Critique Of Identity Politics Research Articles

Queer –activism and intersectionality? A discourse analysis of queer –political subject formations in the problematization of ‘race’

ABSTRACT Queer and intersectional perspectives play an important role in activism and academia and are critical of a collective ‘we’ that is arranged around a (single-issue) identity. However, queer sexual politics are still a side of white theory production, especially in the German-speaking world. This study explores how the current queer political subject in the German-speaking world is constituted in the ‘problematization’ of racism based on a poststructuralist critique of the subject. Against the backdrop of the shared but slightly different critique of identity politics from queer and intersectional perspectives, it also looks at the role intersectionality plays in these queer problematizations of racism. To that end, following Foucault and Jäger, discourse analysis was conducted on materials produced by five German-speaking queer-activist organizations between 2010 and 2016. This study presents the results of the analysis of two representative discourse fragments; in both discourse fragments, a more open queer political subject is constituted in the problematization of ‘race’ by referring in slightly different ways to intersectional critiques, but also to the concept of precarity.

Being Assessed as a Whole Person: A Critique of Identity Politics

Being Assessed as a Whole Person: A Critique of Identity Politics

Activism and the Economy of Victimhood: A Close Look into NGO-ization in Arabic-Speaking Countries

Over the past ten years, countries in the Arabic-speaking region have witnessed a significant increase in the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) branding themselves as LGBT-focused. Predominantly male-led, these organizations brought with their emergence a discourse around gender and sexuality that utilizes identity politics and narratives of victimhood. Consequently, NGOs became able to simultaneously secure funding, to claim struggles around gender, sexuality and bodily integrity as their own, and to appropriate local community and individual victories. The feminist thought became appropriated to legitimize neoliberal organizing. This essay provides a critique of identity politics used by NGOs, claiming representation of diverse queer voices, while reproducing narratives of victimhood. Drawing on a contextualized analysis of trends of the NGOization of activism in the region, this essay offers theoretical and empirical contributions around the complex geographies, continuities, and ruptures within the so-called civil society, state systems, and international funders. The essay questions what is “civil” about a society of functionaries that alienate oppressed populations deemed “unfit” to a foreign imaginary of victimhood. We here aim to expose the role the NGO-ization of activism plays in relation to maintaining the status quo around gender and sexuality, and erasing feminist histories. The essay exposes how victories claimed by NGOs are in fact the work and effort of those whose organizing is located outside the institutions. The essay suggests that LGBT-focused NGOs are often complicit with oppressive state systems and structures, promoting homonationalist narratives. We propose that much activism within NGOs is creating an economy of victimhood that is ultimately dependent on funding provided by states in the Global North. In this essay, we argue that Arundhati Roy's writing around the NGO-ization of resistance is also applicable to the context of the region, as it has material implications on queer intersectional feminist organizing and voices.

Toward a Politics of Immediation

A passage from Fred Moten haunts the writing of these words that seek to push a politics of identity toward a politics of immediation. In a parenthetical aside in a paper on the city and the commune, Fred Moten cautions us as regards the critique of identity politics. Too often, he writes, critiques of identity politics are waged against non-white, non-straight, non-male identity [...] while courteously leaving politics to its own uncriticized devices” (2016: 163). Through the figure of immediation, I ask: what happens when we do not insert a mediating gesture at the heart of experience? Is such a move capable of problematizing the figure of identity while still remaining sensitive to the fact for some the loss of a sense of identity may feel like the very same gesture as the colonial act of exclusion from the category of the human? In this double articulation of refusing mediation and introducing a time-form that challenges human-centred, colonial history, can we create an affirmative politics of emergent subjectivity that does not ignore that allegiances are necessary in the face of the systemic violence of oppression? The task, it seems to me, involves recasting allegiance such that it need no longer be subsumed to identity, and, by extension, to the individual. For the individual, that pet-figure of neoliberalism, is nothing more than the other side of the subject, which is the other side of the human. To focus on the individual in an exploration of modes of existence, to make the politics about the individual, is to reinstall a mediation that knows in advance how to recognize the human as orienter of experience. The problem of identity must instead be engaged from the perspective of Wynter’s “descriptive statement” of the human. This category of the human, as Wynter underscores, is concerned to perpetuate a genre of the human (2015: 9). What kinds of sociality cut across this genre?

