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Trying to represent and perform identity in your pursuit of interests and curiosities is a bit like trying to have a full conversation with a cat, like it understands human language. Nature might respond somewhat to aspects of identity but the performance is largely lost on it.
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I think this is the deepest intellectual weakness of identitarianism. It forgoes genuine curiosity and general interestedness in the universe for a never-break-character identity performance that only works on other humans.
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I don’t think I have any strongly gendered or ethnic or racialized interests. The closest I come is probably vegetarianism/veganism, which has identity roots, and strongly modulates my food related curiosities and interests.
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The problem is that depending on your relative position within structural racism and sexism parts of your identity are ascribed to you whether you want it or not. In a racialized society we all have a race. This looks drastically different from various perspectives.
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That’s a practical problem to navigate. It need not and likely cannot focus interest and curiosity unless it becomes an existential survival threat, and even then identity performance may not be salient to countering the threat. There’s no specific “black” way of escaping chains.
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I honestly think you're missing my point. I'm not making a normative point at all. I'm making what I think is a factual assertion: having a strong "identity performance" persona at all times makes you less able to be curious about and interested in, the world.
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