Tamise Van Pelt’s article, Otherness, begins: “As half of a signifying binary, the ‘Other’ is a term with a rich and lengthy philosophical history dating at least from Plato’s Sophist, in which the Stranger participates in a dialogue on the ontological problems of being and non-being, of the One and the Other.”
In contemporary theory the ‘Other’ can signify varying things across different discourses. There is disagreement whether Otherness is an attribute (as in identity theory) or an alterity (as in Lacanian theory). In looking at Vermonter’s views of ‘outsiders’ I am interested in identity theory’s humanized version of Otherness.
Simone de Beauvoir was one of the first to bring the concept of Otherness into identity theory. In her classic feminist text, The Second Sex, she claimed “Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. . . . In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for the American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for the colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.” In her view the Other helps to define the subject or group and forces people to “realize the reciprocity of their relations.”