January 2008
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As I discussed in chapter 1, within a poststructural framework, there are no fixed subjects with stable and immutable identities. Identity is a product of our temporary attachments to subject positions that anchor us within specific institutional settings and discursive practices. I have suggested that girls’ school identities at ESH were thus fashioned from the subject positions they were assigned within the institution of the school (gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, curricular track, program reputation) and the subject positions that they “took up” in their negotiations of those discourses. However, it is important to note that girls’ seemingly structured positionings within the school were not—even though they appeared to be—fixed and “natural.” Identity categories felt automatic because they existed within larger social forces that generated systems of power, inequity, and oppression. But such forces have historical antecedents and carry social contingencies that make these “inflexible” positionings open to possible reiteration and renegotiation (Butler 1990, 1993). Identity, then, is a combination of both historically and socially contingent structural features that appear to be intractable and the choices we make as discursively produced subjects, who recognize how we have been positioned within these broadly based structures. The “suturing” of these two forms of positioning is what produces identity, where the contingencies inherent in each open up a space for constant negotiation.