Identities and politics: Toward a historical understanding of the lesbian and gay movement (original) (raw)
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Social Science History, 2002
Toward a Historical Understanding of the Lesbian and Gay Movement Critics of identity politics often wax polemically as they charge contemporary social movements with narrowly and naively engaging in essentialist politics based on perceived differences from the majority. Such essentialism, critics charge, inhibits coalition building (e.g., Phelan 1993; Kimmel 1993), cannot produce meaningful social change, and reinforces hegemonic and restrictive social categories (Seidman 1997). It is even responsible for the decline of the Left (Gitlin 1994, 1995). Social movement scholars similarly view ''identity
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2007
Oral history has long been an important resource for lesbian and other underprivileged groups in advancing identity politics. While there is an increased awareness of social construction of identity and the impact of race and class on the experiences of sexual identities, oral historians have yet to rethink their task in view of poststructuralists' and queer theorists' critique of identity. This paper examines the “Oral History Project of Hong Kong Women Who Love Women” as an attempt to construct histories that respect difference and minimize normalization. It discusses the project's significance in terms of its subversion of the heterosexual/homosexual binary and its queering of the notions of identity, community and coming out. The critique unfolded is one of antiassimilation and anti-minoritization.
From Identity Politics to Identification Studies
International Journal of Communication, 2011
Today, identity politics seems almost quaint. Faded into memory are NEA funding battles and culture wars over representations of identities, dismantling of identity-based social programs such as college admissions and affirmative action, and the spawning of an all-purpose, anti-progressive code phrase, "politically incorrect." Moreover, scholars, particularly those working in critical/cultural areas, have theorized identity away in a multitude of ways: combining categories into hybrids and cyborgs, challenging its liberal humanist assumptions, critiquing its biases, tracing its processes of discursive constitution, queering its dualisms, and envisioning its aftermath in a post-identity world. Identity-at least insofar as
The Return of the Repressed: Identity Politics and Queer, Race, Studies
The Return of the Repressed: Identity, Politics, Disciplinarity, and Queer Studies In her recent book Object Lessons, Robyn Wiegman invites those of us working in identity based studies -that is, fields such as Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Intersectionality Theory, Ethnic Studies -to ponder our disciplines' "field imaginary," the often taken for granted, "unconscious" assumptions that provide the conditions of possibility of our work. Arguing that "the operation of the political within identity-based fields has not been sufficiently engaged," (13), she concludes that we have not adequately attended to our assumption that "if we only find the right discourse, object of study, or analytical tool, our critical practice will be adequate to the political commitments that inspire it" (2-3). Wiegman's book is an attempt to provoke such attention. It is divided into chapters that each consider the unexamined disciplinary logics that animate a particular identity-based knowledge and the disciplinary formations that such knowledge has taken in the US academy.
Identity Politics in America: A Review-Essay
Platypus Review
This review-essay examines three books on the topic of identity politics in the United States of America: 1) Identity Capitalists (2021) by Nancy Leong, 2) Elite Capture (2022) by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, and 3) Toward Freedom (2020) by Touré Reed. All three books are criticized within the framework of Marx’s materialist conception of history, commonly known as "Historical Materialism". Article available online at : https://platypus1917.org/2024/05/01/identity-politics-in-america-a-review-essay/
This document is a critical overlook of an arising issue regarding identity in contemporary societies. The document focuses on Identity politics as process that actuates many identities in our society. The understanding of the subject for this document comes from understanding of issues through critical analysis of opinions of critics and our own opinion regarding the issue.
Even before the term identity-politics came into use, there were those who engaged in a political thought process based in identity. These individuals critiqued not only mainstream culture and society, but the ways in which they believed the left had overlooked the significance of race, gender and sexuality in favor of perspectives it deemed more foundational, such as class, economic structure and later philosophical questions of meaning in form. Frantz Fanon, Ralph Ellison and Simone de Beauvoir were but a few writers who directly criticized the left, pointing out perspectives overlooked in the discourse of social equality and fair distribution of resources. Those who took up the cause of critique from the standpoint of identity had a major task. They were charged with informing the world of leftist thoughtboth in the academy and in the arts-of the urgency to address race, gender and sexuality. Moreover, they had to exhibit the ways in which these critical perspectives could illuminate omissions within the accepted discourses of social and political justice and their cultural manifestations.