A Series on Identity Politics and its History - Part Two

Author's Note: Part Two in this series on Identity Politics was written as a Work in Progress Paper and presented at Australian Catholic University's 'Honors Progress Presentations' in June 2018. The differences between Part One and Two are significant, and my thinking here has changed quite dramatically in comparison. As my work develops, and drafts become final drafts and eventually finished chapters, it is interesting to reflect on how not just my ideas, but my methodology and approach is evolving as I write and research. What you read here is significant to my work, and the influence of De Beauvoir in particular remains strong. However, my understanding of the topic and the sub-topics involved has again changed significantly since having written this piece.

For anyone interested in this work, or the series that it is a part of, please feel free to get in touch here on the website and be sure to keep an eye out for upcoming essays in the series.

The history of identity politics as an explicit practice and concept is relatively new when compared to the long historical presence and importance of identity in politics and culture. The way in which a people have self-conceptualised their identities, the way societies and cultures have come to define themselves, and how these ideas have come to shape the unfolding of history, has increasingly become an important site of historical scholarship (Wood 2013, Shin 2011). By reviewing the politics of identity, self-conceptualisation, and self-definition this chapter will trace the origins and evolution of modern identity politics. The chapter will locate the various conceptual developments that have contributed to identity politics inherent inconsistency – an inconsistency that treats difference as both virtue and vice. In doing so, the chapter’s aim is to provide an answer to the first research question: how has identity politics developed an inconsistent treatment of difference? The chapter proceeds to answer this question by conducting a conceptual history – examining the historic development of modern identity politics as a concept and practice. The conceptual history will review the literature and activism surrounding the movement politics of the twentieth century, uncover the origins of modern identity politics, and examine the subsequent conceptual and practical evolutions that follow.

Modern identity politics originated in the social movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Early contributions to the development of an explicit identity politics were made by the Civil Rights Movement and early Second Wave Feminism (Wiarda 2014). This chapter examines the emergence of identity politics in the political and philosophical literature of Feminist and African-American writers and activists. The first sight of some of the characteristics of modern identity politics can be found in Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ published in 1949. De Beauvoir unveiled a gendered identity politics, calling for the self-realisation of Woman as a distinguished Subject separate from, but equal to Man (De Beauvoir 2011). This inspired the collectivisation of female identity into a movement capable of reclaiming female definition and determination (De Beauvoir 2011, Bergoffen 2014). De Beauvoir’s identity politics became more explicit with the introduction of Betty Friedan’s ‘Feminine Mystique’ (Friedan 2010, Heyes 2018). Friedan’s contributions shifted identity politics back toward a less radical, more Liberal Feminist tradition, but maintained the Feminist spirit of De Beauvoir (Boucher 2003). These works mark the beginning of modern identity politics’ conceptual development. From here, the chapter’s conceptual history focuses on the two major conceptual evolutions that came to significantly change the nature and practice of modern identity politics; 1) diversity and the turning inward of identity politics 2) the influence of postmodernism. The first of these conceptual evolutions was developed as an attack on the tradition of Liberal Feminism, and is categorised by a ‘turning inward’ of identity politics transformative political potential (Kauffman 2001). The second, was the sceptical and relativistic influence of postmodern philosophies, in particular of Michel Foucault. The sceptical relativism introduced by Postmodernism continued the ‘turning inward’ of identity politics by influencing the more radical elements of progressivism, segregating accessibility to knowledge and truth (Williams 2016). By reviewing the origins and evolution of modern identity politics, the chapter will demonstrate how these major sites of historical development have introduced an inconsistent treatment of difference.

A Modern Turn in Identity Politics Modern identity politics can be traced back to the publication of Simone De Beauvoir’s 1949 work, ‘The Second Sex’ (Ryan 2001). De Beauvoir’s identity politics grew out of the necessity for woman to find a collective consciousness through which they could lay the foundations of political change and challenge the oppressive social structure of the day (Ryan 2001). De Beauvoir presents a distinctly Feminist identity politics, however the necessary collective challenge that De Beauvoir describes is characteristic of modern identity politics in general because of its use of the same fundamental dichotomies between Subject and Other. De Beauvoir is of particular interest however, for making important conceptual additions, allowing analysis to begin to distinguish between modern and antiquated iterations of identity politics. Because of the distinct Feminist project set forth by De Beauvoir in ‘The Second Sex’, identity politics is initially discussed here in relation to early Feminism, and the Feminist identity politics that emerged from De Beauvoir’s writing.

