Page 118 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

IDENTITY POLITICS

Links Anti-essentialism, identity politics, identity project, multiple identities,
performativity, self-identity, subjectivity

Identity politics Identity politics is concerned with the making and maintenance of 95
cultural rights for those persons making identity claims within society and culture.
Acceptance of anti-essentialist arguments about identity within cultural studies
leads to an understanding of identity politics as the forging of ‘new languages’ of
identity with which to describe ourselves. This is allied to actions aimed at changing
social practices, usually through the formation of coalitions where at least some
values are shared. Identity politics is a sub-set of cultural politics and is thus also
concerned with the ‘power to name’ and to make particular descriptions stick. In
particular, the representation of identities is a ‘political’ question because they are
intrinsically bound up with questions of power as a form of social regulation that
is productive of the self and enables some kinds of identities to exist while denying
it to others.
Identity politics has been most closely identified with feminism, gay activism
and questions of ethnicity. Though these cases are clearly not the limit of identity
politics they represent the most high-profile campaigns. For example, the language
of feminism brings oppression into view and expands the logical space for moral
and political deliberation. As such feminism develops a ‘new language’ in which the
claims of women do not sound crazy but come to be accepted as ‘true’ (in the sense
of a social commendation). The emergence of such a language is not the discovery
of universal truth but part of an evolutionary struggle that has no immanent
teleology, that is, no future pre-determined destiny to which it must evolve. As
such, feminism imagines, and seeks to bring into being, an alternative form of
community by forging a moral identity for women as women by gaining linguistic
authority over themselves.
Since the meanings involved in identity categories are potentially endless, so any
sense of self, of identity or of communities of identification (nations, ethnicities,
sexualities, classes etc.) and the politics that flow from them are necessary fictions
marking a temporary, partial and arbitrary closure of meaning. That is, while it is
possible to go on re-describing what it means to be a ‘woman’ for ever, in order to
say anything (to mark significance), and in order to take action, a temporary closure
of meaning is required. Thus, feminist politics needs at least a momentary and
pragmatic agreement about what constitutes a woman and what is in women’s
interests under particular circumstances. For post-Marxism it is the role of
hegemonic practices to try to fix difference, that is, to put closure around the
unstable meanings of signifiers in the discursive field and thereby to stabilize what,
for example, femininity, masculinity or American identity means.
The political concept of citizenship can be understood as a form of identity and
thus the politics of identity is a part of a much wider politics of citizenship and the
public sphere. Thus, a civic ‘identity of citizenship’ holds together a diversity of
values and lifeworlds within a democratic framework. The identity of citizenship
may be the only thing we have in common, but a commitment by diverse groups
to the procedures of democracy and to intersubjectively recognized rights and