Global and Local Gender Identities at the Crossroads of Cultural Hybridity

Global vs. Local IdentitiesThe traditional conceptions developed in order to study local identity form a useful basis to analyze the possibilities of new global identities. At the individual level, the first approach to be taken into account is essentialism. Taking into account the collective (global) level, according to which identity is given by social attributions, another level, the individual (local) one arises, according to which identity is given by natural features building an identitarian essence. Another approach to local identity is constructivism, according to which identities are created, built and rebuilt, rather than being culturally pre-ordinate. Another view to discuss is the model of narrative identity that considers the biographical structure as a condition for thinkability of global identity.Within the context above, the social structure and culture contrast two notions of local identity. In the former, identity is ascribed, inheriting in the social and family several roles the subject occupies; in the latter, identity is chosen and responsibilities are freely taken up. Deprived of structure the subject is driven into culture; denied identity fulfilled in a significant role, he or she demands an individuality which will make up for what has been relinquished. Furthermore, cultural identity is considered to be the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as he or she is dependent by his/her to a group or culture.On the other hand, Mouffe states that:When we accept that every identity is relational and that the condition of existence of every identity is the affirmation of a difference, the determiners of an 'other' that is going to play the role of a 'constitutive outside', it is possible to understand how antagonisms arise. In the domain of collective identification, where what is in question is the creation of a 'we' by the definition of a 'them', the possibility always exists that this 'we/them' relation will turn into a relation of the friend / enemy type (Mouffe, 1993: 2-3).The condition for collective identification (we vs. them) - 'my blood, my family, my kin, my clan, my nation, my race' - is an ever-present and potentially violent expulsion of those who are not 'my blood, my family, my kin, my clan, my nation, my race.' The existing of one nation presupposes other identical nations, with the consequences that cause Hegel such anxiety and which might be phrased as: the other is so like me, the other is within (Hegel, 2001: 89).The local, then, is an effect of multiple identifications. For example, if was bom and brought up in England may mainly identify myself as English; but if as a child am taken for some time to Jamaica will have to live into that identity. Paul Gilroy writes: I am not against the nation... am against the rhetoric of cultural insider(ism), because think it is too readily limited to unacceptable ideas of homogeneous national culture and exclusionary national or ethnic belonging (Gilroy, 1994: 72). Thus, if identity is understood as an effect of discourse, national identity in a national culture can never achieve the unified homogeneity it wishes for itself. In this case, we have to admit that there can be no escape from identity; and further that all identity defines itself precisely by establishing an inside (in-hereness) and an outside (out-hereness) so that all identity to a degrees practices insidensm together with an exclusionary force. In this case, Anthony Smith concludes that:Of all the collective identities in which human beings share today, national identity is perhaps the most fundamental and inclusive. Not only has nationalem, the ideological movement, penetrated every comer of the globe; the world is divided, first and foremost, into 'nationstates' - states claiming to be nations - and national identity everywhere underpins the recurrent drive for popular sovereignty and democracy, as well as the exclusive tyranny that it sometimes breeds. …