I'm feeling a little exposed

I just googled "empowering nihilism" to find the Hooks article we read so I could refer to it without finding my paper copy and, much to my surprise, the very first thing that came up was my own blog entry from a few weeks ago. Oh boy.

At any rate, what I really wanted to talk about here is Hooks' exploration of the post-modernist condition of lost identity and hopelessness as something that could be useful to women, as well as blacks, in terms of being a starting point for producing empathy. Women have been losing their identities as feminism and social constructs progress, just as Hooks talks about in terms of the black experience. If everyone in post-modernism is losing their identity, because we no longer know what is real anyway, perhaps there is an opportunity here to point out what it is like to be without definition. Do white (propertied) men suffer a loss of identity in the post-modern paradigm? I would argue that they do. The question is, do they recognize it?

Yesterday in our zine group, John said something that got me thinking about all of this. Basically he was talking about the need for someone to recognize their own situation before they can empathize with someone else. Do any of us truly recognize our own loss of identity as it happens? I think many of us cling to the social constructs of our gender, race, status, etc, because there is nothing but a black hole beyond that. What are we if we are not defined? This brings up another question for me. Is this similar to never being outside of the ideology? If we lose (or reject) one identity, do we instantly step into another? What I am getting at is that perhaps there is an opportunity for empathy inherent in the post-modern point of view, but it requires self-awareness.