Asking the always-incisive question, "Who benefits?" which is at the heart of most careful theory, Bannerji wonders aloud for whom questions of identity and "identity politics" are significant and positive. "It will not take much insight", she writes, "to recognize that people who are most exercised [?] about the issue of identity in terms of political and personal power relations are all people who have been repressed and marginalized."(p.20) "Identity politics" read in this context is not a kind of narcissistic navel-gazing, as its critics have made it out to be, but rather an active process of self-definition which then is extended into a larger collective project. Bannerji is interested in examining this project and concentrating on "identity, difference, and representatin as they concern colonial and post-colonial and post-slavery subjects who live in the metropolis of North America [in order to] overcome the either/or relationship of subjectivity and class politics outlined earlier, and to situate identity-related issues within a larger historical and political scope."(p.22)

Naming, says Bannerji, is implicated in relations of power. Who has the power to name themselves or others is reflective of structures of authority and control. Moreover, names are central to identities. Self-naming is crucial to a political subjectivity, and systems of naming construct a discursive hegemony with material effects. Naming difference is one such hegemonic project, for naming difference indicates that the namer has the epistemological power to declare themselves as the One/Subject and "difference" as Other/Object. Naming difference also indicates how the ruling class views itself, for it constructs itself in opposition to the Other, and vice versa. Thus naming is a relational activity, and must be understood in its historical, political, and social context, rendering it a complex subject of analysis.

Having noted this, Bannerji turns to a critique of class-based theory which examines class as devoid of other relations. She shows, using an example of the valuation and remuneration of labour, how class is in fact inseparable from relations of culture, race, gender, and power. Angela Davis, in Women, Race, and Class, shows how race, class, and gender intersected with the U.S. history of slavery in the treatment of black female slaves. Emerging political identities are not automatically determined by class or other configurations, but are "articulated within a given political and ideological environment, [with] self-identities… fraught with contradictory possibilities…."(p.34)

Identity, then, is inseparable from lived social relations, and should not be reduced to an individualistic mental phenomenon. Categories of analysis such as class, race, gender, sexuality, et al are not static, separable things, but rather mutually constitutive processes which cannot be understood in isolation from one another or from the project of identity.

Bannerji begins by introducing the concept of "silence"—both in terms of being silent and being silenced—to describe her experiences of reading and thinking about feminist theories. She argues that "common sense" racism permeates most feminist theory, such that "in both its omissions and commissions racism is an essential organizing discourse of European (white) feminist discourse…"(p.47) All social relations are subsumed, according to Bannerji, under the organizing category of gender, so that "woman" comes to stand for "women". This both erases individual women's subjectivities and reinforces the cultural and epistemological hegemony of the white middle-class.

In this chapter, Bannerji proposes that "there is no better point of entry into a critique or a reflection than one's own experience. It is not the end point, but the beginning of an exploration of the relationship between the personal and the social and therefore the political."(p.55) In relating her experiences within a variety of political and national contexts, Bannerji points to her "otherization" within a white Canadian feminist movement. Participating in discourses and practices that did not speak to her, or include and validate her experiences, she was "offered the possibility of a political or an intellectual agency on grounds and terms that are inauthentic to [my life] and not created by me."(p.63)

Bannerji here locates her critique in epistemological relations, arguing that "the production of knowledge is a part of social production as a whole, and as much attention must be paid to the social relations of 'knowledge' as to its content."(p.63) Knowledge, for Bannerji, comes in two forms: "producer's knowledge" and "consumer's knowledge", denoting the level of activity inherent in its production, use, and deployment. Moreover, the content of what is taught and learned is as important as the structure. An model of active knowledge "begins from experience (the immediate and the local) through an understanding of the increasingly complex mediations which structure it and culminates into political effectiveness."(p.65) Ideally, feminism is part of this project of active knowledge production.

However, as Bannerji indicates, feminism as a body of knowledge often falls short of this goal. She briefly outlines and critiques some of the main streams of feminist thought from a standpoint of epistemological analysis. First, she describes a sort of hybrid radical-liberal-feminist stream of thought in which patriarchy is conceptualized as the primary mode of oppression. This model posits "woman" in opposition to "man", and this differences and form of social organization is trans-historical. Using this paradigm it becomes impossible to identify hierarchies of power and oppression, women's complicity in maintaining gender relations, and differences among women.

Third, Bannerji examines marxist/socialist feminism which, she argues, "disattends Marx's analysis of capital as a social relation rather than a 'thing'."(p.76) Moreover, the affective dimension of class and class struggle was removed or was viewed as tangential. This theory cannot reconcile the elements of "self, culture, and experience".(p.80) As a result, the motivations of political subjectivity and history are reduced to mechanistic models.

In this chapter, Bannerji discusses the disjuncture and dissociation experienced from participating in multiple and sometimes contradictory subject positionings: writer, Indian woman, teacher, public lecturer, and so forth. Her body in the public space symbolizes the ambivalence and often violent conflict between structures and systems of power and knowledge. As she writes, "I am an object. But I am also a subject."(p.104)

In this chapter, Bannerji describes an incident of sexual harassment to illustrate the inseparability of race, class, and gender, both in experiences, and analyses of that experience. This analysis operates on several levels: the actual workplace itself, its situation within Canadian society, Canadian history, and everyday "commonsense" practices.