Assimilation at Work
Devon Carbado
Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Much of the literature that theorizes the connections among race, gender, & sexual orientation adopts either an "intersectional approach" (arguing that race, gender and sexual orientation are not disaggregated but intersecting identities) or an "identity sameness/difference approach" (exploring, for example, whether race is like sexual orientation). My presentation will focus less on making analogies among the identity categories and focus more on the technologies that help to make these categories intelligible. I will argue that assimilatory norms have a regulatory effect on, and help to produce, race, gender, and sexual orientation. To put the point a little differently, assimilation is a technology for identity formation. In this way, quite apart from whether, for example, race is like sexual orientation in some substantive sense, the reiterative terms upon which these two identities exists are a function of the disciplinary norms of assimilation.