Identity Politics

Identity politics refers to an area of discourse and political action that mobilizes identity as the basis for demanding legal rights, claiming social and cultural recognition, and legitimating identities often suppressed or devalued by dominant culture. Encompassing issues associated with race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, as well as lifestyle choices, identity politics broadly involves both particularistic individual identity and collective identity based on common essential characteristics or a set of shared experiences. Discussions and evolving definitions of identity politics tend to focus on ways that identities are conceptualized and leveraged as a political force. The resulting frames and narratives through which identity is addressed continue to shape and reshape what is considered to be the politics of identity.

Identity can be broadly conceived as continuous and unified throughout time and geographic location; as distinguishing an individual in relation to others; and as the basis for mutual recognition. Beyond representing a sense of self, identities are representative of the publicly recognized labels ascribed to an individual or group by other members of society. When identity is politicized, forms of self or group representation can be directed toward increasing the agency of minority groups, often through attempts to confront and change ways that dominant groups position and understand marginalized members of society. Identity politics is commonly described in opposition to citizenship or emancipation politics: rather than people seeking universalized rights and inclusion in societal institutions, it is described as a postcitizenship politics of difference focusing on status and collective identities for members already integrated into society.

Collective identity constitutes a group political consciousness that defines and examines interests, and negotiates and contextualizes everyday symbols, often through an emphasis on and maintenance of boundaries between members and nonmembers. This system of relations, representations and interactive definitions determine to a large extent the range of constraints and opportunities in which group interests are analyzed and political action takes place, and thereby produces symbolic meanings in which activists can locate a sense of belonging, meaning, and causality.

Identity politics in North America is typically associated with the liberation and lifestyle movements that took hold in Western countries during the 1960s, which often parallel the idea of new social movements. Defining forms of collective action thought to be distinctively modern, new social movement theory is rooted in the complexity of information societies that are no longer defined in class terms, and driven toward issues such as equality, democratic participation, quality of life and individual self realization. Identity in new social movement theory is often divided into two types: embedded or natural identities and detached or movement identities. While detached identities are [Page 726]thought to be more easily adopted or discarded, embedded identities are often invoked in movements that situate identity as a central goal of activism, whether to reclaim stigmatized identities or to deconstruct identity categories like man, woman, straight, gay, black, or white. Many of these movements depart from a notion of dominant identity—that is, white, male, heterosexual, Western—that serves as a marker for positioning a group's collective identity in relation to the dominant norm, and also as representative of the hegemonic domination they aim to challenge.

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