Identity Politics

Historical Synopsis

During the 1960s, unprecedented large-scale political movements—such as second wave feminism, civil rights movements, gay and lesbian liberation activism, and the American Indian movements—launched their attack on the systemic injustices and inequalities that alienated them. These social movements developed a rich literature of questions about the nature, origin, and future of the particular identities traditionally left out of studies. Identity politics as a base for collective behavior was closely connected to the idea that some social groups were historically oppressed because of their particular identities; for example, one's identity as a woman or as a Native American made him or her vulnerable to cultural imperialism (including stereotyping, stigmatizing, erasure, or labeling), violence, exploitation, marginalization, or powerlessness.

Defenders of identity politics called for new analyses of oppression and gave voice to those long silenced as they sought to reconstruct, redescribe, and transform the dominant discourse that stigmatized particular minority group(s). Intersections of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity were the bases of new identities that began to draw the attention of social scientists. Although the description of identity politics goes back to intellectual writings of famous critics such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Frantz Fanon, sociologist Renee R. Anspach first employed the term in 1979. For the past several decades, however, the phenomenon of identity politics attracted numerous scholars. This focus on cultural identities marked a significant shift from the economically and politically based analyses that had long dominated the social sciences. Identity-based movements became the “new social movements” in sociology literature and drew the interest of both U.S. and European scholars. Works of Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, for example, hypothesized that the new social movements were “identity oriented” rather than “strategy oriented,” and these “expressive” movements were partially a product of the information age and postindustrial era of the Western, developed societies.

Critics of Identity Politics

Identity politics as a base for organized behavior and a set of political philosophical positions draws criticism from various divergent schools of thought, including liberalism, Marxism, and post-structuralism. Criticism of identity politics dates back to the 1970s when scholars began systematically outlining and defending the philosophical underpinnings of identity politics.

Obscurity of the Term

Critics argue that use of the phrase identity politics as popular rhetoric belies more possible analytical explanatory power of the term. Because the term is primarily descriptive rather than explanatory, rigorous empirical analyses of identity politics are absent in the field. Using or misusing identity politics as a blank term invokes a range of tacit political implications, making identity claims by some early political activists seem lacking in analytical content, mislead-ingly totalizing, and un-nuanced. As the notion of identity has become indispensable in contemporary political discourse, even as the public rhetoric of identity politics empowered the new social movement activism, it failed to produce coherent theoretical analyses on political inclusiveness and models of the self. In this regard, identity politics increasingly became a derogatory synonym for anti-racism, feminism, and anti-heterosexism.

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