The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition, claiming that
desire is always a desire for recognition and that it is only through the
experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially
viable beings. That view has its allure and its truth, but it also misses
a couple of important points. The terms by which we are recognized
as human are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the
very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that
deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status,
producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human. p. 2
” I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an
interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open
up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to
celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions
for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation.” p. 3
“The human is understood differentially depending on its race, the legibility of that race, its morphology, the recognizability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, the categorical understanding of that ethnicity. Certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that
form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life. Certain humans are not recognized as human at all, and that leads to yet another order of unlivable life. If part of what desire wants is to gain recognition, then gender, insofar as it is animated by desire, will want recognition as well.” p. 2
My comment: it gets recognition!
“If I am someone who cannot be without doing, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the conditions of my existence. If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do
something with what is done with me.” p 3