Sanctioned identities: Legal constructions of modern personhood

Abstract

Studies of identity politics have often overlooked the role of bourgeois law in eliciting and confirming people's experience of themselves as persons with inherent qualities that they have a right to express. By constituting people as proprietors of their persons and capacities, bourgeois law requires those who come before it to display difference. Yet bourgeois law disclaims its role in producing difference, for by declaring all men equal before the law, in constitutes differences as developed outside its purview. Although the cultural logic of bourgeois law encourages people to imagine themselves as unique persons with rights, people achieve rights only through specific historical struggles.