In reading through my notes and while working on my group project, I keep wondering, what is the difference between membership and identity? Are they interrelated, i.e. does one lead into another? Is one a matter of how you, yourself, feel and identify versus how others identify you? In my notes I wrote that membership is a political identity. What exactly does that mean?
Response:
In some sense, the progression of your own questioning is coming the answer, and I also say a little bit about this in response to Victorya's question.
Per your last question, however, let me further clarify.
Rather than say "membership is a political identity," let us instead render the statement as "membership points us to how identity is political."
When I say such things, I am trying to get you all to consider some of the reasons why we care about identity and membership at all. As a micro-concern, identity is mainly understood by the self as personal, "I am an artist"; "I am a Southerner"; "I am hip-hop"; "I am who I am." At the same time, as a macro-concern, identity also requires relation. Not only must you be recognized by another as that which you claim, but that recognition carries with it a constellation of burdens and obligations, a series of things one ought to do, say, demonstrate to expect, if one indeed expects to continue to have a "right" to the identity.
That we often feel these identities as constitutive of ourselves is easy and apparent. But when one comes up against the boundary of that identity, one also has an opportunity to glance what is otherwise transparent to any given person in the midst of living his or her life: when one leaves home and, upon return, is told that one is now "different"; when one realizes that the jokes his friends tell aren't actually "okay" and so on. In such moments, when the mechanisms that make his or her membership become suddenly apparent, that person must on some level make a choice, to do things that better conform to what childhood friends and family expect; to go ahead and laugh anyway or to pretend to not hear-- to feel oneself perform what use to come "naturally." To do it is to try to return to membership. To not do it is to risk losing something nonetheless important to one's living, social ease, care, community... MP