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 This is interesting to me.

I am also reminded of Arthur Danto's suggestion, in THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THE COMMONPLACE, that what defines a work of art is that we may speak of it using "is" in a special way, which he calls (I think) "the is of artistic identification." As philosophy, I think this is just a trick around the problem of defining. As an inquiry into language, it opens up the possibility that there are ways in which we use the verb "to be" that are not literal and not "boiling down".

A sentence like "I am a lesbian," as your student observes, is a choking, squashing categorizing, that tires to rob an individual of her particular complex experience. But a sentence like "I am a fountain" uses "is" in a different way, to propose a multitude of hypothetically literal (i.e, metaphoric) ways in which an individual might be a fountain; she might feel a flowing, a gushing forth, a nurturing, a connection to a metaphoric spring, etc.  When we use metaphors, we tease the literalizing impulse of language (we play *against* it) to force language to yield up insights other than the literal.

One of the aspects of Facebook that once appealed to me a great deal was that when I was prompted to say what I was "doing," the default text used to be "Mark Lord is ___" I took such pleasure in allowing myself to "be" so many things: the laundry, the first day of school, the anxieties of my children, the sensation of being in water. It was an invitation to consider myself as Danto says one can see (and discuss) art: on a plane that is different than the literal one. I could "be" so many things, things that would obviously be impossible, from the standpoint of the literal. But from the point of view of a playfully "against" use of language, "being" is an unstable state, it is provisional, and experimental.