Melde Rutledge, II is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, Black Psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon memorial work on Black Skin, White Mask, phenomenology as examined by Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, structural anthropologists Francisco Varela, Fernando Flores, Hilary Lawson and Humberto R. Maturana and speech-act theory (particularly the work of John Searle) in his understanding of the “performativity” of our identities. All of these theories explore the ways that social reality is not a given, but is continually created and open and it is we who close it through our stories “through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social signs.”