Pride in and pride out of the box

Today, pride is often invoked together with identity: LGBTQIA+ pride, the pride of being Italian or of belonging to a certain community. This circulation highlights a series of ambivalences: identity can be a matrix of differences that result in marginalization, but also an instrument of emancipation. Different is, for example, the pride of being Italian in Italy in the 2000s compared with the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, where the ethnic pride of some immigrant communities could have marked a counter-discourse in relation to the dominant stigmatization.

Identity is, at the same time, what makes social recognition possible and what presents us as governable and classifiable subjects. For M. Foucault, identity is the result of practices of classification, forms of knowledge and institutions that name us, separate us, and make us exist as a type of subject. And, wherever socially relevant differences emerge, it is likely that inequalities will be produced. Identity can therefore also be an instrument of marginalization: think, for example, of the construction of the figure of the non-EU person in relation to that of the expat, the former marginalized, the latter in a condition of privilege. Even when it constitutes the basis for the recognition of rights, access to healthcare, and protections, the identity construct does so at the price of making people interpretable, predictable and, therefore, governable.

The strategic significance of pride – think of Pride – arises as an act of reversal: what was a mark of shame becomes a reason for pride. But the Foucauldian question remains: how much do we pay, in terms of subjection, when we fix ourselves within categories recognizable by the State, the market, institutions, society; in short, by the Other? J. Butler radicalizes this doubt: identities are not essences, but effects of normative repetitions. Precisely because they are performative, they are never completely closed, but power tends to stabilize them into rigid figures.

This applies to traditional gender categories – heterosexual men and women – but it also applies to subjectivities that escape this binary distinction: in order to be recognized as intelligible, they must nevertheless fit into some hegemonic matrix of identity. Let us take the example of the gay man. Many believe that gay subjectivity was constructed, in the West, starting from an Anglo-Saxon, white, urban, middle-class matrix, which exported a certain way of living and naming desires throughout the world. This matrix certainly constituted a model of liberation; but, at the same time, it tends to erase or re-signify more local and historically stratified experiences, such as, for example, Two-Spirit subjectivities in Indigenous communities of North America or Neapolitan femminielli. In these cases, we do not simply have “gay people who are not yet modern,” but different forms of life, desire and belonging that challenge the dominant model. The risk is that an identity category, born with the objective of social and institutional recognition, may in turn become an instrument of marginalization for subjectivities that do not recognize themselves in that model or that are articulated in more hybrid, situated, opaque ways in relation to the dominant identity grids.

Pride related to a marginalized identity can be an instrument of resistance, alliance and emancipation; but it can also turn into a cage when identity becomes a label to be defended rather than a field to be transformed, when one stops opposing the production of differences that produce inequalities and settles for a good position within the existing order.

Is a non-identitarian pride possible? The task is not to abandon pride, but to disarm the claim of identity to be an essence. A non-identitarian pride would be a pride in relationships and alliances, rather than in belongings: “I am proud to embrace my marginalized subjectivity, to build community and to work to change things.” The lesson for diversity management is to approach the issue of pride with an awareness of its ambivalence: as a tool for changing things, not for rigidifying identity forms that end up making people belonging to disadvantaged or marginalized groups coincide with the cause of their marginalization. The risk, otherwise, is to create or emphasize further forms of disadvantage or discrimination, reinforcing boundaries and hierarchies instead of working on dialogue and on the material and symbolic conditions that define who is included and who remains outside.