Vector Identity Theory
Hi all! This guest post is from Violet, a regular commenter at The Thang Blog and all-around awesome gal. Enjoy!
Hi. I’m Violet. Rebecca has been kind enough to let me have some of her blog space for a guest post, and let me dip my toe carefully into the world of writing for a wider internet audience. Identity-wise, I am a twenty-something white currently-abled trans-female-spectrum genderqueer and sexuality-queer tomboy geek engineer. Except to the extent I’m not. But this post is about identity labels, so bear with me. Rebecca has previously posted about identity labels as keywords here, which I think is awesome, and I wanted to add another different (and geeky) way of looking at them to the discussion. This post is adapted from something I wrote more personally last year.
By “identity labels”, what I mean are nouns and adjectives that you use to describe people — “woman”, “man”, “goth”, “punk”, “masculine”, “feminine”, “trans”, “queer”. These things are useful for communication. Labels can function as a shorthand to tell people about what your life is like. They allow people with attributes in common to find each other and compare notes. I use them a lot.
The problem is that they’re wrong. Or, rather, not quite right. Any time you have an identity, it comes with a pile of stereotyped behaviors that any given claimant of the identity might or might not share, and it tends to reduce the perception of the claimant down to those stereotypes. Oops. (Rebecca, in her keyword post, also got into the possible confining nature of labels imposed by others.)
Now for the geeking out. Don’t worry — if you don’t speak math, I’ll give an example in pictures below.
I often view labels as vectors in some huge or infinite-dimensional vector space. Given a set of labels — say, {male, female} or {straight, queer} or {gay, lesbian, bi, trans, queer, questioning, ally} or whatever — finding out how you identify is a process akin to estimating the projection of your personal self-vector onto the subspace covered by the basis of labels in the set. Of course, that basis is never orthonormal; that would be too clean. It’s not orthogonal or normal at all. It’s just a mess of huge-dimensional vectors that you have to try to match yourself up against, throwing away all those components of yourself that aren’t in directions available to you in that basis. Worse, the self-vector is a function of time. The way you project on to a certain set of labels changes over the course of your life, sometimes even non-continuously. Even the identity labels change over time. Does being a goth mean the same thing now as it did fifteen years ago?
For an example of how my thinking about labels works, people sometimes ask me “are you male or female?” What they mean is usually something like this:
Pick either the male dot or the female dot. Okay, that doesn’t really fit me at all. I certainly don’t fall exactly on one of those dots. How about another picture, where there’s a continuum between male and female?
Hmm. Still not all that great — in this model the extent to which I am female is exactly the extent to which I am not male. I don’t think there’s actually a single coordinate that describes my place on a line for this — what if I am some amount of both? So then you can imagine this picture, an orthonormal basis for gender:
This is better, but I still think it is more complicated than that — “male” and “female” are culturally understood as at least somewhat opposed — being male does have something to do with not being female. So this picture is somewhat more accurate:
But that’s just my identity put in terms of binary gender. Binary gender isn’t a good system for capturing a whole lot of parts of my identity (or anyone’s, I am guessing). There are whole dimensions of identity that have nothing to do with concepts of masculinity or femininity, and exist off the male/female plane, like this (The disc is there to help you picture the three dimensions. In my head there are more than three dimensions involved here, but I don’t think I can draw that.):
In most modern culture, asking about someone’s gender limits your question to the male/female plane, but it’s not evident to me why that particular plane has to be that special. For example, in a lot of situations my geekiness is a lot more important than my projection on to the male/female plane. I’ve even answered the question of “what gender are you” with “I’m a geek” before. And some people’s genders might be completely orthogonal to the male/female plane, which makes answering the gender question in a societally understandable way even harder.
I’m surprised I can do more than just stand and stammer when people ask me the “male or female” question. Those are useful labels to have around, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I find it important to keep in mind that those categories are not mutually exclusive, and they completely miss some dimensions of gender identity. The same goes for any other set of labels you care to pick.
Themocracy
The next time you go over this? You really need to find somewhere to work in a ‘hat’ pun.
Oh you are so correct. I am remiss.
Love. Love. Love. Beyond fabulous.
Everything is better with charts.
Seriously. I think this would really make more sense to people who don’t seem to understand what all this means when it’s just described in words. It is pretty abstract in the vocabulary sense, and so I love the way you’ve made it visual and immediate.
This has got to be the most brilliant theory of how identity works I’ve seen in a long time (if ever). It’s not a restrictive model (you can always add more dimensions to account for any identity), and I think it could work really well when accounting for intersectionality in discussions of privilege. Maybe it’s just because of my own geeky tendencies, but this really makes sense to me.
Thanks for the high praise! I should figure out whether this metaphor helps thinking about intentionality for me — it kind of makes me want a mathematical representation for *that* too, which might be hard.
This is so strange, I wrote something quite like this on gender a while ago. Of course, since I’m from an artsy background it has less charts and more flowery metaphors, and yours is actually BETTER.
So in short, awesome!
I know that I’m a big artsy dork, and would love to hear your flowery metaphors, too!
Aah, but this one is a much better theory!
Also, it’s incredibly scary to link to my own blog, especially that post. I imagine it’s, uhm, a little pretentious and I probably got a million things wrong. (And please do tell me what those mistakes are!)
That said, here you go. Be gentle? http://say-rawr.blogspot.com/2010/05/international-day-against-homophobia.html
Thanks! I really like the planet metaphor, particularly because it allows for the possibility of strapping on some rockets and moving your planet elsewhere.
Hahah, yep. And thank you! I like to think I’m a space whale, swimming around and generally having a good time. Having the space (pun unintended but welcomed) to revise my own opinions of myself, or even change on a daily basis, is very important to me.
Ooh, that’s neat, similar to what another friend of mine has metaphor-ed (it’s a word now, dammit) to me about gender as a computer science-style clustering problem.
And thanks for the praise!
Having majored in both engineering and sociology in college, I have to say that this struck me as incredibly cool. You managed to combine concepts from the social sciences with concepts from the physical sciences by using a few well placed analogies and nicely rendered diagrams. My little geek heart is fluttering.
Thank you!
Hi, here via Feministe SSS.
LOved this, especially the idea about making it a non-orthogonal vector space. My own effort (spread over three posts, concluding here didn’t get that far, but I think I started from a not-too-clever analogy presented by someone else and got lost along the way. From the series of posts, I think that gender identity involves several vectors from the wider many-dimensional identity-space you describe (my discussion ends up with about 6 or 7 possible such) if each of those is allowed to be composed of two “male” or “female” non-orthonormal vectors, you can see how quickly any attempt to describe gender in a 2d space is going to run into trouble
I touched on the intentionality thing, but like you I didn’t get very far with it except to say that intention seems to be associated with communicating to others – the social aspect gender rather than the personal.
[...] June 2, 2010 tags: gender, working things out by wickedday There was an absolutely fascinating guest post at The Thang Blog recently by self-described ‘twenty-something white currently-abled trans-female-spectrum [...]
[...] “covered in body hair.” This is potentially related to Violet’s excellent “Vector Identity Theory,” although the specific formulation she provides is related to gender identity and not sexual [...]
Excellent post, fully demonstrates the issue of gender identity. But, in the interest of fully exploring the topic, I do have one little criticism:
“For an example of how my thinking about labels works, people sometimes ask me `are you male or female?’ What they mean is usually something like this:”
While I can’t speak for everyone, let alone to your own experiences, I will say that when I ask that question, I just want to know which pronouns to use when I refer to you when speaking to others.
I respect the uniqueness of your identity. I respect that stereotypes are generalizations at best. But honestly, I’m just looking to use the English language in some non-clumsy way to refer to you, a singular person, such that the audience of my speech will understand the reference.
If you want to know which pronouns to use, why don’t you try asking exactly that, rather than trying to approximate it with something else?