Identity and Ideas: A Roundtable on Identity Politics

This roundtable discussion examines the issue of identity politics and how identity influences and is influenced by gay/queer politics and theory. The participants discuss how identity politics affects political organizing and activism, how different identity communities can build coalitions, how the language related to identity is evolving, and how sexual attractions and practices interact with identity. The discussants look at how the influx into the gay and lesbian movement of new groups that challenge traditional identity boundaries—e.g., bisexuals and transgendered people—is affecting the movement. Finally, the discussants examine how “idea-based” politics may supplant identity-based politics as a new inclusive paradigm.     

Civil Society and the Sexual Politics of Difference

This paper discusses the sexual politics of anti-normalization within the context of the sociological discussions of civil society and the public sphere. The sexual politics of anti-normalization is less centered around "identity" as a means of securing group solidarity and representing sexual communities in civil society. A politics of anti-normalization comprehends identity as a means of normalizing and regulating sexual desire and difference. Anti-normalization entails the politicization of ethical-moral issues concerning sex and desire and the production of sexual differences beyond the usual opposition of heterosexuality to homosexuality. I discuss the ways that the theoretical discourses on civil society reduce conceptions of difference to identity and develop a framework for analyzing the sexual politics of difference "beyond identity" in the public sphere.     

Abelove’s Historical Vision: Gentle Warnings Against Moralism,Colonialism, and an Apolitical Identity Politics

Henry Abelove’s insightful and carefully researched book, Deep Gossip (2003), creatively opens up many important topics for exploration. I address 3 of these topics: Abelove’s appreciation of Freud’s refusal to moralize about homosexuality, the crucial difference between moralism and a hermeneutic vision of moral understandings, and Abelove’s discussion of the historical shift from gay liberation to a more recent postmodern identity politics and with it the loss of a more explicitly political anticolonialism. Compulsory heterosexuality can be understood as a key element that holds in place current arrangements of gender and the military-industrial-educational-surveillance state, which is currently justified by and in step with neoliberal economic theory and subjectivity, colonial wars of occupation, and the use of at-a-distance airpower.     

Women's Accounts of Organizational Politics as a Gendering Process

Organizational politics is implicated in all levels of organizational functioning, from power structures and informal interaction to individual identity. This study argues that organizational politics provides an approach to examining professional women's experiences of organizations as gendered. Women graduates in male‐dominated organizations claimed not to be limited by explicit discrimination, but they construct organizational politics as being masculine in character and as a barrier to their careers. These women represent organizational politics as irrational, aggressive, competitive and instrumental, leading to individual, not organizational, success. Their accounts undermine the stereotypical dichotomy of masculine rationality and feminine emotion by claiming that women behave reasonably and by focusing on emotion in men's political game playing. However, claiming to be rational and rejecting politics, while acknowledging its role in career success, is uncomfortable for ambitious women. They risk sabotaging their own position by appearing too sensitive to engage in the less savoury aspects of organizational life. Organizational political processes are seen as fundamental to gender in organizations, first, because political activity is seen as gendered and masculine and contrary to female identity; secondly, because politics is part of the informal system which constructs organization from which outsiders are excluded; and finally, because political activity is linked to the performance, achievement and maintenance of power.     

Latin American Identity Politics: Redefining Citizenship

Identity‐based social movements and politics have played an important role in Latin America since the 1970s and continue to do so today. In this essay, I argue that this form of politics – as it has taken shape across Latin America – has been defined by its intersectionality. I trace the ways in which neoliberalism has facilitated a certain kind of identity politics while limiting more radical political claims. I argue that identity politics have contributed to the current “pink tide” sweeping across the continent and are in continual dialogue with these new leftist governments as they redefine what it means to be citizen and what the relationship between state and citizen should be.     

