Negotiating complex identities

Given the rich layering of the work published in the pages of IFJP, it can be challenging to identify a single theme around which to organize each issue. But for this issue, the theme of “negotiating complex identities” seems entirely apposite. This is not only because each of the articles works eloquently with the pain, struggle, and potential power of negotiating complex identities in distinctive ways, but also because “negotiating complex identities” bespeaks profound stories about the persistent work of feminist and critical scholars, activists, and thinkers world-wide.

But what is identity? In the context of social justice, the idea and practice of “identity politics” is very familiar and powerfully suggestive of rights protections, yet identity is always simultaneously claimed, resisted, and contested. For example, traditional understandings of feminism suggest that claiming, owning, and insisting on the identity of “woman” is a foundational moment as well as a site of feminist resistance and struggle against the over-determination of most women's experiences based on only some women's experiences. Both remain very important – think of some of the contemporary debates around trans identities marked by seemingly oppositional and certainly painful deliberations about who can “count” or qualify as a woman or a man, and how to be counted if one rejects the binary. Or, to refer back to our Editorial in Issue 21.2, “Resisting global anti-genderism with global feminist research,” consider the anxieties and violence engendered by white hetero-patriarchal insistences that women and men are unchangeable “natural” identities. Or, reflect on the Vatican’s renewed dogma that gender is entirely and always biological and binary in the recently published “‘Male and Female He Created Them’: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education” (http://www.educatio.va/content/dam/cec/Documenti/19_0997_INGLESE.pdf), or on the ongoing turmoil around South African middle-distance runner and Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya's determination to compete as a woman (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/caster-semenya). A thousand and more examples might be included here to begin to illustrate that “identity” is both always austerely demanded and deeply contested.

While debates about gender difference and identities rage, gender difference is still starkly manifest in who rises to the top of political, economic, and social structures and in corporeal manifestations of privilege and power – with the cost for those at the bottom often being exclusion, powerlessness, pain, and indeed death. But as the articles in this issue remind us, there are a multitude of ways in which people work with the complexities of identity and power through a mixture of resistances, refusals, and invitations for re-thinking.

Nithya Rajan's reading of lip-sewing protests by refugees so well demonstrates that even those forcibly displaced from home, culture, and nation can exercise political agency through a repertoire of protest. This article shows the power of fresh perspectives on deeply situated actions that often come to light as symptoms of powerlessness, but even in silence have much to teach us.

In another exploration of change agents, Heidi Riley considers the impact of insurgency on the collective gender identity of low-level male combatants in the Nepalese People's Liberation Army (PLA). Deploying a relational analysis with respect to state forces, female PLA members, and the rural population, she emphasizes men's engagement with ideas of gender equality as well as violent masculinity.

Meghan Kallman simultaneously centers race, gender, and nationality to understand the distinct experiences of white women and women of color in Peace Corps field sites. Focusing on a field that invokes colonial ideology, she reveals how gender and race privilege are redistributed in new contexts, even as vulnerability to violence remains a constant. But neither relation of power is frontally addressed by the organization.

Lewis Turner continues the conversation on gender and refugee status with a significant contribution to the limited scholarship on refugee men. His intersectional analysis focuses on the treatment of Syrian men by humanitarian workers in Jordan. Centering refugee men shows how humanitarian care is permeated by particular understandings of gender, race, and ethnicity in ways that affect the humanitarian response.

Finally, Shan-Jan Sarah Liu also relies on an intersectional approach in examining how Chinese migrant women in Taiwan negotiate their own citizenship in the face of immigration restrictions. In a contribution to feminist studies of citizenship and migration, she relies on women's own constructions of their citizenship, and shows a limited spectrum of agency with respect to citizenship entitlements.