Identity Politics

Identity politics refers to the idea that socially constructed identities, especially in minority communities, are the basis for creating group solidarity and political action. It is especially applied to political action by groups that identify as racial and gender minorities, but also includes immigrant status, social class, or other identifying factors. Identity politics is an attempt to develop political agendas that are based upon these identities. The term is used in a variety of ways to describe phenomena as diverse as multiculturalism, women's movements, civil rights, lesbian and gay movements, and regional separatist movements.

Many contemporary advocates of identity politics take an intersectional perspective, which accounts for the range of interacting systems of oppression that may affect their lives and come from their various identities. According to many who describe themselves as advocates of identity politics, it centers the lived experiences of those facing what they term "systemic oppression." Systemic oppression is the view that the problems minorities face are not understandable as simply racism, or sexism, but rather the belief that society is organized to serve the interests of the majority at the expense of minorities.

Identity politics typically is used to describe the efforts to create community and struggle against majority groups by people of specific race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, economic class, disability status, education, religion, language, profession, political party, veteran status, and geographic location. These identity labels are not mutually exclusive but are in many cases compounded when describing hyper-specific groups.

Identity politics has critics from both liberal and Marxist perspectives. Liberals see it as particularist, in contrast to the universalism of liberal perspectives. Marxists argue that it detracts attention from non-identity based structures of oppression and exploitation. Those who take an intersectional perspective, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, criticize narrower forms of identity politics which over-emphasize inter-group differences and ignore intra-group differences and forms of oppression.

Terminology

The term identity politics may have been used in political discourse since at least the 1970s.^[1]

During the late 1970s, increasing numbers of women—namely Jewish women, women of color, and lesbians—criticized the assumption of a common "woman's experience" irrespective of unique differences in race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and culture.^[2] The first known written appearance of the term is found in the April 1977 statement of the Black feminist socialist group, Combahee River Collective.^[3] edited by Barbara Smith, a founding member of the Collective, credited with coining the term.^[4] The collective group of women saw identity politics as an analysis that introduced opportunity for Black women to be actively involved in politics, while simultaneously acting as a tool to authenticate Black women's personal experiences.^[5] It took on widespread usage in the early 1980s. It has gained currency with the emergence of social justice activism.

In academic usage, the term identity politics refers to a wide range of political activities and theoretical analyses based on the subjective experience of injustice shared by different, marginalized social groups. In this context, identity politics aims to both create solidarity around these socially constructed identities and to create greater self-determination and political freedom for marginalized peoples through understanding particular paradigms and lifestyle factors. It seeks to challenge the socially constructed characterizations and limitations, instead of organizing solely around status quo belief systems or traditional party affiliations.^[6] Identity is used "as a tool to frame political claims, promote political ideologies, or stimulate and orient social and political action, usually in a larger context of inequality or injustice and with the aim of asserting group distinctiveness and belonging and gaining power and recognition."^[7]

History

1960s Liberalism

Civil Rights Era

Liberalism implicitly accepted that the statement in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal" could serve as the basis for creating a more inclusive, just society. Based on these ideas liberals had fought to correct what they saw as flaws in the political society that led to discrimination against women, people of color and homosexuals. The civil rights movement conducted campaigns like the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham campaign, and numerous others to force desegregation and create economic opportunity for blacks. President John F. Kennedy spoke of creating an "equal chance" for all Americans.^[8]These efforts would lead to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which would outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Sexual orientation and gender identity would be added later. The next year the Voter Rights Act of 1965 was passed, prohibiting states from passing laws and creating rules that would unfairly hinder minority voters from casting their votes. In 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Congress passes the Great Society legislation as part of his war on poverty. These were all part of the liberal efforts to promote equal opportunity for all Americans.

Gay rights movement

In 1969 a riot broke out at the Stonewall Inn of the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan in New York City. This is largely considered the initiation of the gay liberation movement. Gay liberation built on the feminist notion that the personal is the political. Annual marches to commemorate the anniversary of Stonewall would later become the Gay Pride parade. While there were always different groups within different interests within the movement, as with the feminist movement, much of the focus was on equal rights, cultural acceptance, and removing barriers to employment.