Life politics,nature and the state: Giddens' sociological theory and The Politics of Climate Change

Anthony Giddens' The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate‐change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens' earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understanding of climate change. Climate change instantiates how, in high modernity, the existential contradiction of the human relationship with nature returns in new form, expressed in life politics and entangled with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. The interlinking of existential and structural contradiction is manifested in the tension between life politics and the capitalist nation‐state. This tension is key for understanding the failures so far of policy responses to climate change.     

Local Motions: Surfing and the Politics of Wave Sliding

Tapping into the politics and rhythms of surfing, this paper embodies a “set” of waves that seeks to erode the sedimentation of Hawaii's modern political orders. By foregrounding a more fluvial and dynamic sense of the political, this paper treats surfing not only as a heterotopic site of agency, but also as an opening for an “other” kind of politics.     

Planning Other Families: Negotiating Population and Identity Politics in the Peruvian Amazon

This article examines the ways in which globally driven population policies are experienced by rural, indigenous women in Amazonian communities on the periphery of formal, political power. As with other global development processes, population programs are actively resisted, accepted, and modified by the women who are their intended "targets." Through a nuanced exploration of the interface of indigenous identity with the discourse of empowerment and reproductive rights, this article traces the impact of internationally funded population and development programs on local identity politics in the Peruvian Amazon.     

Disabled People and the Politics of Difference

Whilst the Disabled People's Movement has necessarily evolved from a consciousness of disability as central to its participants' identities, and a critique of disablism as endemic to institutional discrimination, academics and activists in various civil rights movements are increasingly perturbed by the personal and political dangers generated by an adherence to 'identity politics' simpliciter. The actual complexities of social life-in particular, the multiple dimensions of identities and the matrices of interlocking discriminationshave propelled us towards a politics of difference. Since a shift of premises and even paradigms is the prerequisite of such a politics, it will inevitably encounter resistance from some sections of our respective movements. This article addresses some aspects of this emerging politics of difference with reference to the self-organised groups in UNISON, the UK's public sector trade union, where the disabled members' group co-exists with groups for women, black people and lesbians and gay men, so that the politics of identity is always already entwined with the politics of difference. Three main themes are pursued-the attempts to transform occasional inter-group collaborations into sustainable inter-group coalitions; the mobilisation of differences across groups in the service of enhancing democracy within groups; and the struggles to accommodate to a burgeoning intra-group diversity.     

The Forum: Second Thoughts on Presidential Politics

In this essay, we confront the “conventional wisdoms” promoted throughout this long presidential campaign. By conventional wisdoms, we mean the common knowledge of politics—the things that commentators and analysts forward as taken‐for‐granted assertions and beliefs. We will revisit just a few of the campaign season’s conventional wisdoms and review them with a sociological eye. In so doing, we find that in politics, as in most other areas, conventional wisdom can be a risky source of knowledge.     

Beyond Identity: Queer Values and Community

This essay traces the movement within the LGBT community from relying on identity politics to considering a politics of value as a political and community-forming strategy. In the process, the author uses the work of Michel Foucault to think through how the articulation of shared values might open up personal, communal, and political possibilities otherwise delimited when LGBT people think of themselves within the confines of separate, and often separating, identity categories.     

Radclyffe Hall, E. Lynn Harris, and Franz Kafka: Christianity, Queerness, and the Politics of Normalcy

This essay examines Christian tropes in three queer texts: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), E. Lynn Harris's Just As I Am (1994), and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915). At issue are the linkages between queer theory and literature, on the one hand, and Christian paradigms, on the other hand. This essay considers whether, insofar as they deploy Christian tropes, these texts sustain a politics of the normal that inevitably subvert queer-positive representations.     

