## 1. History and Scope




The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of
large-scale political movements--second wave feminism, Black Civil
Rights in the U.S., gay and lesbian liberation, and the American Indian
movements, for example--based in claims about the injustices done
to particular social groups. These social movements are undergirded by
and foster a philosophical body of literature that takes up questions
about the nature, origin and futures of the identities being defended.
Identity politics as a mode of organizing is intimately connected to
the idea that some social groups are oppressed; that is, that
one's identity as a woman or as African American, for example,
makes one peculiarly vulnerable to cultural imperialism (including
stereotyping, erasure, or appropriation of one's group identity),
violence, exploitation, marginalization, or powerlessness (Young 1990).
Identity politics starts from analyses of such forms of social
injustice to recommend, variously, the reclaiming, redescription, or
transformation of previously stigmatized accounts of group membership.
Rather than accepting the negative scripts offered by a dominant
culture about one's own inferiority, one transforms one's
own sense of self and community. For example, in their germinal
statement of Black feminist identity politics, the Combahee River
Collective argued that 



> 
> 
> 
> as children we realized that we were different from boys and that we
> were treated different--for example, when we were told in the same
> breath to be quiet both for the sake of being 'ladylike'
> and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. In the
> process of consciousness-raising, actually life-sharing, we began to
> recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and
> growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives
> and inevitably end our oppression. (1982: 14-15)
> 
> 
> 




The scope of political movements that may be described as identity
politics is broad: the examples used in the philosophical literature
are predominantly of struggles for recognition and social justice by
groups of citizens within western capitalist democracies, but
Indigenous rights movements worldwide, nationalist projects, or demands
for regional self-determination use similar arguments. Predictably,
there is no straightforward criterion that makes a political struggle
into an example of "identity politics." Rather, the term
signifies a loose collection of political projects, each undertaken by
representatives of a collective with a distinctively different social
location that has hitherto been neglected, erased, or suppressed. It is
beyond the scope of this essay to offer historical or sociological
surveys of the many different social movements that might be described
as identity politics, although references to this literature are
provided in the bibliography; instead the focus here is to provide an
overview of the philosophical issues in the expansive literature in
political theory.



The phrase "identity politics" is also something of a
philosophical punching-bag for a variety of critics. Often challenges
fail to make sufficiently clear their object of critique, using
"identity politics" as a blanket description that invokes a
range of tacit political failings. From a contemporary perspective,
some early identity claims by political activists certainly seem naive,
totalizing, or unnuanced. However, the public rhetoric of identity
politics served useful and empowering purposes for some, even while it
sometimes belied the philosophical complexity of any claim to a shared
experience or common group characteristics. Since the twentieth century
heyday of the well-known political movements that made identity
politics so visible, a vast academic literature has sprung up; although
"identity politics" can draw on intellectual precursors
from Mary Wollstonecraft to Franz Fanon, writing that actually uses
this specific phrase, with any of its contemporary baggage, does not
begin until the late 1970s. Thus it was barely as intellectuals started
to systematically outline and defend the philosophical underpinnings of
identity politics that we simultaneously began to challenge them. At
this historical juncture, then, asking whether one is for or against
identity politics is to ask an impossible question. Wherever they line
up in the debates, thinkers agree that the notion
of *identity* has become indispensable to contemporary
political discourse, at the same time as they concur that it has
troubling implications for models of the self, political inclusiveness,
and our possibilities for solidarity and resistance.


## 2. Philosophy and Identity



From this brief examination of how identity politics fits into the
political landscape it is already clear that the use of the
controversial term "identity" raises a host of
philosophical questions. Logical uses aside, it is likely familiar to
philosophers from the literature in metaphysics on personal
identity--one's sense of self and its persistence. Indeed,
underlying many of the more overtly pragmatic debates about the merits
of identity politics are philosophical questions about the nature of
subjectivity and the self (Taylor 1989). Charles Taylor argues that the
modern identity is characterized by an emphasis on its inner voice and
capacity for *authenticity*--that is, the ability to
find a way of being that is somehow true to oneself (Taylor 1994).
While doctrines of equality press the notion that each human being is
capable of deploying their practical reason or moral sense to live
an authentic life qua individual, the politics of difference has
appropriated the language of authenticity to describe ways of living
that are true to the identities of marginalized social groups. As Sonia
Kruks puts it:



> 
> What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier,
> pre-identarian forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for
> recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has
> previously been denied: it
> is *qua* women, *qua* blacks, *qua* lesbians
> that groups demand recognition. The demand is not for inclusion within
> the fold of "universal humankind" on the basis of shared
> human attributes; nor is it for respect "in spite of"
> one's differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for
> oneself *as* different (2001: 85).



