Deconstruction and the Question of Identity

Abstract

This chapter introduces deconstructive theory and asks what it means to conceptualise youth identity when it comes from and through a primary relationship with an ‘adult’ culture and identity. I do this by looking to postcolonial and feminist theorists who have utilised deconstructive methods in questioning this notion of identity as it operates in race and gender discourse. As a model for approaching a similar questioning of youth discourse, I examine work from Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak that addresses the identity positions of women and racial others. They focus not only on the dominant conceptual conditions through which such identity positions are produced, but also on how the voices of women and racial others are constrained and subordinated. These theorists work to displace the grounding assumptions of identity as distinct and directly accessible to oneself and offer a means of thinking beyond frameworks that posit dominant and marginal identities as natural and inevitable. Bhabha, Spivak and Butler, in particular, make use of deconstructive techniques to reveal how the dominant identity positions of men and of the West are actually dependent on a subordinated identity category. In doing so, they demonstrate why it is problematic to seek to have marginal identities ‘speak’ themselves from within such an order as a way to address or overcome their subaltern status.