After identity

Much scholarship has already mapped how people acquire gender, sexual and racial identities over time. Georgia Warnke turns to a different question: what kind of thing an identity actually is. Her central claim is that identities are interpretations, and that they resemble the act of understanding a text more than most of us assume.

On this view, seeing oneself or another person as a particular race, sex or gender offers one reading among many. It does not capture everything that can be meant by a person, and it is not the only correct reading. Nobody is simply and always one thing, whether black or white, male or female, man or woman. Each identity covers a limited domain, and applying it outside that domain produces injustice and inconsistency.

In the book's closing sections, Warnke follows these ideas into law and public policy. She examines what they imply for affirmative action, parental leave following childbirth, the place of gay people in the military, and marriage between partners of the same sex.