Otherness, History of

The concept of “the Other,” and the related ideas of “Otherness” and “Othering,” arose via a series of interconnected intellectual moments in the West, finding expression in philosophy, social studies, literature, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, race and ethnicity studies, aesthetics, architecture, and the visual arts. These movements are linked to investigations of identity and identification, with the need to find one's own identity or selfhood. An outcome of these searches is that one's self often becomes defined against another, a phenomenon that can be ...