What is identity politics




















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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The battle over identity politics, explained. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. He wrote: Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy.

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The most extreme weather events of In pictures. Critical engagement with the origins and conceptualization of subjectivity also informs poststructuralist challenges to identity politics. They charge that it rests on a mistaken view of the subject that assumes a metaphysics of substance —that is, that a cohesive, self-identical subject is ontologically if not actually prior to any form of social injustice Butler [].

This subject has certain core essential attributes that define her or his identity, over which are imposed forms of socialization that cause her or him to internalize other nonessential attributes. This position, they suggest, misrepresents both the ontology of identity and its political significance. The alternative view offered by poststructuralists is that the subject is itself always already a product of discourse, which represents both the condition of possibility for a certain subject-position and a constraint on what forms of self-making individuals may engage in.

There is no real identity—individual or group-based—that is separable from its conditions of possibility, and any political appeal to identity formations must engage with the paradox of acting from the very subject-positions it must also oppose.

Central to this position is the observation that any claim to identity must organize itself around a constitutive exclusion:. The danger of identity politics, then, is that it casts as authentic to the self or group a self-understanding that in fact is defined by its opposition to a dominant identity, which typically represents itself as neutral.

This danger is frequently obscured by claims that particular identities are essential or natural, as we saw with race. For example, some early gay activists emphasized the immutable and essential natures of their sexual identities. They were a distinctively different natural kind of person, with the same rights as white, middle-class heterosexuals another natural kind to find fulfillment in marriage and family life, property ownership, personal wealth accumulation, and consumer culture.

This strand of organizing associated more closely with white, middle-class gay men with its complex simultaneous appeals to difference and to sameness has a genealogy going back to pre-Stonewall homophilic activism see discussion in Terry , esp. While early lesbian feminists had a very different politics, oriented around liberation from patriarchy and the creation of separate spaces for woman-identified women, many still appealed to a more authentic, distinctively feminist womanhood.

Heterosexual feminine identities were products of oppression, yet the literature imagines a utopian alternative where woman-identification will liberate the lesbian within every woman e. Although Foucault is the most often cited as the originator of such genealogical arguments about homosexuality, other often neglected writers contributed to the emergence of this new paradigm e.

McIntosh Such theories still co-exist uneasily with popularized essentialist accounts of gender and sexual identity, which purport to look for a particular gene, brain structure, or other biological feature that is noninteractive with environment and that will explain gender-normative behavior including sometimes trans identity and same-sex sexual desire.

Some gay activists thus see biological explanations of sexuality as offering a defense against homophobic commentators who believe that gay men and lesbians can voluntarily change their desires. Furthermore, as Eve Sedgwick argues, no specific form of explanation for the origins of sexual preference will be proof against the infinitely varied strategies of homophobia Sedgwick esp.

These conflicting positions within gender and sexual politics are exemplified in the history of the expansion of gay and lesbian organizing to those with other queer affiliations. Indeed, this suspicion sometimes worked in the opposite direction: not all trans or intersex people have understood themselves to be queer, or to share the same political goals as gay and lesbian organizers, for example.

The possibility of feminist solidarity across cis and trans lines hinges on the centrality of sex and gender identities—and how those are understood—to political spaces and organizing Heyes Traditions of trans, mestiza, and cyborg feminist politics have resisted the claim of sameness and recommended models that embrace the historicity of subject-positions and intrasubjective plurality Stone ; Haraway ; Lugones ; see Bettcher for an overview.

While the common charge that identity politics promotes a victim mentality is often made glibly, Wendy Brown offers a more sophisticated caution against the dangers of ressentiment the moralizing revenge of the powerless. The challenge that identity politics retains attachments to hierarchized categories defined in opposition to each other and over-identifies with artifactual wounds has been met with more discussion of the temporality of identity politics: can an identification be premised on a forward-looking solidarity rather than a ressentiment -laden exclusion see Zerilli ; Weir ; Bhambra and Margee ?

It also invites consideration of whether pain is always a regressive, fixed ground of identity claims, or whether it might be a legitimate reality for mobilization, as Tobin Siebers suggests of disability —3. Some proponents of identity politics have suggested that poststructuralism is politically impotent, capable only of deconstruction and never of action Hartsock — There are, however, political projects motivated by poststructuralist theses. Institutionalized liberal democracy is a key condition of possibility for contemporary identity politics.

The citizen mobilizations that made democracy real also shaped and unified groups previously marginal to the polity, while extensions of formal rights invited expectations of material and symbolic equality. The perceived paucity of rewards offered by liberal capitalism, however, spurred forms of radical critique that sought to explain the persistence of inequity.

At the most basic philosophical level, critics of liberalism suggested that liberal social ontology—the model of the nature of and relationship between subjects and collectives—was misguided.

To the extent that group interests are represented in liberal polities, they tend to be understood as associational, forms of interest group pluralism whereby those sharing particular interests voluntarily join together to create a political lobby. Citizens are free to register their individual preferences through voting, for example , or to aggregate themselves for the opportunity to lobby more systematically e.

These lobbies, however, are not defined by the identity of their members so much as by specific shared interests and goals, and when pressing their case the marginalized subjectivity of the group members is not itself called into question. Finally, political parties, the other primary organs of liberal democratic government, critics suggest, have few moments of inclusivity, being organized around party discipline, responsiveness to lobby groups, and broad-based electoral popularity.

Ultimately conventional liberal democracy, diverse radical critics claim, cannot effectively address the ongoing structural marginalization that persists in late capitalist liberal states, and may even be complicit with it Young ; P.

Williams ; Brown ; M. Williams ; Mills On a philosophical level, liberal understandings of the political subject and its relationship to collectivity came to seem inadequate to ensuring representation for women, gay men and lesbians, or racial-ethnic groups M.

Williams Critics charged that the neutral citizen of liberal theory was in fact the bearer of an identity coded white, male, bourgeois, able, and heterosexual Pateman ; Young ; Di Stefano ; Mills ; Pateman and Mills This implicit ontology in part explained the persistent historical failure of liberal democracies to achieve full inclusion in power structures for members of marginalized groups.

A richer understanding of political subjects as constituted through and by their social location was required. In particular, the history and experience of injustice brought with it certain perspectives and needs that could not be assimilated through existing institutions. Individuals are oppressed by virtue of their membership in a particular social group —that is, a collective whose members have relatively little mobility into or out of the collective, who usually experience their membership as involuntary, who are generally identified as members by others, and whose opportunities are deeply shaped by the relation of their group to corollary groups through privilege and oppression Cudd Liberal democratic institutions have persistently grappled with the challenge of recognizing such asymmetries of identity while stressing procedural consistency and literal equality in institutions.

Thus for example the twentieth-century U.



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