Nation and Identification: Psychoanalysis, Race, and Sexual Difference

Abstract

Group rights, or individual rights and privileges derived from membership within a group, have become a pressing issue within contemporary political theory, especially insofar as new social movements have challenged Western democracies' traditional liberal individualism. Given widespread geographical mobility, as well as the recognition that other types of collective identity (including race, class, gender, and sexual orientation) are central to the distribution of social and economic goods, many political theorists have argued that the latter identities have more political salience than collectives based on propinquity (Guinier). In one of the more systematic efforts to legitimate group rights, Iris Marion Young has tried to delineate a justice that takes into account the many differences politicized by the new social movements. She defines a social group as "a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or way of life. . . . A social group is defined not primarily by a set of shared attributes, but by a sense of identity." Young therefore privileges identification as the process by which a group is formed (43-44). But such identification is not voluntarist, since for Young the social group under consideration (which includes and encloses individuals regardless of will) is quite different from voluntary organizations based on religion, profession, etc.