For some proponents of identity politics this demand for
authenticity includes appeals to a time before oppression, or a culture
or way of life damaged by colonialism, imperialism, or even genocide.
Thus for example Taiaiake Alfred, in his defense of a return to
traditional Indigenous values, argues that:



> 
> Indigenous governance systems embody distinctive political values,
> radically different from those of the mainstream. Western notions of
> domination (human and natural) are noticeably absent; in their place we
> find harmony, autonomy, and respect. We have a responsibility to
> recover, understand, and preserve these values, not only because they
> represent a unique contribution to the history of ideas, but because
> renewal of respect for traditional values is the only lasting solution
> to the political, economic, and social problems that beset our people.
> (Alfred 1999: 5)



What is crucial about the "identity" of identity
politics appears to be the experience of the subject, especially their
experience within social structures that generate injustice, and the
possibility of a shared and more authentic or self-determined
alternative. Thus identity politics rests on the connection between a
certain undergoing and the subject-position to which it is attributed,
and hence on unifying claims about the meaning of politically laden
experiences to diverse individuals. Sometimes the meaning given to a
particular experience will diverge from that of its subject: thus, for
example, the victim of sexual violence who is told they caused their
own fate by taking risks, when they believe their attacker is culpable.
Making sense of such interpretive gaps depends on methods that
recognize the divergence between dominant epistemic accounts and
subjugated knowledges (Alcoff 2018). Thus concern about this aspect of
identity politics has crystallized around the transparency of
experience, and the univocality of its interpretation. Experience is
never, critics argue, simply epistemically available prior to
interpretation (Scott 1992); rather it requires a theoretical
framework--implicit or explicit--to give it meaning (Heyes
2020). Moreover, if experience is the origin of politics, then some
critics worry that what Kruks (2001) calls "an epistemology of
provenance" will become the norm: on this view, political
perspectives gain legitimacy by virtue of their articulation by
subjects of particular experiences. This, critics charge, closes off
the possibility of critique of these perspectives by those who
don't share the experience, which in turn inhibits political
dialogue and coalition-building. Nonetheless, skepticism about the
possibility of experience outside a hermeneutic frame has been
juxtaposed (or even reconciled) with phenomenological attempts to
articulate a ground for experience in the lived body (Alcoff 2000; see
also Oksala 2004 and 2011; Stoller 2009; Heyes 2020), or in related
accounts of complex embodiment (Siebers 2017). Recent work in Black
feminist philosophy has also returned to identity political language by
seeking to ground political perspectives in storytelling: for example,
Kristie Dotson (2018) argues that a Black feminism starting from
personal narrative provides a practice that can undercut unknowing in
settler colonial contexts.



From these understandings of subjectivity, it is easy to see how
critics of identity politics, and even some cautious supporters, have
wondered how it can meet the challenges of *intersectionality*
(Hill Collins and Bilge 2016). Intersectionality is both an ontology
and a method, with origins in women of color feminisms, especially
Black feminisms (Crenshaw 1989, 1990; Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013;
Hancock 2016). Its central tenet is that no axis of identity can be
understood as separable from others--whether in terms of
individual experience or the political structures that underlie social
stratification. To speak of "people of color" without
distinguishing between class, gender, sexuality, national and ethnic
contexts, for example, is to risk representing the experience of only
some of the group's members--typically those who are most
privileged. To the extent that identity politics urges mobilization
around a single axis, it will put pressure on participants to identify
that axis as their defining feature, when in fact they may well
understand themselves as integrated selves who cannot be represented so
selectively or reductively (Carastathis 2017). Generalizations made
about particular social groups in the context of identity politics may
also come to have a disciplinary function within the group, not just
describing but also dictating the self-understanding that its members
should have. Thus, the supposedly liberatory new identity may inhibit
autonomy, as Anthony Appiah puts it, replacing "one kind of
tyranny with another" (1994: 163). Just as dominant groups
in the culture at large insist that the marginalized integrate by
assimilating to dominant norms, so within some practices of identity
politics dominant sub-groups may, in theory and practice, impose their
vision of the group's identity onto all its members.



For example, a common narrative of U.S. feminist history points to
universalizing claims made on behalf of women during the so-called
"second wave" of the feminist movement in the late 1960s
and 1970s. The most often discussed (and criticized) second wave
feminist icons--women such as Betty Friedan or Gloria
Steinem--are white, middle-class, and heterosexual, although this
historical picture itself too often neglects the contributions of
lesbian feminists, feminists of color, and working-class feminists,
which were less visible in popular culture, perhaps, but equally
influential in the lives of women. For some early radical feminists,
women's oppression *as women* was the core of
identity politics and should not be diluted with other identity issues.
For example, Shulamith Firestone, in her classic book *The
Dialectic of Sex*, argued that "*racism is sexism
extended*," and that the Black Power movement represented
only sexist cooptation of Black women into a new kind of subservience
to Black men. Thus for Black women to fight racism (especially among
white women) was to divide the feminist movement, which properly
focused on challenging patriarchy, understood as struggle between men
and women, the foundational dynamic of all oppressions (Firestone 1970:
esp. 103-120).