Framing Identity Politics: Right-Wing Women as Strategic Party Actors in the UK and US

ABSTRACT

Women’s political underrepresentation in right-wing parties remains a global phenomenon. Despite their rejection of “identity politics,” the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party and the United States’ Republican Party have launched formal initiatives to recruit women legislative candidates. In this article, we ask: How do right-wing women advocate for increasing women’s representation within parties that explicitly reject group identity politics? More specifically, we examine 1) how party elites frame the UK’s Women2Win and the US’s Project GROW campaigns, and 2) the role that women play in each of these initiatives. Through interviews with party elites and content analyses of news articles and campaign materials, we show that right-wing women in both countries function as strategic party actors, advocating for women’s representation tactically within the specific ideological and electoral context of their party.     

Beyond Identity Politics

The author details the reasons why he has reached the conclusion that LGBT people have seen the limits of identity politics—that sexual object choice alone is not sufficient to connect a community and by extension a movement—and he calls for a new stage in political organizing linking people of progressive political philosophies, bridging the various social identities.     

Heavenly Monsters: The Politics of the Male Body in the Naked Issue of Attitude Magazine

The male body in contemporary gay culture is subordinated to distinct aesthetic and ethical norms that reflect an all-male idolization of the young, muscular, smooth, and transcendent physique. The queer body is manipulated in different techniques including daily work at the gym, diet, hair supplement/removal, tanning, and dying. Liberating the body from heteronormative oppression does not necessarily guarantee the liberation of the (gay) body from other powerful systems that produce and commercialize body fascism. This article problematizes these body politics and economy of identity focusing on the naked issue of Attitude (October 1999), a six-year-old British life-style glossy magazine. This analysis mainly focuses on the illuminating interview with five gay men who express their intimate feelings and criticize the body worship in the gay media: an over-weight man, a skinny man, a psoriasis sufferer, an old and heavily tattooed and pierced man, and a bodybuilder who works as an escort.     

National conceptions,transnational solidarities: Turkey,Islam and Europe

In this article, I examine the interplay between the institutionalization of Islam in Europe and the transnationalism of Turkey's Directorate for Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Based on extensive fieldwork in Turkey, Austria, Belgium, France and Germany, I demonstrate not only the salience of the nation‐state prerogative on the part of both European states and the Turkish state but also the tension between national conceptions of Muslim identity on both sides amid transnational solidarities. I also argue that, to a certain extent, European policies of detransnationalizing the Muslim field in Europe also intersect with the Diyanet's transnational politics vis‐à‐vis Turkish/Muslim immigrants in their common resistance to the deculturalization of Muslims in Europe. While European countries try to nationalize their respective Muslim communities into their cultural and juridical framework through reterritorialization, the Diyanet has increasingly deterritorialized its activities to preserve a Muslim identity engrained in Turkishness – hence, the coexistence of both a tension and mutual accommodation between Europe and Turkey.     

Interculturalism and the pendulum of identity

This article offers a critical appraisal of the role played by cultural identity in intercultural bilingual Arabic–Hebrew schools in Israel. While engineered as oases of interculturalism amidst a life of ethnic segregation, such schools ultimately confront serious difficulties in escaping the constraints of identity politics and representation. This is expressed by the leading part that group identity plays in the schools’ everyday life. By drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, we argue that this state of affairs diminishes the potential of the intercultural encounter to overcome emotional and conceptual inhibitions reigning in larger society. Interculturalism, in order to distance itself from a politics of ressentiment that can only restrict its capacity to flourish, needs to place itself before representation.     

Phantom Menaces: The Politics of Rumour,Securitisation and Masculine Identities in the Shadows of the Ninjas

The article examines the 2009–2010 Zumalai ‘ninja’ scare, in which the deaths of a child and a young woman had triggered rumours of shadowy ninjas being at work, which in turn led to a massive operation by police special forces. The article traces the history of the ninja phenomenon in Timor-Leste and Indonesia. It then examines the case from three different vantage points: the politics of rumour surrounding the case; the securitisation of the scare; and as a clash of competing masculinities. Through these approaches, not only some of the long-lasting legacies of Indonesian occupation and of the resistance become visible, but also some of the profound societal changes since independence.