Description: Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martín Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martín Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.
Review Quotes: "With her nuanced views of these historical variable visible identities and her careful analyses and arguments against the ways alternative conceptualizations have unfolded in history and in philosophy and political theory, Linda Martín Alcoff has indeed, as she hoped, constructed a 'bridge"...over 'the huge gulf that separates races and genders in their country.'"--Hypatia