ABSTRACT
Any discussion of a feminist “I” must take into account the register “we,” a contested zone that resists defi nition but asserts its own existence. . . . Audre Lorde declares, “If we don’t name ourselves, we are nothing” (Lorde, 1980). . . . those who are named by others have no way to exist in and for themselves. Yet the “we” is somehow in existence, known to itself, available for the naming. Audre Lorde frames a “we” that situates her clearly among those who are vulnerable to being named from the outside and thus, paradoxically, created for other’s purposes while being eliminated for their own. (Perrault, 1998, p. 192)
An enduring paradox in the concrete operations that follow from the ideologies of empowerment theory and liberatory pedagogy seems to be a double bind of fi rst and second-order conceptions of marginalized identity. To begin with, an individual is not “marginal” except by membership in some group that is convention-or context-determined. Groups are marginalized in relation to other more powerful, dominant groups. But much of social justice and social service policy and practice is based on the fi rst-level supposition that it is membership in such groups that creates the problems for individuals that demand a social response in the form of some intervention that requires the work of a helper. The individuals who need
CHAPTER 5
help are determined to be members of a group marginalized in some way in common, so by defi nition, they are in need, but the solutions can be offered only according to specifi c needs, identifi ed in individual terms in relation to helpers who are read as nonmarginal in the roles they assume as working in relation to particular populations or groups.
