Social Identity

Abstract

Many political struggles for emancipation seemingly presuppose identity politics: a form of political mobilization based on social kind membership, where some shared experiences or traits delimit “belonging.” This is because social and political philosophers typically hold that contemporary injustices such as oppression and discrimination are structural, systematic, and social. In being structural, they have their causes in norms, habits, symbolic meanings, and assumptions unquestionably embedded in and underlying institutional and social arrangements. In being systematic, social injustices exist throughout a society and usually over a period of time, so that societal institutions come to form interlocking webs that maintain and reinforce injustices experienced. And in being social, contemporary injustices are grounded in socially salient self- and other-directed identifications, where such identifications typically fix social group membership. Social injustice is not incidental and individual but targets members of certain groups due to their group membership: typically, due to individuals’ gender/sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, and/or class. Elucidating the nature of social identities then appears to be necessary in order to understand contemporary social injustices. We may face oppression due to membership in a collective, where others impose such membership upon us; or we may personally and voluntarily identify with an oppressed collective for which we seek political recognition. Thus, the expression “social identity” can denote either a group-based or an individual phenomenon, which needs disambiguating. We can ask on what basis are, for example, all women as women bound together (what constitutes their collective kind identity)? Or is gender identity essential to a person qua that person (are certain social classifications part of our individual identity)? Additionally, there are different modes by which social identifications and identity formation can take place: this may be voluntary (we choose certain identifications), or ascriptive (certain identities are attributed to us by others). However, elucidating particular social identities is riddled with difficulties, and this has generated various so-called identity crises. Identity politics presumes the existence of social kinds founded on some category-wide common traits or experiences. But as many have argued, no such transcultural/transhistorical commonality exists because our axes of identity (gender, race, ability, class) are intertwined and inseparable. In an attempt to unlock this impasse, the past few decades have witnessed lively philosophical debates about the nature of social identity more generally, and about the character of particular social identities.