Identity Politics: A Tool for Empowerment or a Barrier to Progress

Introduction

In the 1970s, members of the US-based black feminist organization Combahee River Collective coined the term 'identity politics' to refer to a form of political organization and theoretical analysis based on solidarity amongst those belonging to a particular oppressed social identity. According to the statement published by the collective (1983: 268), this idea was rooted in the belief that 'the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression'. Indeed, such an idea had been the basis of collectivizing in most contemporary social justice movements in the US context, such as the Women's Movement and the movement for Civil Rights 'these were rooted in the agitators' own identities as 'women' and as 'black' respectively.

As Kimberle Crenshaw notes, such politics amongst marginalized groups such as people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and others is valuable for fostering a sense of strength, community, and intellectual development. She also points to how it has been instrumental in 'recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual' (Crenshaw, 1991: 1241), thereby allowing into the realm of the political issues that were hitherto not actionable. In this sense, identity politics is what made the feminist articulation of 'the personal is political' possible, and is also valuable for providing the ground on which a marginalized group can first articulate its problems and its needs.

However, whereas the Combahee River Collective's idea of identity politics saw oppressions as 'interlocking' (1983: 264), there appears to be a general tendency amongst those who organize along identitarian lines to reduce it, in practice, to an intra-categorical homogenization similar to the universalizing politics it is meant to address. Here, intra-group differences, such as those between women from different race and class groups, or those between black men and black women, are often ignored (Crenshaw, 1991: 1242).

Intersectional analysis

At the first level of intersectional analysis, this means that the group ends up being represented according to the needs and ideas of its more privileged members: bell hooks (1984: 6) mentions how during the second wave of the feminist movement in the US, slogans such as 'organize around your own oppression' provided privileged women with an excuse to ignore the disparity between them and the masses of women, and make their own interests focal to the movement. Moreover, this misrepresentation furthers the oppression of the group's least privileged members. Here, we are reminded of Hooks questioning Betty Friedan as to who would fill in for white, middle-class housewives' domestic work if they were to enter the professional workforce (ibid.) or, as Evelyn Nakano Glenn articulates in her 1992 essay on the historical continuities of racial divisions in paid reproductive labor in the West: 'Who benefits from the oppression of the underclass?'

On another level of analysis, ignoring intra-group differences can lead to tensions amongst groups as well, as Crenshaw (1991) points out, giving the example of how ignoring black men's abuse of black women can lead to aggravation of white hostility against black men, premised on the historical racial stereotype that the latter is 'inherently' violent.

Yet another intersectional feminist critique of identity politics comes from Nancy Fraser, who problematizes identity politics for its foregrounding and valourization of 'difference': in 'demanding respect for oneself as different' (Kruks, 2001: 108-9), identity politics loses its transformative potential in favor of recognition and visibility as different within the existing system, shifting its goals 'from redistribution to recognition' (Fraser, 2015: 701). This, in turn, depoliticizes identity formations to 'simply an identity marker' (Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective, 2014: 25), and situates them within a sanitized cultural realm that is yet shaped by the same patterns of domination.

Moreover, in cases of valourization of difference, there is also the danger of solidifying this sense of difference. Whereas identity is shifting, ever-forming, and relational, some kinds of identity politics may see it as stable and essential, constructed in opposition to another identity. As Cathy Cohen (1997:440) notes:

The inability of queer politics to effectively challenge heteronormativity rests, in part, on the fact that despite a surrounding discourse which highlights the destabilization and even deconstruction of sexual categories, queer politics has often been built around a simple dichotomy between those deemed queer and those deemed heterosexual.

This dichotomy not only ignores 'the ways our multiple identities work to limit the entitlement and status some receive from obeying a heterosexual imperative' (ibid), it also reduces queerness to the realm of the sexual and ignores that the identity category of the homosexual itself was has been historically formed through the transposing of a sexual practice onto 'a kind of interior androgyny' and was not always present (Foucault 1978: 43).

Other operations of identity politics can similarly be given to creating dichotomies between the oppressed and the oppressor: woman and man, black and white, and so on. This, too, may lead to a turn away from the transformative aims of political organization to forms of separatism; what bell hooks (1984:26) describes as the concentration on developing a counter-culture for instance, 'a woman-centered world wherein participants have little contact with men'. In such instances, not only is one removed from others who despite occupying a different identity may be suffering from similar oppressions and oppressors, but one also runs the risk of re-creating oppressive structures within this new counter-culture for its focus on a single axis of solidarity and lack of recognition of intra-group differences. Here, one must note that the Combahee River Collective's statement on identity politics declares itself as against precisely this example of lesbian separatism, calling it 'a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.' (1983: 270).

At this juncture, it may be clearer that it is not so much identity politics per se, as it was originally conceptualized by the Combahee River Collective, that intersectional feminists find limiting. Instead, it is the particular, single-axis forms it has taken over the years, which are seen as especially limiting: for instance, in terms of scholarship, Ann Laura Stoler (1995) talks about how analyses of sexuality and the colonial order suffered a long time because Foucault's works on sexuality and race were not read together: queer scholars disregarded his work on race, and to a certain extent, post-colonial scholars disregarded his work on sexuality.

Indeed, in advocating for intersectionality, one must pay attention to relations of power and the multiple locations at which our identity identities are located, and through this construct a political position. In this context, what intersectional feminists find productive is a turn from identity politics to political identity. This political identity is one that is capable of being cooperative and coalitional, is based on a nuanced understanding of power relations, and a refusal, not of identity categories as a whole, but of identity categories as stable phenomena.

In other words, since we are always becoming (Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective, 2014: 25), we must in the words of Cohen, who is here paraphrasing Crenshaw use the idea of intersectionality to reconceptualize or problematize the identities and communities that are 'home' to us and challenge these identities that seem like home by acknowledging the other parts of our identities that are excluded (Cohen, 1997: 459). In doing so, one's politics moves beyond the confines of narrowly-defined social categories into a more expansive realm that neither leaves certain people behind nor forces them into categories where their needs are not seen.

Conclusion

Thus, identity politics is seen by intersectional feminists as useful insofar as it facilitates the formation of a community and a collective consciousness that is not contingent on a rigid or uniform identity. Such a politics or political identity is rather based on a recognition of how our identities are formed by our multiple and intersecting locations along axes of power, with the goal of destabilizing them. Equally important for intersectional feminists is the commitments stated by the Combahee River Collective to develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice, thus also destabilizing the notion of a pre-packaged politics in favor of one that evolves alongside changes in its socio-political and historical context.