Such claims about the universality of gender have therefore been
extensively criticized in feminist theory for failing to recognize the
specificity of their own constituencies. Friedan's famous
proposition that women needed to get out of the household and into the
professional workplace was, bell hooks pointed out, predicated on the
experience of a post-war generation of white, middle-class married
women limited to housekeeping and child-rearing by their professional
husbands (Friedan 1963; hooks 1981). Many women of color and
working-class women had worked outside their homes (sometimes
in *other* women's homes) for decades; some
lesbians had a history of working in traditionally male occupations or
living alternative domestic lives without a man's "family
wage." Theorizing the experience of hybridity for those whose
identities are especially far from norms of univocality, Gloria
Anzaldua, for example, writes of
her *mestiza* identity as a Chicana, American, raised
poor, a lesbian and a feminist, living in the metaphoric and literal
Borderlands of the American Southwest (1999 [1987]). Some women from
the less developed world have been critical of Northern feminist theory
for globalizing its claims. Such moves construct "Third
World" women, they argue, as less developed or enlightened
versions of their "First World" counterparts, rather than
understanding their distinctively different situation (Mohanty 1991
[1984]); or, they characterize liberation for Northern women in ways
that exacerbate the exploitation of the global poor--by supporting
economic conditions in which increasing numbers of western women can
abuse migrant domestic workers, for example (Anderson 2000). The
question of what a global feminism should make of identity political
claims, or how it should conceive solidarity among women from massively
different locations within the global economic system remains open
(Weir 2008).



Further complicating intersectional methods, the very categories of
identity that are taken to intersect may themselves be thought of as
historically contingent and variable. To take the example of
"race," despite a complex history of biological
essentialism in the presentation of racial typologies, the notion of a
genetic basis to racial difference has been largely discredited; the
criteria different societies (at different times) use to organize and
hierarchize "racial formations" are political and
contingent (Omi and Winant 1994 [1986]). While some human physical
traits are in a trivial sense genetically determined, the grouping of
different persons into *races* does not pick out any patterned
biological difference. What it does pick out is a set of social
meanings with political ramifications (Alcoff 1997, 2006). The most
notorious example of an attempt to rationalize racial difference as
biological is the U.S. "one-drop rule," under which an
individual was characterized as Black if they had "one
drop" or more of "Black blood." Adrian Piper points
out that not only does this belief persist into contemporary readings
of racial identity, it also implies that given the prolonged history
of racial mixing in the US--both coerced and voluntary--very
significant numbers of nominally "white" people in the
U.S. today should be re-classified as "Black" (Piper
1996). In those countries that have had official racial
classifications, individuals' struggles to be re-classified
(almost always as a member of a more privileged racial group) are
often invoked to highlight the contingency of race, especially at the
borders of its categories. And a number of histories of racial groups
that have apparently changed their racial identification--Jews,
Italians, or the Irish, for example--also illustrate genealogical
theses (Ignatiev 1995). The claim that race is "socially
constructed," however, does not in itself mark out a specific
identity politics. Indeed, the very contingency of race and its lack
of correlation with categories that have more meaning in everyday life
(such as ethnicity or culture) may circumscribe its political
usefulness: just as feminists have found the limits of appeals to
"women's identity," so Asian-Americans may find with
ethnicities and cultures as diverse as Chinese, Indian, or Vietnamese
that their racial designation itself provides little common ground.
That a US citizen of both Norwegian and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage will
check that they are "white" on a census form says
relatively little (although in a post-Trump U.S., it arguably says
more [Jardina 2019]) about their experience of their identity, or
indeed of their very different relationship to anti-Semitism. Tropes
of separatism and the search for forms of authentic self-expression
are related to race via ethno-cultural understandings of identity: for
example, the U.S. Afrocentric movement appeals to the cultural
significance of African heritage for Black Americans (Asante
2000).



Critical engagement with the origins and conceptualization of
subjectivity also informs poststructuralist challenges to identity
politics. They charge that it rests on a mistaken view of the subject
that assumes a *metaphysics of substance*--that is,
that a cohesive, self-identical subject is ontologically (if not
actually) prior to any form of social injustice (Butler 1999 [1990]).
This subject has certain core essential attributes that define her or
his identity, over which are imposed forms of socialization that cause
her or him to internalize other nonessential attributes. This position,
they suggest, misrepresents both the ontology of identity and its
political significance. The alternative view offered by
poststructuralists is that the subject is itself always already a
product of discourse, which represents both the condition of
possibility for a certain subject-position and a constraint on what
forms of self-making individuals may engage in. There is no real
identity--individual or group-based--that is separable from
its conditions of possibility, and any political appeal to identity
formations must engage with the paradox of acting from the very
subject-positions it must also oppose. Central to this position is the
observation that any claim to identity must organize itself around a
constitutive exclusion:



