by Mathangi Krishnamurthy
When I first moved into an apartment onto campus to take up my current job as faculty at one of the most prestigious institutes in India, I knocked at my neighbour's door to introduce myself, only to be asked, "What department is Sir in?" Highly amused, I responded, that actually only madam would take up residence and work here; madam, of course, being myself. What would otherwise have raised my feminist hackles, to this day amuses me, perhaps because I was able to take pleasure in overturning a kind of misrecognition, no matter to how small a degree. Gender, age and body are easy and frequent stages for misrecognition—one is seen, heard, and assumed to be of a certain age, gender, and life stage. "You don't look your age!" is a form of misrecognition that can offer pleasure or otherwise depending on whether such looking is over- or under-determined.
In the social sciences, such misrecognition informs identity. In other words, across literatures, it is only through agreeing, refusing, conforming, partly conforming, and co-opting available labels and modes of being does one gain identity. We all therefore, exist, by misrecognizing ourselves and others for there is either no core self, outside of such temporary and sometimes sedimented forms of knowing, or the possibility of gaining any authentic self is always already lost. In this short essay, this is what concerns my exploration of pleasure. For other theorists like Nancy Fraser, misrecognition refers to the denigration and refusal of common humanity in others; in other words, a literal refusal to recognize. While there are clearly pleasures to the latter, I do not take it up in this piece. However, where the first and the second come together is in reading Pierre Bourdieu, for who misrecognition resides in the everyday where things, people, and processes get attributed to available realms of meaning and thereby misrecognized as such, making no room available for the uncommon, the changing, and the different.
These days, I walk around utterly confused as to who to be. I am a thoroughly misrecognized entity; seen as woman even though I do not know how to behave in an adequately womanly fashion; considered responsible even though only I know how often I misplace my keys; accorded the privilege of teaching despite my own frequent misgivings and surrender to the "imposter" syndrome; and the most egregious burden of all, considered an adult, even though I, like most others, fake it.