The gay liberation movement of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s urged lesbians and gay men to engage in radical direct action, and to counter societal shame with gay pride. In the feminist spirit of the personal being political, the most basic form of activism was an emphasis on coming out to family, friends, and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person. While the 1970s were the peak of "gay liberation" in New York City and other urban areas in the United States, "gay liberation" was the term still used instead of "gay pride" in more oppressive areas into the mid-1980s, with some organizations opting for the more inclusive, "lesbian and gay liberation."^[9] While women and transgender activists had lobbied for more inclusive names from the beginning of the movement, the initialism LGBT, or "Queer" as a counterculture shorthand for LGBT, did not gain much acceptance as an umbrella term until much later in the 1980s, and in some areas not until the 1990s or even 2000s.^[10]

Postmodernism and identity politics

The 1960s and 1970s also saw the rise of postmodernism in the academy. Deconstruction and the power/knowledge theories of Michel Foucault became highly influential. They argued that the Enlightenment and scientific knowledge that emerged from it produced knowledge that supported the ruling class. Jacques Derrida argued that Western discourses were phallocentric, by which he meant both theocratic and patriarchal. Foucault argued that knowledge was produced by discursive practices that propped up existing power structures. The result of postmodern ideas was an attack on the universalist assumptions of the Enlightenment and liberalism.

The postmodern critique argued that these universal ideals were grounded in discourses that were designed to prop up the power of the establishment, who are predominantly white, male and heterosexual. Postmodernism argues that discourses serve the interests of the ruling majority. In the 1990s and after, these ideas were taken up by the theorists of race, feminism and gender studies. They would come to be grounded in the new postmodern Critical theory.

Civil rights, feminism and gay liberation and anti-colonial movements would all undergo major shifts based on the idea that social action now meant fighting for one's identity. They adopted the view that political struggle now meant that society must affirm their marginalized and excluded identities. The rise of this new identity politics meant that critical and social theory itself must undergo a transformation, or fragmentation as the dominant theory was white, male and heteronormative. Each category - women, gay men and lesbians, people of color, and various previously excluded groups - would develop its own version of theory based on its own sense of identity. These would be sometimes allied, sometimes competing. Diversity would require not only different attempts to understand social phenomena, but also of their very theoretical discourse itself.

Post-colonialism

One of the key tenets of modern identity politics comes from post-colonialism, although it is shared by all the other postmodern critical approaches. It is the concept of "otherness" or "othering." In his book, Orientalism, Egyptian literary critic Edward Said, using Michel Foucault's postmodern theory of discourse argued that that the West not only created the East as the exotic other, but in the process had created themselves as the norm by which the other could be measured. The result for the other is that they were excluded not only from the discourse of the West, but also from themselves. They needed to reclaim themselves on their own terms.^[11] This view of otherness was explicitly political and a call for a politics of identity which runs through all the postmodern discourses of marginalized groups.

Social Construction of Identity

In the 1990s and early 2000s, a new generation of scholars applied the theories of postmodernism to race, gender and other marginalized groups. They created new theories about society, like Intersectionality, standpoint theory and the social construction of identity. Identity politics depends heavily on these new theories that arose largely from race and gender studies programs. According to postmodern social constructionism, it is not people who make discourses, but discourses which make people. As truth and universal values have been critiqued as reflecting the values of the dominant class and culture, the discourses of reason, logic, evidence, and norms is rejected as white, male, heteronormative culture making individual subjects that conform to the norm. For postmodern race and gender theorists, group identity becomes the locus of resistance and the defining feature of what is generally understood as individual subjectivity. The social construction of (group) identity would serve as the basis for a shift in the approach of identity politics from equality of opportunity to fighting for diversity, inclusion and equity.

Standpoint theory was introduced into feminist scholarship by Nancy Hartsock in 1983.^[12] It is based on the view that people occupying the same location in the social grid have roughly the same experience of power, and that one's position within the power grid will determine what one can know. While originating in a Marxist context, within the postmodern context, it is now a key element of identity politics. What a person is capable of knowing is said to be based on their group. Those who are part of the majority are said to be privileged, not capable of knowing the experience of minorities or their own privilege. Those that are part of a racial, gender or other minority group are said to be able to see not only their own experience but also understand the experience of majority. Standpoint theory emphasizes lived, personal, and subjective knowledge over the objective knowledge that is the basis for the majority's social position and power.