Neo-Gnosticism, ideology and the culture wars: the contemplative antidote – perennial tensions: a reply to Jersak

This reply speaks to Brad Jersak's analysis of the left–right culture wars spectrum and his critique of identity politics. He offers an alternative rooted in his studies of George P. Grant and Simone Weil's notion of the primacy of the Good vis-à-vis the triumph of the will that undergirds modernist assumptions. Jersak's thesis is confirmed and would be strengthened by careful attention Eric Voegelin's assessment of Gnosticism in The New Science of Politics. What needs further attention on the way of just peacemaking is the important turn from the vita activa to a sustained vita contemplativa as a way of knowing and being (cf. Merton). Finally, using Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (1946) reminds us of the inevitable clash between idealists and realists, raising the question of how, in the end, the owl of contemplative wisdom might navigate conflict between doves and hawks.

“The Slaves Who Were Ourselves”: The Politics of Identification in Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

This essay examines Ntozake Shange’s critique of identity politics in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. The multiple foci of the novel allow Shange to examine the pitfalls of identity politics and suggest an alternative politics of identification. The stories of the elder sisters, Sassafrass and Cypress, dovetail into each other. Sassafrass struggles against the misogyny within the Black Arts Movement, while Cypress gains insight into the inhumanity at the heart of gender separatism. Indigo, the youngest, stays in the South and trains as a healer and a midwife. Indigo shows a great capacity for identification from an early age. Her violin playing serves as an intersubjective medium, allowing her to identify with and heal her listeners. This psychic process enables Indigo to forge new alliances across culturally constructed lines of identity while widening the imagination of social justice. Shange ends her novel by celebrating the everyday as the site where identities are constantly made and remade in search of a broader community.

Toward Overcoming Identity Politics – A Question of Effectiveness and Responsibility

In this paper I will examine the grounds for the desires of marginalized groups to be recognized, by building on Wendy Brown’s critique of identity politics. In that context I will try to actualize the question of responsibility for the sake of critique and revision of the principles underlying identity politics. I will demonstrate how the subjects use identity politics to seek symbolic and legal recognition, by inscribing pain into the law and creating wounded attachments. I will show how the resistance expressed in this manner is ineffective, because the subjects: 1. are normalized and depoliticized; 2. are deprived of the possibility to take action; 3. linger in the past; 4. deny responsibility. After examining the problematic implications produced in this way, I will point out how empowering resistance can be used to overcome pain, as an alternative to identity politics.

On Vulnerability as Judith Butler’s Language of Politics: From Excitable Speech to Precarious Life

On Vulnerability as Judith Butler’s Language of Politics: From Excitable Speech to Precarious Life George Shulman (bio) It is often said that philosophy begins in wonder, but it may be the case that political theory begins in a sense of danger—in emotions of fear or dread, in perceptions of impending or potential harm, in experiences of vulnerability or injury. Most famously, Thomas Hobbes made the English Revolution a “state of nature” to elicit and mobilize fear of premature, violent death in the service of a state-building project promising safety. So also, after Socrates’s judicial murder, Plato dreamed a republic in which philosophy (and its practitioners) would be safe, not vulnerable. And did Marx not depict communism as the “specter” of destruction haunting the European bourgeoisie? If canonical political thought is animated by representations of danger and harm, which must be apprehended at all to be addressed by action, so political theorists often speak in a voice of warning about “what is to be done.” Of course the other side of warning and injury is (the hope for) safety, even plenitude. So Plato imagines a world safe for philosophy, while Hobbes promises that mortal safety, and indeed material well-being, are possible if people consent to a sovereign power that “overawes them all.” The capacity of this mortal god to terrify is the condition of its capacity to protect. As these examples suggest, however, the move from dangerous vulnerability to abiding safety may come at the expense of (democratic) politics itself as a distinctive human practice. Plato and Hobbes seem to seek safety by imagining sovereign states and extrapolitical truths: by these absolutes they promise to overcome or at least contain the conflict arising from human plurality and social inequality. On the one hand they argue that the absence of sovereign [End Page 227] power and truth—and so the messy pervasiveness of politics because justice is not self-evident nor order automatic—is the major cause of human suffering. On the other hand, their critics say, by wedding philosophy and power to secure a sovereign framework of life, they would rescue human beings from danger at too high a cost. Indeed, theorists who value politics depict Plato and Hobbes as making impossible promises: that philosophy can generate a principle of (absolute, extrapolitical) authority that can give political life a secure “foundation,” and thereby end it. If it is impossible to transcend conditions of finitude and plurality, however, then politics is not only inescapable, but valuable. For as Machiavelli argues, human beings do face mortal danger unless they generate durable political forms, but they must create order from among themselves by political means, and their capacity to do so is jeopardized—we should say endangered—by despair in their capacity to act, by excessive fear of conflict and by fantasies of escaping the contingencies that make action and choice at once necessary and costly. For Machiavelli, then, the price of false promises of safety is freedom, but conceived politically as an agonistic practice of fashioning a common world out of plural (and often acute) differences, freedom is also the best means to sustain a durable framework for human life in all of its dimensions. Accordingly, a central element in the “genre” of political theory is argument about danger and how to forestall it. When figures like Machiavelli and Arendt take up the “vocation” of political theory, therefore, they take on the rhetorically complex task of persuading people to face what they are invested in denying: the importance of dangers not yet visible; the necessity (and fatefulness) of choices people would rather defer; the impossibility of moral purity in making them; the burdens, risks, and suffering that inhere to human freedom. Judith Butler surely places herself among those who challenge the illusions and longings that generate subjugation in the name of an impossible safety. Let us assess, then, the value but also the dangers in her argument about the chimera of safety, by reading Excitable Speech, published in 1997, in tandem with her more recent work, especially Precarious Life, published in 2005. It is typically said that Butler’s work has shifted from a critique of identity politics...

