Making up people Glynis cousin. Foucault Classification important for regimes of cure, control or punishment: the criminal, the insane are made.

Making up people

Glynis cousin

Foucault

• Classification important for regimes of cure, control or punishment: the criminal, the insane are made

Blackness: a colonial invention

As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion….to experience his being through others (Fanon)

..and of nationalist exclusions

While he contemplates himself with the detachment of someone else, he feels in effect detached from himself, he becomes someone else, a pure witness (Sartre: the antisemite and the Jew)

Hacking: making up people

I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications. We think of many kinds of people as objects of scientific inquiry. Sometimes to control them, as prostitutes, sometimes to help them, as potential suicides. …..Sometimes just to admire, to understand, to encourage and perhaps even to emulate...

We think of these kinds of people as definite classes defined by definite properties. As we get to know more about these properties, we will be able to control, help, change, or emulate them better. But it's not quite like that.

They are moving targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before. The target has moved. I call this the ‘looping effect'. Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before. I call this ‘making up people'.

Making up people phases:

• 1. Count! 2. Quantify! 3. Create Norms! 4. Correlate! 5. Medicalise! 6. Biologise! 7. Geneticise! 8. Normalise! 9. Bureaucratise!

Simplistic antinomies

Modern identities are immensely complex for being jumped up. The counterpoised abstractions of black and white, slave names and free names, christianity/islam, male/female, always have some basis in fact but rather more in fantasy

Panethnicity and ethnicism

 • So a panethnic category takes many diverse groups of people and

groups them together as one group. Terms like European American, African American, Latino/a, American Indian, and Asian American are all panethnic labels that take diverse groups of people and lump them

into larger categories.  Le Espiritu Yen (1992  ) Asian American Panethnicity, Bridging Institutions and Identities, Temple University Press

• ethnicist discourses seek to impose stereotypic notions of ‘common cultural need’ upon heterogenous groups with diverse social aspirations and interests (Brah, 1992)

ambivalence

I wasn’t a misfit; I could join the elements of myself together. It was the others,they wanted misfits; they wanted you to embody within yourself their ambivalence (Kureishi)

How real is real: knots?

We are not real but racists say we are real so we become real in facing racism….

Challenges are: to resist reverse discourse (Foucault)

narrow life scripts (Appiah)

raciology (Gilroy)

Made up people making up

Friendship delivers us from identity (Dhanda and Pawlett)