Friday, March 28, 2008

Social Identity

The next Disability Blog Carnival theme is 'The Hardest Part'. I was thinking about it, and decided I didn't want to interpret 'hard' as 'difficult', because that's standard. I wanted to do something different.
Bill Choisser has an online book about prosopagnosia here. I found it among my printouts yesterday and was reading it again, and noticed how he describes identity. One aspect he discusses is 'core identity' - cores are generally hard, so that's the connection. Pretty tangential, I know. I like being tangential.
I have a regular pattern of treating whatever I'm reading as if it doesn't relate at all to myself. In fact, I don't tend to have a sense of 'myself' while reading. But when I reread things, sometimes I suddenly start thinking about how they relate to me.
Anyway, I started wondering what my own identity would look like with that model. I'm female, so my personal identity (what you actually are) would be female. I consider myself female, as opposed to being transsexual or genderqueer or something, so my core identity would also be female. But maybe close to the border, because being female is not as significant to my identity as it seems to be for most. My personal identity is in my core identity, because I'm fine with who I am, but maybe towards the border rather than squarely in. Actually, my core identity is probably very small, only slightly bigger than my personal identity, because I consider myself very unique.
Type is acceptable mating partners. Therefore, my 'type' is nonexistant, because I have no interest in sex with anyone. As for my tribe, it's several parts. One is 'developmentally disabled people', another is 'highly-educated intellectuals'. Or no, on reviewing the definition, it's probably only developmentally disabled people, and my immediate family. It crosses both genders. My personal identity is towards the edge of my tribe, and my core identity is half in and half out, because I don't fully feel a part of any group.
My core identity is certainly hard. It's hardened and solidified to stand the assaults my teachers gave to it, as they tried to force it to move. It's the hardest part in this diagram, the part most resistent to change (except maybe personal identity). I mentioned above that my core identity is small, that's because it curled up for protection. It's strong because it had to be.
And another meaning of hard - this was difficult for me, to figure out where these things are positioned. The hardest part to figure out was probably my tribe. I don't have much of a clear idea what that even means.

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hope you can join us on Change.org in our community: "Support People with Disabilities"

http://www.change.org/changes/view/2154

Thanks,
Will H.

3:44 PM  
Blogger Ettina said...

I'm certainly not going to do that, since you guys support the Combating Autism Act. Have you even read my description? I don't want to be 'combatted'.

3:30 PM  
Blogger cripchick said...

is ucp supporting that bill or the change.org website? i'm glad to hear you are against it---this is why i love blogging as a medium to combat everything media is saying about autism right now.

anyways, bev from asperger square 8 was telling me about a term/idea called master status, have you heard of that in terms of identity?

7:03 PM  

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