A Queer Strategy of Equivocation: The destabilisation of normative heterosexuality and the rigid binary gender order

The critique of identity politics has opened up a sceptical attitude towards normative categories and demands for the coherence and stability of sex, gender and sexuality. At the same time reflections on mechanisms of exclusion within emancipatory movements and politics have also gained attention. Thus, not only (hetero-)sexism and homophobia, but also discriminations pertaining to the rigid binary gender order as well as racist discrimination are issues of importance to queer politics. Considering the critique of identity or minority politics, I have come to the conclusion that rather than to proliferate or to dissolve categories of sex, gender and sexuality, it is more promising to render them ambiguous: that is what I call a queer strategy of equivocation. Nevertheless sexual ambiguity is not progressive or liberating in itself. Instead, we have to realize that queer/feminist struggles against normative identities, a destabilization of binary, heterosexual norms or new forms of gendered or sexual existence are quite compatible with the quest for individualization put forth by neo-liberal forms of domination. Therefore, a strategy of equivocation should include the fight against social hierarchies, inequalities, and normalizations. The task is to consider simultaneously the working of and the intervention into different mechanisms of power; normalizations and hierarchizations, inclusions and exclusions work together, but not always in the same direction or without contradictions.

Subject trouble

In this essay I explore the role of dialectics for how social theory can take account of the problem of structure and agency, or, determination and freedom, in a critical and emancipatory way. I discuss the limits and possibilities of dialectical, and of anti-dialectical, criticisms of Hegelian dialectics. For this purpose, I look at Judith Butler’s discussion of dialectics and the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in her writings between 1987 ( Subjects of Desire; republished 1999) and 1990 ( Gender Trouble, republished 2000). Butler’s book Gender Trouble remains a key text of contemporary feminist theory. Butler formulates in this book a critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex based on her claim that Beauvoir makes a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that implies the notion of the sexed body as a pre-cultural entity. In her earlier writings, though, her evaluation of de Beauvoir had been much more positive. The change in Butler’s evaluation of de Beauvoir is part of her increasing rejection of dialectics: Butler rejected in Gender Trouble any form of Hegelian dialectics with reference to Luce Irigaray’s (1985) claim that it is ‘phallogocentric’. Although Butler subsequently returned to Hegelian themes, she seems never to have revoked this claim made in her most momentous work. I argue that this change in the theoretical structure of Butler’s argument weakens her critique of identity politics and I suggest reading Butler backwards, from Gender Trouble to the more open discussion of dialectics in her earlier texts. Drawing on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and other formulations of critical theory, I argue that the valid aspects of the critique of Hegelian dialectics can better be formulated as a dialectical critique of dialectics (Adorno; Butler, 1987a) than as a rejection of dialectics (Derrida; Irigaray; Butler, 1990). Retracing the genealogy of Butler’s argument will be a necessary backdrop, too, for evaluating her more recent comments on the Hegelian and ‘Frankfurt School’ traditions such as her Adorno Lectures given in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in November 2002.

Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture (review)

At the outset of Surface and Depth, Michael T. Gilmore declares that he is "swimming against the disciplinary tide" by emphasizing "the dominant structures and values that have shaped American experience" in an era more attuned to race, gender, and other forms of difference (xii). Well, maybe. The critique of identity politics has been underway for some time now, and even during difference's heyday the mainstream received plenty of attention. True, Surface and Depth is the sort of sweeping (from John Winthrop to Philip Roth), thematically-organized study that one associates with an earlier era of American Studies, but its return is consistent with the post-identity politics revival of other grand narratives like Marxism. In this respect it's about as "unfashionable" (Ibid.) as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000), another recent book that forthrightly reclaims the power to totalize called into question by the postmodern politics of difference.