> 
> An identity is established in relation to a series of differences
> that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential
> to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, it would not
> exist in its distinctness and solidity. Entrenched in this
> indispensable relation is a second set of tendencies, themselves in
> need of exploration, to conceal established identities into fixed
> forms, thought and lived as if their structure expressed the true order
> of things. When these pressures prevail, the maintenance of one
> identity (or field of identities) involves the conversion of some
> differences into otherness, into evil, or one of its numerous
> surrogates. Identity requires differences in order to be, and it
> converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own
> self-certainty. (Connolly 2002: 64)



The danger of identity politics, then, is that it casts as authentic
to the self or group a self-understanding that in fact is defined by
its opposition to a dominant identity, which typically represents
itself as neutral. Reclaiming such an identity as one's own
merely reinforces its dependence on this Other, and further
internalizes and reinforces an oppressive hierarchy. This danger
is frequently obscured by claims that particular identities are
essential or natural, as we saw with race. For example, some early
gay activists emphasized the immutable and essential
natures of their sexual identities. They were a distinctively
different natural kind of person, with the same rights as (white,
middle-class) heterosexuals (another natural kind) to find fulfillment
in marriage and family life, property ownership, personal wealth
accumulation, and consumer culture. This strand of organizing
(associated more closely with white, middle-class gay men) with its
complex simultaneous appeals to difference and to sameness has a
genealogy going back to pre-Stonewall homophilic activism (see
discussion in Terry 1999, esp. 353-7). While early lesbian
feminists had a very different politics, oriented around liberation
from patriarchy and the creation of separate spaces for
woman-identified women, many still appealed to a more authentic,
distinctively feminist womanhood. Heterosexual feminine identities were
products of oppression, yet the literature imagines a utopian
alternative where woman-identification will liberate the lesbian within
every woman (e.g., Radicalesbians 1988 [1970]). The paradigm shift that
the term "queer" signals, then, is a shift to a model in
which identities are more self-consciously historicized, seen as
contingent products of particular genealogies rather than enduring or
essential natural kinds (Phelan 1989 and 1994; Blasius 2001). Michel
Foucault's *History of Sexuality* famously argues
that "homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of
sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a
kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite
had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a
species" (Foucault 1978: 43). Although Foucault is the most
often cited as the originator of such genealogical arguments about
homosexuality, other often neglected writers contributed to the
emergence of this new paradigm (e.g., M. McIntosh 1968). Such theories
still co-exist uneasily with popularized essentialist accounts of
gender and sexual identity, which purport to look for a particular
gene, brain structure, or other biological feature that is
noninteractive with environment and that will explain gender-normative
behavior (including sometimes trans identity) and same-sex sexual desire.



At stake are not only epistemological and metaphysical questions about
how we can know what kind of thing "sexual orientation"
might be, but also a host of moral and political questions. Some gay
activists thus see biological explanations of sexuality as offering a
defense against homophobic commentators who believe that gay men and
lesbians can voluntarily change their desires. Indeed, much of the
intuitive hostility to genealogical or poststructuralist accounts of
sexuality within gay and lesbian communities even today seems to come
from the dual sense of many individuals that they could not have been
other than gay, and that anything less than a radically essentialist
view of sexuality will open the door to further attempts to
"cure" them of their homosexuality (through
"conversion therapy," for example). Nonetheless, it is
perfectly possible to argue that the experience of one's bodily
feelings and concomitant sense of self having an origin solely inside
oneself is both deeply felt and in this sense real, and an experience
with a history larger than the individual (Heyes 2007; Salamon
2010). Furthermore, as Eve Sedgwick argues, no specific form of
explanation for the origins of sexual preference will be proof against
the infinitely varied strategies of homophobia (Sedgwick 1990:
esp. 22-63). That sexual orientation takes on a metaphysical
life of its own elides the fact that it is generally sexual
behavior--not an abstract "identity"--that is
the object of moral disapprobation. *Queer* politics, then,
works to trouble the categories "gay" and
"lesbian," as well as "heterosexual" (or
indeed other categories of social thought in general), and point out
that the homo/hetero dichotomy, like many others in western
intellectual history that it arguably draws on and reinforces, is not
only mutually implicated, but also hierarchical (heterosexuality is
superior, normal, and originary, while homosexuality is inferior,
deviant, and derivative) and masquerades as natural or
descriptive.



These conflicting positions within gender and sexual politics are
exemplified in the history of the expansion of gay and lesbian
organizing to those with other queer affiliations. Those describing
themselves as "gay" and "lesbian" wondered if
bisexual and transgender (and then intersex, Two Spirit, asexual, and
more) people shared sufficiently similar experience and interests to
make an identity political movement. Indeed, this suspicion sometimes
worked in the opposite direction: not all trans or intersex people have
understood themselves to be queer, or to share the same political goals
as gay and lesbian organizers, for example. The debate finds a parallel
in a form of challenge to the inclusion of transwomen in women-only
spaces (or indeed, their identification as "women" in the
first place). The possibility of feminist solidarity across cis and
trans lines hinges on the centrality of sex and gender
identities--and how those are understood--to political spaces
and organizing (Heyes 2003). Traditions of trans, mestiza, and cyborg
feminist politics have resisted the claim of sameness and recommended
models that embrace the historicity of subject-positions and
intrasubjective plurality (Stone 1991; Haraway 1991; Lugones 1994; see
Bettcher 2014 for an overview).



