To be or not to be (a gendered subject): was that the question?

This article presents the author's response to Mary Lou Rasmussen's critical analysis of a piece the author completed in its original form more than a decade ago. She opens this response with the words which Shakespeare gives to Hamlet. There were many reasons why she settled on Hamlet's soliloquy. First, his words stand as a fitting response because they exemplify an individual's storied self, a narrative account of their human experiences in process. A second more philosophical reason the author took Hamlet's words as her starting point is that they encapsulate what Britzman (1995, 1998) identifies as a question about the "crisis in representation" (of identity) which she believes is to a very large extent unanswerable. In this short response, the author clarifies what she meant, all those years ago, about endeavouring to get beyond "identity" in gender and education research. And to be sure, what she meant was not the support of gender equity over identity. It was essentially a matter of identifying gender identity as inherited baggage--bearing heavy semantic overload from past time and as a sometimes reconfigured spectacle fixed in particular texts--that one could perhaps risk moving beyond. Identity, after all, is a complex union of "ipse"--selfhood--as well as "idem"--permanence. (Contains 9 notes.)