Identities as Collective Action

This quotation from Audre Lorde is typical of the sentiments animating difference discourse. It’s easy to see how we’d get from here to support for a legal right designed to protect against “externally imposed definition” so that we could all have our “fullest” concentration of energy available to us. But is it possible to comprehend, much less embrace or be “comfortable with,” identity categories such as “black,” “lesbian” or “feminist,” “without the restrictions of externally imposed definition”? Or are these identity categories (as opposed to their supposed referents: dark skin, female same-sex eroticism, a commitment to certain practice of gender)