While the common charge that identity politics promotes a victim
mentality is often made glibly, Wendy Brown offers a more sophisticated
caution against the dangers of *ressentiment* (the
moralizing revenge of the powerless). She argues that identity politics
has its own genealogy in liberal capitalism that relentlessly
reinforces the "wounded attachments" it claims to
sever: "Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes
claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and
inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future--for
itself or others--that triumphs over this pain" (Brown 1995:
74). The challenge that identity politics retains attachments to
hierarchized categories defined in opposition to each other and
over-identifies with artifactual wounds has been met with more
discussion of the temporality of identity politics: can an
identification be premised on a forward-looking solidarity rather than
a *ressentiment*-laden exclusion (see Zerilli 2005; Weir
2008; Bhambra and Margee 2010)? It also invites consideration of
whether pain is always a regressive, fixed ground of identity claims,
or whether it might be a legitimate reality for mobilization, as Tobin
Siebers suggests of disability (2017: 322-3). Some proponents of
identity politics have suggested that poststructuralism is politically
impotent, capable only of deconstruction and never of action (Hartsock
1998: 205-226). There are, however, political projects motivated
by poststructuralist theses. For example, Judith Butler's famous
articulation of *performativity* as a way of
understanding subject-development suggests to her and others the
possibility of disarticulating seamless performances to subvert the
meanings with which they are invested (Butler 1999 [1990]). Drag maybe
constituted such a disarticulation, although other critics have
suggested other examples; Adrian Piper's conceptual art seeks to
disrupt the presumed self-identity of race by showing how it is
actively interpreted and reconstituted, never determinate and
self-evident. Linda Zerilli discusses the "world-building"
work of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective--a feminist
group that rejects a subject-centred view of women's injured
status in favor of a protensive practice of freedom (2005: chapter
3).


## 3. Liberalism and Identity Politics



Institutionalized liberal democracy is a key condition of
possibility for contemporary identity politics. The citizen
mobilizations that made democracy real also shaped and unified groups
previously marginal to the polity, while extensions of formal rights
invited expectations of material and symbolic equality. The perceived
paucity of rewards offered by liberal capitalism, however, spurred
forms of radical critique that sought to explain the persistence of
inequity. At the most basic philosophical level, critics of liberalism
suggested that liberal social ontology--the model of the nature of
and relationship between subjects and collectives--was misguided.
The social ontology of most liberal political theories consists of
citizens conceptualized as essentially similar individuals, as for
example in John Rawls' famous thought experiment using the
"original position," in which representatives of the
citizenry are conceptually divested of all specific identities or
affiliations in order to make rational decisions about the social
contract (Rawls 1971). To the extent that group interests are
represented in liberal polities, they tend to be understood as
associational, forms of interest group pluralism whereby those sharing
particular interests voluntarily join together to create a political
lobby. Citizens are free to register their individual preferences
(through voting, for example), or to aggregate themselves for the
opportunity to lobby more systematically (e.g., by forming an
association such as a neighborhood community league). These lobbies,
however, are not defined by the identity of their members so much as by
specific shared interests and goals, and when pressing their case the
marginalized subjectivity of the group members is not itself called
into question. Finally, political parties, the other primary organs of
liberal democratic government, critics suggest, have few moments of
inclusivity, being organized around party discipline, responsiveness to
lobby groups, and broad-based electoral popularity. Ultimately
conventional liberal democracy, diverse radical critics claim, cannot
effectively address the ongoing structural marginalization that
persists in late capitalist liberal states, and may even be complicit
with it (Young 1990; P. Williams 1991; Brown 1995; M. Williams 1998;
Mills 2017).



On a philosophical level, liberal understandings of the political
subject and its relationship to collectivity came to seem inadequate to
ensuring representation for women, gay men and lesbians, or racial-ethnic
groups (M. Williams 1998). Critics charged that the neutral citizen of
liberal theory was in fact the bearer of an identity coded white, male,
bourgeois, able, and heterosexual (Pateman 1988; Young 1990; Di Stefano
1991; Mills 1997; Pateman and Mills 2007). This implicit ontology in
part explained the persistent historical failure of liberal democracies
to achieve full inclusion in power structures for members of
marginalized groups. A richer understanding of political subjects as
constituted through and by their social location was required. In
particular, the history and experience of injustice brought with it
certain perspectives and needs that could not be assimilated through
existing institutions. Individuals are oppressed by virtue of their
membership in a particular *social group*--that is, a
collective whose members have relatively little mobility into or out of
the collective, who usually experience their membership as involuntary,
who are generally identified as members by others, and whose
opportunities are deeply shaped by the relation of their group to
corollary groups through privilege and oppression (Cudd 2006). Liberal
democratic institutions have persistently grappled with the challenge
of recognizing such asymmetries of identity while stressing procedural
consistency and literal equality in institutions. Thus for example the
twentieth-century U.S. discussion of the categories of race organized
around color-blind versus color-conscious public policy (Appiah and
Gutmann 1996). Color-blindness--that is, the view that
race *should* be ignored in public policy and everyday
exchange--had hegemony in popular discourse. Drawing attention to
race--whether in a personal description or in university
admissions procedures--was characterized as unfair and racist.
Advocates of color-consciousness, on the other hand, argued that racism
would not disappear without proactive efforts, which required the
invocation of race. Affirmative action requires statistics about the
numbers of members of oppressed racial groups employed in certain
contexts, which in turn requires racial identification and
categorization. Thus those working against racism face a paradox
familiar in identity politics: the very identity they aim to transform
must be invoked to make their case.