Third-wave feminism, Critical race theory, and Intersectionality

Second-wave feminism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s within liberal politics to advocate for greater rights and freedoms for women. Third-wave feminism was in part a reaction to that and to the sense that feminism had not included women of color. In 1988, Deborah K. King coined the term multiple jeopardy to express how factors of oppression are all interconnected. King suggested that the identities of gender, class, and race each have an individual prejudicial connotation, which has an incremental effect on the inequity of which one experiences.^[13]

Intersectionality followed shortly afterward. It represented a significant step in the development of identity politics. It began with Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw famous essay, "Mapping the Margin: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color." It was a key text in the rejection of liberal inclusiveness in favor of a more radical identity politics. The liberal approach was grounded in a universalism. Crenshaw insisted on foregrounding identity, famously describing the difference between the statement, "I am Black," versus "I am a person who happens to be Black." The former grounds the person's subjectivity in their social identity, while the latter treats that social identity as an accidental feature grounded in the person's universal claim to personhood.^[14]

Kimberlé Crenshaw was a student of Derek Bell, the law professor generally credited with the development of Critical legal studies at Harvard Law School in the 1980s. This developed into Critical Race Theory. Bell originally focused on largely economic issues. In the 1990s scholars like Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins applied postmodern critical theory to the field. From their backgrounds in feminism as well as racial studies, they created concepts like intersectionality to describe how racial and gender minorities experience marginalization and oppression within the dominant culture. Intersectionality developed as a result of third-wave feminism and in part as a response to it. Black feminists, influenced by the rise of Critical race theory, argued that the experience of black women could not be fully understood or described by oppression as understood by feminism, nor that of black males.

This postmodern critical race theory rejects the older liberal notion of creating greater opportunities for blacks and other minorities and focuses on cultural issues and identity politics. It repudiates liberal approach to a rights-based remedies (expanding access to education and economic opportunities) on the critical theoretical grounds that social structures systematically oppress blacks and only permit remedies that do not change the dominant structure and that serve white interests. Critical race theory attempts to disrupt the socially constructed system, rejecting objectivity as racist and offering narratives of oppression based on identity. Rather than a color-blind society, it seeks to foreground racial identity as the basis for critique and political organizing.

Gender theory and Queer theory

The emergence of gender theory in the 1980s and 1990s also had a profound impact on feminism. Gender theory, like Critical race theory and intersectionality relied heavily on postmodern discourse analysis. It also help precipitate a major shift in feminism away from the focus on equal access and improving the economic lives of women to the ways in which the discourse of modernity excluded and oppressed women.

Queer theory emerged in the 1990s with the works of theorists like Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Gayle Rubin. Grounded in postmodern theory, Queer theory has an explicitly political agenda grounded in identity politics. It seeks to "blur boundaries" and disrupt notions of what is normative in order to "create a space" for the marginalized and excluded. The term "queer" is meant to refer to all marginalized groups.

By the 2000s, in some areas of postmodern queer studies (notably those around gender) the idea of "identity politics" began to shift away from that of naming and claiming lived experience, and authority arising from lived experience, to one emphasizing choice and performance.^[15] Judith Butler, who does not identity as postmodern, and those influenced by her particularly stress this concept of remaking and unmaking performative identities.^[16] Writers in the field of Queer theory have at times taken this to the extent as to now argue that "queer," despite generations of specific use to describe a "non-heterosexual" sexual orientation,^[17] no longer needs to refer to any specific sexual orientation at all; that it is now only about "disrupting the mainstream," with author David M. Halperin arguing that straight people may now also self-identify as "queer."^[18] However, many LGBT people believe this concept of "queer heterosexuality" is an oxymoron and offensive form of cultural appropriation which not only robs gays and lesbians of their identities, but makes invisible and irrelevant the actual, lived experience of oppression that causes them to be marginalized in the first place.^[19] "It desexualizes identity, when the issue is precisely about a sexual identity."^[20]

Non-U.S. Examples

The United States strives to assimilate ethnic minorities. While there are ethnic neighborhoods, they do not maintain political sovereignty over a region of the country. In other western countries such regional control by minority populations does exist. In such regions, identity politics plays a role in either the fight against discrimination, or even autonomy. In Canada and Spain, identity politics has been used to promote separatist movements, like the Quebecois and the Basque.

