Identity perplexity,stigma,and social critique: Critical phenomenology with an errant twist

Abstract

How do we offer critiques of social marginalization and the politics surrounding it without reducing people to mere victims or, at the least, “tokens of a type”? Phenomenology offers a useful way to address this problem. Focusing on the concept of stigma, this article proposes an errant phenomenology informed by Arendt's concern to “defrost” canonical moral and political concepts and Glissant's errant poetics of opacity. Centering upon an African American mother raising a child diagnosed with autism, it argues that an errant version of critical phenomenology can both illuminate the workings of stigma in this child's life and, at the same time, provide resistance to any simplistic classification of his social identity. But the article also makes a more radical claim by addressing the meta problem of concept reification in critical social theory. It offers an avenue for disturbing category thinking itself in generative ways, enriching how we envision social critique and deepening our critical capacity.