Critics have also charged that *integration* (or,
more provocatively, assimilation) is a guiding principle of liberalism
(see Callan 2005). If the liberal subject is coded in the way Young
(1990) suggests, then attempts to apply liberal norms of equality will
risk demanding that the marginalized conform to the identities of their
oppressors. For example, many commentators on the politics of gender
and sexuality objected to campaigns defending "gay
marriage" or otherwise representing queer people as living up to
heterosexual (white, or middle-class) norms, on the grounds that these
legal developments assimilate same-sex relationships to an existing
dominant model, rather than challenging its historical, material, and
symbolic terms (e.g., Card 2007; Puar 2017). If this
is *equality*, they claim, then it looks suspiciously like
the erasure of socially subordinate identities rather than their
genuine incorporation into the polity. One of the central charges
against identity politics by liberals, among others, has been its
alleged reliance on notions of sameness to justify political
mobilization. Looking for people who are *like* you rather
than who share your political values as allies runs the risk of
sidelining critical political analysis of complex social locations and
ghettoizing members of social groups as the only persons capable of
making or understanding claims to justice. After an initial wave of
relatively uncompromising identity politics, proponents have taken
these criticisms to heart and moved to more philosophically nuanced
accounts that appeal to *coalitions* as better
organizing structures. On this view, separatism around a single
identity formation must be muted by recognition of the intersectional
nature of social group memberships. The idea of a dominant identity
from which the oppressed may need to dissociate themselves remains, but
the alternative becomes a more fluid and diverse grouping, less intent
on guarantees of internal homogeneity.



Finally, the literature on multiculturalism takes up questions of
race, ethnicity, and cultural diversity in relation to the liberal
state (Levy 2000; Kymlicka 2001). Some multicultural
states--notably Canada--allegedly aim to permit the various
cultural identities of their residents to be preserved rather than
assimilated, despite the concern that the over-arching liberal aims of
such states may be at odds with the values of those they claim to
protect. For example, Susan Moller Okin argued that multiculturalism is
sometimes "bad for women," especially when it works to
preserve patriarchal values in minority cultures. If multiculturalism
implies a form of cultural relativism that prevents judgment of or
interference with the "private" practices of minorities,
female genital mutilation, forced marriage, compulsory veiling, or
being deprived of education may be the consequence. Okin's
critics countered that she falsely portrayed culture as static,
internally homogeneous, and defined by men's values, allowing
liberalism to represent a culturally unmarked medium for the defense of
individual rights (Okin et al. 1999). For many commentators on
multiculturalism this is the nub of the issue: is there an
inconsistency between defending the rights of minority cultures, while
prohibiting those (allegedly) cultural practices that the state judges
illiberal (Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005; Phillips 2007)? Can
liberalism sustain the cultural and value-neutrality that some
commentators still ascribe to it, or to what extent should it embrace
its own cultural specificity (Taylor 1994; Foster and Herzog 1994;
Kymlicka 1995)? Defenders of the right to cultural expression of
minorities in multicultural states thus practice forms of identity
politics that are both made possible by liberalism and sometimes in
tension with it (see Laden and Owen 2007). Increasingly it is difficult
to see what divides anything called "liberalism" from
anything called "identity politics," and some commentators
have suggested possible *rapprochements* (e.g., Laden
2001).


