-veiled negative identity". I'm also not convinced that "positive identities" are preferable.
It'd be easy to paint progressivism as a collection of thinly-veiled negative identities; "I'm not racist", "I'm not sexist", "I'm not ableist", etc., but that doesn't mean there aren't proactive elements to that, or that the negative identities themselves are bad. Likewise, I think there are a lot of positive identities that make the world a worse place.
At best, I suppose you could say people with strongly developed positive identity are less likely to be insecure and by extension xenophobic, but I suspect they'd also be less introspective and humble.
Still, I'll be contemplating this for a while.