You know those Lego kits with instructions? Think, for example, of the Lego kit designed to be constructed in the shape of a pirate ship—with masts, poop-deck-style windows, eye-patched faces, parrots, treasure chests, and palm trees. Although that kit comes with a few “pirate-themed” accessories, only an idiot would believe that rest of the kit, with its many many simple brown and white, rectangular Legos, could ONLY be used to build a pirate ship. Only and idiot would believe that the standard little blocks could NOT, for example, also be combined into a fairytale castle, a dream house, a monster, a mountain, and that the pirate-themed parrots and treasure chests could NOT alternatively, for example, adorn this dream house or mountain.
And yet, for some reason, most of us continue to be idiots. The mere fact of being packaged and sold “as a kit” does not change or limit the purpose of standard Legos. They are MULTI-purposed building blocks, designed specially for the purpose of creative, self-expressive building and re-building.
This is a good way to think about the relationship between our bodies and the identities-that-we-are-told-correspond-to-these-bodies. Our bodies and biologies are like Legos: the building blocks of our identities. Although the colors, shapes, patterns of these building blocks are fixed, and may have been presented to us [marketed to us] as a part of some over-arching kit [a “woman” kit, a “black” kit, a “white” kit] the pieces themselves have a wide variety of different uses. We can construct our own identities with our bodies, we don’t have to follow the instructions. Just as we can rip apart the tragically packaged “LEGO PIRATE” box and build those brown Legos, white windows, palm trees, and bearded faces into a fanciful dream house so can we decide that pale skin, male genitalia, and no-estrogen mean something other than that “white male” ordered by the instructions.
1 comment:
I remember rarely receiving Lego™ sets when I was a little kid - I think my older siblings received the majority of them before I was fully cognizant. I remember a ginormous box of everything mixed together - and I remember being frustrated, every so often, when I actually tried to follow the directions to build one of the pre-packaged objects. My little body thought: "Why is this using so few of the blocks? So much is going to waste!"
So does this lend credibility to your everyone-in-a-house model of philosophy, where the "Great White Man" becomes the pirate ship whose constituent blocks become irrelevant, redundant, or end up being part of a fairytale castle? (That is, not just thinking of the legos as individuals' building blocks of identity, but on a macro-/societal scale?)
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