## 4. Contemporary Philosophical Engagement with Identity Politics



Since its 1970s origins, identity politics as a mode of organizing
and set of political philosophical positions has undergone numerous
attacks by those motivated to point to its flaws, whether by its
pragmatic exclusions or more programmatically. For many leftist
commentators, in particular, identity politics is something of
a *bete noire*, representing the capitulation to
cultural criticism in place of analysis of the material roots of
oppression. Marxists, both orthodox and revisionist, and
socialists--especially those who came of age during the rise of
the New Left in western countries--have often interpreted the
perceived ascendancy of identity politics as representing the end of
radical materialist critique (see discussions in McNay 2008:
126-161, and Kumar et al. 2018). Identity politics, for these
critics, is both factionalizing and depoliticizing, drawing attention
away from the ravages of late capitalism toward superstructural
cultural accommodations that leave economic structures unchanged. For
example, while allowing that both recognition and redistribution have a
place in contemporary politics, Nancy Fraser laments the supremacy of
perspectives that take injustice to inhere in "cultural"
constructions of identity that the people to whom they are attributed
want to reject. Such recognition models, she argues, require remedies
that "valorize the group's 'groupness' by
recognizing its specificity," thus reifying identities that
themselves are products of oppressive structures. By contrast,
injustices of distribution require redistributive remedies that aim
"to put the group out of business as a group" (Fraser 1997:
19). If Fraser's argument traces its intellectual roots to Marx
through critical theory, similar arguments come via Foucauldian
genealogy. In her 2008 book *Against Recognition*, for
example, Lois McNay argues that identity claims that are at the heart
of many contemporary social movements are represented as demands for
recognition in the context of an over-simplified account of power.
Although theorists of recognition typically start from a Hegelian model
of the subject as dialogically formed and necessarily situated, they
too quickly abandon the radical consequences of such a view for subject
formation, McNay argues. The subject of recognition becomes both
personalized and hypostatized--divorced from the larger social
systems of power that create conditions of possibility for particular
"identities" (2008: esp. 1-23). In this way, the
debates around subject-formation that are at the heart of philosophical
discussions of identity politics parallel conversations between
Habermasians and Foucauldians about the possibility of a transcendental
subject that can ground practices of critique (see Allen 2008). This
varied debate has a long half-life (see Fraser 2010; 2013) and
contemporary manifestations. For example, Glen Coulthard (2014) argues
that the shift in colonial state-Indigenous relations in present-day
Canada from unabashed assimilationism to demands for mutual recognition
(especially of cultural distinctiveness) cannot be an adequate
decolonization strategy. Reading the intellectual history of the
politics of recognition through Hegel to Sartre to Fanon to Benhabib,
Coulthard argues that this discourse is a reiteration (and sometimes a
cover-up) of the patriarchal, racist, and colonial relations between
Indigenous people and the Canadian state that it purports to
ameliorate. Instead, he defends a paradigm of critical Indigenous
resurgence that draws on cultural history and economic practices that
are neither essentialized nor romanticized, but that also do not rest
on concession-oriented relation-building with the existing Canadian
state. Audra Simpson makes a similar argument, suggesting that the
politics of recognition in the context of settler dispossession denies
its own history, assuming that recognition for Indigenous people can
occur within the context of such "largely state-driven
performance art" as reconciliation, which casts the injustices of
settler colonialism as having occurred "in the past" and
requiring apology, rather than acknowledging the wide-ranging material
political consequences of land theft and Indigenous sovereignty (2017,
6-7).



From the early days, the presentation of a dichotomy (or a choice)
between recognition and redistribution, or the cultural and the
economic, was challenged by those who pointed out that the
intersectional politics of gender, sexuality, and race had always been
engaged and understood through the structures of capitalism (Butler
1997; *Upping the Anti* 2005; Walters 2018). Given how many
contexts these debates must generalize, it is hard to see how one can
draw any conclusions about the merits of a thing called "identity
politics" over and above any other kind. Nonetheless, in the
post-2016 political world, after the Brexit referendum in the UK and
the election of Donald Trump in the US, as well as following the rise
of nationalist and/or austerity right parties in many other countries,
recrimination from diverse political perspectives has again focused on
the alleged over-emphasis on "identity politics." The
decline of class-based politics, the growth of economic inequality, and
the disaffection of working-class white men, critics suggest, was
neglected by both political party leaderships and grassroots
organizers, in favor of campaigning around issues attaching to
feminism, queer politics, and anti-racism. For example, Francis
Fukuyama argues that the twentieth century was the century of the
economic in politics--a contest between a left defined through
workers' rights, social welfare, and robust redistribution, and
the right's drive to reduce government by shrinking the public
sector and selling publicly owned services and replacing them with
private market delivery. By contrast, he suggests, the twenty-first
century has seen the left focus "less on creating broad economic
equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of
marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants and
refugees, women, and LGBT people. The right, meanwhile, has redefined
its core mission as the patriotic protection of traditional national
identity, which is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or
religion" (Fukuyama 2018, 91). This allegedly renders the left
less able to address trending inequality, and redirects its focus to
"cultural issues," and validating interiority and achieving
recognition--all of which racist nationalists can easily
co-opt:



> 
> Today, the American creedal national identity, which emerged in the
> wake of the Civil War, must be revived and defended against attacks
> from both the left and the right. On the right, white nationalists
> would like to replace the creedal national identity with one based on
> race, ethnicity, and religion. On the left, the champions of identity
> politics have sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American
> national story by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases
> that racism, gender discrimination, and other forms of systematic
> exclusion are in the country's DNA. (108)



Identity politics, Fukuyama concludes, is the lens through which
politics in the US is refracted, with a turning-away from economic
inequality on the left providing a convenient evasion for the
right.



