On the Proletarian Identity of “A Woman Dressed as an Enormous Beetle”

Abstract

A set of politics that uses rhetoric, imagery, music, and performance to promote interests that are distinctively and explicitly identified with the working class, Burgmann productively suggests, might revitalize the labor movement. Yet the effort to apply lessons from “identity politics” to “class politics” reproduces two problems in contemporary radicalism. First, by reducing the movements of ethno-racial minorities, women, and gays and lesbians to “identity politics” Burgmann underestimates those movements' claims to civil rights, human rights, socioeconomic improvement, and their general democratic nature. Second, the use of “class” to explain the antiglobalization movement is anachronistic and inadequate to the task of understanding radical politics today.