Making Jews, Making Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Identity

A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song. By Jeffrey Melnick. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 277 pages. $29.95 (cloth). $16.95 (paper). The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. By Jonathan Freedman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 264 pages. $45.00 (cloth). In his 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, the sociologist of religion Will Herberg commented on the post-World War II rise in synagogue membership, particularly "In the smaller towns and in the suburbs." He noted that: In the city, living in a "Jewish" neighborhood, one may unconsciously continue to accept one's Jewishness in residual terms of ethnic "belonging"; in the suburbs and in most smaller towns this is no longer possible: one must begin to think "seriously" of his Jewishness, and the only possible outcome of such thinking in present-day America is identification with the Jewish religious community, frequently leading to affiliation with the synagogue. 1 Contrary to standard narratives of postwar assimilation-as-deracination, Herberg proposes that third-generation Jews actually became, in some respects, more Jewish than their parents as a result of their move to the suburbs. "Jewishness," in this account, emerges as a particular thing--as an identity--in the absence of the quotidian framework provided by the urban Jewish neighborhood. [End Page 553] Jeffrey Melnick tells a related story in A Right to Sing the Blues, his new book about the relationship between Jews and African Americans in the music industry of the early twentieth century. Melnick presents his account as a prehistory of "Black-Jewish relations," which he contends "needs to be approached--not exclusively, but still significantly--as a story told by Jews about interracial relations." 2 This discourse emerges as a recognizable phenomenon, Melnick argues, in the late 1960s, just as relationships between the two groups were breaking down under pressure of increasing "economic disparity" and "different levels of cultural power." 3 In the face of this widening gap--which Karen Brodkin and George Lipsitz have related to suburbanization and other material events in the postwar United States 4 --"Black-Jewish relations" emerged as a "romantic tale about the relative unimportance of class status in melting pot America." 5 With its "basic plot . . . about the comparative suffering of Jews and Blacks," 6 the discourse of black-Jewish relations mobilized another potent identity formation--this one grounded in canons of "authentic" suffering--in order to "argue[ ] for the utopian (post-class or trans-class) possibilities of liberal democracy." 7 Thinking about these issues usefully refines our conception of identity politics. This seems particularly necessary at the current moment because the project of identity politics has recently taken a number of hits--not, as it happens, from the right, but from other factions of the left. From the liberal left, scholars such as Walter Benn Michaels and Ross Posnock have argued that identity politics, like the early twentieth-century cultural pluralism it grew out of, reproduces the logic of the "racialist, nativist thinking" it sets out to repudiate. 8 From the Marxist left, meanwhile, Rosemary Hennessy has repeated the longstanding assertion that political movements grounded in identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality fail to recognize the "determining force" of class and thus run the risk of commodified complicity with neo-liberal capitalism. 9 Both these lines of argument make key points about the project of identity politics that dominated the American left roughly from the late 1960s through the late 1990s, in particular taking to task identity politics' problematic tendencies towards either rigid essentialism or the facile celebration of diversity. It may be, though, that the critique of identity politics has become reflexive enough in the contemporary academy to itself raise suspicions. At the very least, we need to press [End Page 554] critics of identity politics to complicate their object of study in ways that they have not done. Certainly Michaels...

The Parable of Matthew: Identity Politics, Politics of Desire, and the Politics of Performance

Matthew Shepard's murder in October 1998 provides an opportunity to examine and reconsider identity politics as they play out around Matthew's body. After a sustained critique of identity politics, the author proposes, in their stead, a politics of performance, which offers a constructive alternative to current political agendas by allowing the simultaneous preservation and erasure of difference.

Les guerres culturelles américaines : un psychodrame médiatique

This aim of this paper is to analyze the recent political and ideological conflicts, known as « culture wars », that have wracked but also entertained the United States. A short semantic analysis of the metaphor of war which has invaded public discourse is followed by a presentation of the various groups involved in these «wars». This piece deals with some of the major issues pitting the two camps against each other such as the fight over the canon, elitism the role of media and the debate over family values. The heterogeneity of the liberal as well as of the conservative camp and the ambiguity of some alliances and political stands are taken into account. The apparent ideological victory of the right is then questioned and a critique of identity politics and of the ideological volte-face of the left is offered. Finally the idea that the United States is facing fragmentation is challenged. The last section of the paper studies the emergence of a new ideological paradigm based on market values and anti-racism which gives the U. S a strong sense of unity in spite of all the so-called «culture wars».