Fukuyama writes with a hostile outsider's dismissal of the
social movements he labels as identity politics, yet the bifurcation he
describes between the economic and the identarian is echoed in a 2018
special issue of the Marxist journal *Historical Materialism*,
in which the editors' introduction describes approvingly
subsequent articles that show how



> 
> the Left has abrogated the notion of identity as being materially
> rooted, and contingent on historical and geographical context. In its
> place, we see the hegemonic acceptance of an inherently reactionary
> alternative: one which perceives race, gender and sexuality as
> dearly-held, self-fashioning, and self-justifying essences. Such a
> concession has not only reinforced the class/identity binary, but also
> led to a stifled political imagination in which identity-based politics
> can only be conceptualised within a liberal-capitalist logic. (Kumar et
> al. 2018, 5-6)



In response to this challenge, defenders point out again how
political organizing through contemporary feminism and
anti-racism--by way of movements like #MeToo or Black Lives
Matter, for example--has not shied away from the economic
components to their analyses. The binary between economic critique that
marks discussion of "redistribution," and discussion of
group identity that characterizes "recognition," may in
moments be conducted as if the two were separate. The idea, however,
that proponents of treating gender, sexuality, or race as intersecting
axes of individual meaning and social stratification have consistently
neglected the economic aspects of their analyses is hard to sustain. As
Suzanna Danuta Walters points out, "the critique of identity
politics is dependent upon seeing identity as only the province of the
disenfranchised and marginal" as well as upon seeing white men
(including the working-class, straight men who are the imagined
community of the neonationalist right) as somehow not having
"identity" (Walters 2018, 477). Described by Paul Joshua as
"anti-identity identity politics," this position, as
exemplified in his description of the "All Lives Matter"
response to Black Lives Matter, "is predicated on the
taken-for-grantedness of a pre-established racist system which from
centuries of *de jure* and *de facto* practices is now
fixed almost silently into the socio-political infrastructure....
Despite its universalist pretentions, it remains a cloaked identitarian
politics which through a hegemonic narrative (re)presents itself as a
radically inclusionary counter-narrative" (2019, 16).



Every time this article is revised, it is tempting to write that
"identity politics" is an out-moded term, over-determined
by its critics and part of a reductive political lexicon on both the
Marxist left and the neoconservative right. Yet in 2020, still, there
are recent iterations of the recognition versus redistribution debate,
ongoing arguments about the demands of intersectionality, and new forms
of political resistance to the movements that circulate under the sign
"identity politics." Both flexible and extensible, identity
political tropes continue to influence new political claims: an
extensive literature approaches disability, for example, as a diverse
and dynamic set of experiences of social injustice that sediment
self-understandings among the disabled and motivate a politics that
insists dominant cultures change their exclusionary social practices
(Davis 2017 [1997]; Silvers 1998, Siebers 2006, 2008; Kafer 2013).
Perhaps most important for philosophers, any idea of identity itself
appears to be in a period of rapid evolution. Attempts to decode human
genetics and shape the genetic make-up of future persons (Richardson
and Stevens 2015), to clone human beings, or to xeno-transplant animal
organs, and so on, all raise deep philosophical questions about the
kind of thing a person is. As more and more people form political
alliances using disembodied communications technologies, the kinds of
identities that matter seem also to shift. Behaviors, beliefs, and
self-understandings are increasingly pathologized as syndromes and
disorders, including through the identification of new
"types" of person (in turn generating possibilities for new
forms of identity politics).



Increasingly, this long list of confounding variables for identity
political thought is finding philosophical cohesion in anti-identarian
models that take somatic life, affect, time, or space as organizing
concepts. For example, both new materialisms and neo-vitalist
philosophies, in their political contexts, share an emphasis
on *becoming* over *being*, a "posthumanist"
reluctance to award ontological priority to any shared characteristics
of human beings (Wolfe 2010), a skepticism about discourses of
authenticity and belonging, and a desire to focus on generative,
forward-looking political solutions (Bhambra and Margee 2010; Coole
and Frost 2010; Connolly 2011). The lines between humans and other
animals (Haraway 2007; Donaldson and Kymlicka 2014, 2016), between the
living and the non-living (Sharp 2011), and between objects and
subjects (Bennett 2009) are radically challenged. The COVID-19
pandemic shows more clearly than ever how the edges of human bodies
are porous with our environments. To varying degrees these emphases
are echoed in other process ontologies--whether Annemarie
Mol's work in medical anthropology (2002), the reintroduction of
bodies as socially and biologically dynamic and intra-active forces in
forming political subjectivities (Protevi 2009), or the ways indirect,
technologically mediated experience shapes so much of our contemporary
"identities" (Turkle 2011). This mass of shifts and
contradictions might be thought to mark the end of the era of identity
politics. Whatever limits are inherent to identity political
formations, however, the enduring rhetorical power of the phrase
itself indicates the deep implication of questions of power and
legitimate government with demands for self-determination that are
unlikely to fade away.