In Africa, Asia, and eastern Europe, identity politics has supported violent nationalist and ethnic conflicts. However, it also can refer to majority groups as well. In Europe, where assimilation is less successful, identity politics can also support the idea that the silent majority needs to be protected from globalization and immigration.^[21]

Arab identity politics

Arab identity politics concerns the identity-based politics derived from the racial or ethnocultural consciousness of Arab people. In the regionalism of the Middle East, it has particular meaning in relation to the national and cultural identities of non-Arab countries, such as Turkey, Iran, and North African countries: "Iranian and Arab identity politics thwarted, perverted, and dismembered communitarian thinking for long periods in the twentieth century and the same applies to other forms of psycho-nationalism in Turkey."^[22][23] In their 2010 Being Arab: Arabism and the Politics of Recognition, Christopher Wise and Paul James challenged the view that, in the post-Afghanistan and Iraq invasion era, Arab identity-driven politics were ending. Refuting the view that had "drawn many analysts to conclude that the era of Arab identity politics has passed", Wise and James examined its development as a viable alternative to Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab world.^[24]

According to Marc Lynch, the post-Arab Spring era has seen increasing Arab identity politics, which is "marked by state-state rivalries as well as state-society conflicts". Lynch believes this is creating a new Arab Cold War, no longer characterized by Sunni-Shia sectarian divides but by a reemergent Arab identity in the region.^[25]Najla Said has explored her lifelong experience with Arab identity politics in her book Looking for Palestine.^[26]

Muslim Identity politics

Muslim identity has some overlap, and some important differences from Arab identity. Many Muslims are Arab, but there are large blocks that are Persian, Asian, European and North American. Since the 1970s, the interaction of religion and politics has been associated with the rise of Islamist movements in the Middle East. Salwa Ismail posits that the Muslim identity is related to social dimensions such as gender, class, and lifestyles (Intersectionality), thus, different Muslims occupy different social positions in relation to the processes of globalization. Not all uniformly engage in the construction of Muslim identity, and they do not all apply to a monolithic Muslim identity.

Māori identity politics

The Māori are indigenous Polynesian peoples native to New Zealand. Due to somewhat competing tribe-based versus pan-Māori concepts, there is both an internal and external utilization of Māori identity politics in New Zealand.^[27] Projected outwards, Māori identity politics has been a disrupting force in the politics of New Zealand and post-colonial conceptions of nationhood.^[28] Its development has also been explored as causing parallel ethnic identity developments in non-Māori populations.^[29] Alison Jones, in her co-written Tuai: A Traveller in Two Worlds, suggests that a form of Māori identity politics, directly oppositional to Pākehā (white New Zealanders), has helped provide a "basis for internal collaboration and a politics of strength".^[30]

A 2009, Ministry of Social Development journal identified Māori identity politics, and societal reactions to it, as the most prominent factor behind significant changes in self-identification from the 2006 New Zealand census.^[31]

Criticism

The term identity politics has been applied retroactively to varying movements that long predate its coinage. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. discussed identity politics extensively in his book The Disuniting of America. Schlesinger, a strong supporter of liberal conceptions of civil rights, argues that a liberal democracy requires a common basis for culture and society to function. Rather than seeing civil society as already fractured along lines of power and powerlessness (according to race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.), Schlesinger suggests that basing politics on group marginalization is itself what fractures the civil polity, and that identity politics therefore works against creating real opportunities for ending marginalization. Schlesinger believes that "movements for civil rights should aim toward full acceptance and integration of marginalized groups into the mainstream culture, rather than … perpetuating that marginalization through affirmations of difference."^[32]

Brendan O'Neill has suggested that identity politics causes (rather than simply recognizing and acting on) political schisms along lines of social identity. Thus, he contrasts the politics of gay liberation and identity politics by saying: "[Peter] Tatchell also had, back in the day, … a commitment to the politics of liberation, which encouraged gays to come out and live and engage. Now, we have the politics of identity, which invites people to stay in, to look inward, to obsess over the body and the self, to surround themselves with a moral forcefield to protect their worldview—which has nothing to do with the world—from any questioning."^[33]

In these and other ways, a political perspective oriented to one's own well being can be recast as causing the divisions that it insists upon making visible. Similarly in the United Kingdom, author Owen Jones argues that identity politics often marginalize the working class, saying:

In the 1950s and 1960s, left-wing intellectuals who were both inspired and informed by a powerful labour movement wrote hundreds of books and articles on working-class issues. Such work would help shape the views of politicians at the very top of the Labour Party. Today, progressive intellectuals are far more interested in issues of identity. ... Of course, the struggles for the emancipation of women, gays, and ethnic minorities are exceptionally important causes. New Labour has co-opted them, passing genuinely progressive legislation on gay equality and women's rights, for example. But it is an agenda that has happily co-existed with the sidelining of the working class in politics, allowing New Labour to protect its radical flank while pressing ahead with Thatcherite policies.^[34]

A leftist critique of identity politics, such as that of Nancy Fraser,^[35] argues that political mobilization based on identitarian affirmation leads to surface redistribution that does not challenge the status quo. Instead, Fraser argued, identitarian deconstruction, rather than affirmation, is more conducive to a leftist politics of economic redistribution. Other critiques, such as that of Kurzwelly, Rapport and Spiegel,^[36] point out that identity politics often leads to reproduction and reification of essentialist notions of identity, notions which they argue are inherently erroneous.

