The ideology of fixed identities

The idea of fixed identities is a plague upon contemporary societies. I see how this ideology can make things seem simpler, more predictable, in societies that are relatively static. However, if one's society, or the people in it, have experienced a lot of change, the ideology that identities are basically fixed and remain relatively unalterable throughout one's lifetime, seems plainly wrongheaded.

Much of my contention with these ideologies, that hold that our identities remain fixed, stems from personal experience with them. As an ideological force, they seem to exert a very reactionary effect on social relations.

In my life, I have been categorised in various very unhelpful ways. It has seemed to me that categorising me according to a "type" has inevitably hindered communication, and has sometimes been used with exactly this intention by those who have a political agenda.

Categorising me in a particular way prevents me from communicating things that do not come from the perspective of one who sees the world according to the category. It's Procrustean. Anything that goes outside the lines of the ideologically determined cookie-cutter persona is deemed to be irrelevant, unintelligible, or just plain crazy.

I'm had legitimate concerns for my well-being dismissed because I speak as "a female" -- only not nearly enough, apparently, since women are considered to be most quintessentially themselves when they do not speak at all. (Having said that, a woman who speaks much, but without much consideration to the content, is considered, in Zimbabwe, to be expressing her normality. Go quiet in that country, and as a female, you will be considered to have become "depressed".)

I've not been able to express my sense of loss of my culture, identity, and country, because a white African's perspective has long been deemed socially illegitimate. It's supposed to be transcended by a righteous black's perspective.

I've been told that if I want to communicate at all, I must represent myself as a "white woman", when the Western cultural history that has produced this category of "white woman" is not my own cultural history at all. Even this brief post should be enough to indicate that I have not had the same, or similar privileges, as the U.S., British, or Australian, middle class female, who happens to be Anglo-Saxon. I think differently, because I am already different. I cannot choose this historically engendered category of identity because it has no predictive power over my behaviour, and as an epistemological category, makes little sense when applied to me.

And then there is the idea that the leopard does not change its spots. This is a particularly noxious ideology, since it is based wholly on an oversimplified idea of historical determinism. The assumption here is that experiences do not, or ought not to change one's nature. One is destined always to remain the same, just as one's parents had determined one to be. There's no thinking; there's no responsiveness; there's no will power. One is like a billiard ball to be directed by another, or an historically produced blob.