"Liminality and Selfhood: Toward being enough"

May 11, 2015 Tania Laure

WHAT IS TENDER, undeniable, fluid, like winter, memory, or hunger: this practice of pairing with an/other and oscillating between states of (dis) identification yields a liminal identity, a subjectivity that is material and corporeal but which also transcends the limits imposed by corporeality, visual culture, and colonization—a selfhood that challenges the normative constructions of 'self.' This liminal subjectivity is not exactly an achieved state; instead, it is a series of uncovering—like the ever outward concentric circles made by a pebble’s break of pond surface, circles that also progress ever inward. What is uncovered is not a new identity but, instead, a self that was always there: the girlfriend subject in her full humanity had always been a multiplied subject of remarkable depth, and her practice of coupling with an/others is subjectivity as revelation. These revelations mark an/other part of the 'waiting' self, the self that was and is always there, a self that was, is, and (un)becomes. +Kevin Everod Quashie, Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject