Necessary Identities: From Bernard Williams to Feminist Critique

This paper explores the fruitful concept of necessary identity, put forward by Bernard Williams in Shame and Neces- sity (1993) in order to explain a peculiar kind of social identity. Firstly, we will investigate the foundation of this concept, by analyzing Williams’s account of personal practical identity. To this end, we will discuss the role played by luck and necessity in Williams’ understanding of personal practical identity. Secondly, we will focus on the analysis of necessary identities by addressing two historical examples given by Williams. In the second part of the paper, we will consider a debate that followed Williams’s concept of necessary identity, which was taken up by Margaret Walker in light of feminist accounts about necessary identity constitution. In Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (2007) Walker deepens Williams’s position by focusing on the invisible mechanisms of social power and misrecogni- tion that perpetuate the immutability of some social identities; as a model of the perpetuation of necessary identities we will discuss Angela Davis’s positions in Women, Race and Class. From a feminist perspective, we will investigate gender identity as a necessary identity which personal character develops within. From a point of view of the affective situation, we are particularly interested in examining necessary identities as a dispositive where emotion repertoire takes place. Dwelling on the link between Williams’s and Walker’s accounts sheds new light on how personal develop- ment and emotion regulation take place within a practical identity that stems from asymmetrical relations of power.