Intersectional critiques

In her journal article Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color, Kimberle Crenshaw treats identity politics as a process that brings people together based on a shared aspect of their identity. Crenshaw applauds identity politics for bringing African Americans (and other non-white people), gays and lesbians, and other oppressed groups together in community and progress. But she critiques it because "it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences."^[37] Crenshaw argues that for Black women, at least two aspects of their identity are the subject of oppression: their race and their sex.^[38] From the viewpoint of intersectionality, identity politics are useful, but incomplete. Intersectionality further breaks identities into subgroups; African-American, homosexual, women, would constitute a particular hyper-specific identity class.^[39]

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Ackelsberg, Martha A. "Identity Politics, Political Identities: Thoughts toward a Multicultural Politics," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 16(1) (1996): 87–100.
• Butler, Judith Butler. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," Theatre Journal 40(4) (1988): 519–531.
• Chua, Amy. Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0399562877
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," Stanford Law Review 43(6) (1991): 1297.
• Eisenstein, Zillah R. (ed.). Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1979. ISBN 0853454760
• Fleras, Augie, and Roger Maaka. The Politics of Indigeneity: Challenging the State in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. Dunedin, NZ: Otago University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-1877276538
• Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. New York, NY: Routledge, 1990. ISBN 978-0415900973
• Harding, Sandra, and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.). Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science Synthese Library, vol 161. Springer, Dordrecht, 1983. ISBN 978-9027715388
• Hoffman, Amy. An Army of Ex-Lovers: My life at the Gay Community News. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1558496217
• Hollibaugh, Amber. "Gay Rights Are Not Queer Liberation," Autostraddle, June 29, 2012. Retrieved June 30, 2022.
• Hoskins, Te Kawehau, and Alison Jones (eds.). Critical Conversations in Kaupapa Maori. Wellington, NZ: Huia Publishers, 2005. ISBN 978-1775503286
• Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1997. ISBN 9780814742341
• Jones, Owen. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London, England: Verso, 2021. ISBN 978-1844678648
• King, Deborah K. "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology," Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14(1) 10-01 (1988): 42–72.
• Levine, Hal B. Constructing Collective Identity: A comparative analysis of New Zealand Jews, Maori, and urban Papua New Guineans. Pieterlen and Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1997. ISBN 978-3631319444
• Lynch, Marc. The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0231158855
• Mortimer, Dora. "Can Straight People Be Queer? - An increasing number of young celebrities are labeling themselves 'queer.' But what does this mean for the queer community?" Vice Media, February 9, 2016.
• Noury, Abnul, and Gerard Roland, "Identity Politics and Populism in Europe," Annual Review of Political Science 23 (2020): 421–439.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979. ISBN 978-0394740676
• Said, Nijla. Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family. Riverhead Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1594632754
• Schlesinger, Arthur Meier. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. ISBN 0393318540
• Smith, Barbara (ed.). Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York, NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983. ISBN 0913175021
• Stout, Christopher T. The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020. ISBN 978-0813944982
• Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How we get free : Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1642591040
• Wiarda, Howard J. Political Culture, Political Science, and Identity Politics: An Uneasy Alliance. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2014. ISBN 978-1472442284
• Wise, Christopher, and Paul James (eds.). Being Arab: Arabism and the Politics of Recognition. Victoria, Australia: Arena Publications, 2010.

External links

All links retrieved June 30, 2022.

• Identity politics Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Joan Mandel. How Political is the Personal?: Identity Politics, Feminism and Social Change
• A Marxist Critiques Identity Politics Seattle Weekly, April 25, 2017.
• Roger Lancaster. Identity Politics Can Only Get Us So Far Jacobin, August 3, 2017.
• Sheri Berman. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/14/identity-politics-right-left-trump-racism Why identity politics benefits the right more than the left] The Guardian, July 14, 2018.