In one of the most important philosophical texts of the twentieth century, De Beauvoir unveils a female identity in desperate need of self-realisation and feminine solidarity. De Beauvoir exposes the condition of women’s oppression in society and demonstrates the ethical imperative to abolish the conception of Woman that resigned her to her place under Man. ‘The Second Sex’ is a response to the lack of a distinct female identity within the homogeneous concept of Man. De Beauvoir laments the idea of a shallow equality shared between men and women that is ignorant of difference, an idea characterised for De Beauvoir by the author Dorothy Parker, who writes: “I cannot be fair about books that treat women as women. My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we are, should be considered as human beings.” Universalist abstractions of this sort for De Beauvoir are “not a liberation for [women], but an inauthentic flight” (De Beauvoir 2011). Women lacked a sense of self-definition, one that was distinctly female and sensitive to the peculiarities of femininity. The differences between the sexes that were so clearly apparent to De Beauvoir, left the question of ‘what is a woman?’ unanswered and ambiguous.

Drawing on Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic (Hegel 1998), De Beauvoir examines the dynamic between Man as the essential Subject, and Woman as the inessential Other immediately setting forth the potential for a gendered identity politics (Ryan 2001). The philosophical concept of Woman had until De Beauvoir only ever been defined in its inessential relationship to the essential Subject of Man. The absorption of Female history and identity into the homogeneity of the concept ‘Man’, gave philosophical force to the call for a reimagining female identity, and thus to a Feminist identity politics. For all of history Woman, by their physiological structure, had been the inessential Man. For De Beauvoir their “alterity […] appears to be an absolute” (De Beauvoir 2011). There is no accidental nature to the historical fact of Woman’s Otherness, it was and is the state of history that women are the inessential and incomplete Man. The “fundamental characteristic of Woman”, wrote De Beauvoir, was that she was “the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other” (De Beauvoir 2011). De Beauvoir saw the centre of women’s oppression laying not at the feet of simple biology, economics, politics, or legality; women’s oppression was derived essentially from the entire process by which the feminine was defined and determined by society (Bryson 1992). De Beauvoir’s identity politics called on women to realise the historic and social constructions of femininity, and form female coalitions capable of recapturing and restructuring what ‘Woman’ was. The feminist identity politics that can be drawn out of De Beauvoir’s work contains many of the conceptual characteristics of modern identity politics. Identity politics is fundamentally about the dichotomy between Subject and Other. It generally operates in one of three ways: A Subject defining itself by the exclusion of an Other from its concept of Subject; as an Other defining itself by its exclusion from normative status as Subject; or as an intermittent transition between either of these positions. In De Beauvoir’s case, women are defined as the Other in their exclusion from the normative status held by the essential Subject ‘Man’. This dichotomy is the fundamental conceptual element that is stable through even antiquated iterations of identity politics. De Beauvoir however, is of particular interest for having made additions to the concept of identity politics that can be considered modern.

De Beauvoir’s major modern addition to the concept of identity politics is the idea of connected existences. Connected existence recognises that experiences, while vastly different across multiple discourses, can find points of convergence. Women may share in a female identity – this identity however should also manifest into infinite variation, leading to a vast variety of experiences that will differ greatly among any one group. De Beauvoir avoids falling into abstraction when discussing the multiplicity of female identity by appealing to the situated subjectivity of women’s experiences (Stavro 2007). A review of historic materialist, biological, psychological, mythological and literary accounts of experience, led De Beauvoir to find that no single perspective can describe in full, the Otherness of female identity (De Beauvoir 2011, Stavro 2007). However, this review also found that women’s experience is present across discourses under the category of ‘Woman’, and that there are points at which differences between women converge. This conceptual development added a nuance to female identity politics, recognising the similarities between women, while avoiding abstract homogenous categorisation. Pre-modern iterations of identity politics were essentialist and abstracted from the unique female experiences underneath the category of Woman. De Beauvoir, by recognising that identity is not a universalising entity, shifted the conceptual moorings of identity politics to reflect not only the generalities of oppression, but the situated subjectivity of individuals (Stavro 2007). The aim of an identity politics aware of the idea of connected existences then, should seek out what similarity it can, and use the connections between people to construct greater understanding of the different ways in which identity can manifest. This more nuanced approach encourages the acknowledgement of difference, and claims that communication across these differences can breed empathy and understanding capable of forming greater coalitions. As the introduction suggest, having established the origins of identity politics, the thesis will continue the conceptual history by locating and analysing the two major conceptual shifts that have resulted in modern identity politics’ inconsistent treatment of difference. The first of these being the challenge mounted by increasing recognition of diversity within social movement politics – turning the site of transformative identity politics back onto the individual (Kauffman 2001). The thesis will demonstrate how the site of identity politics’ transformative potential shifted from public sphere institutional politics, to a personal sphere politics of ego and the self. The second major development featured in the conceptual history is the influence of postmodern thought. The thesis will focus in particular on the influences of Foucault, which entrenched the turning inward of identity politics and added a sceptical relativism whose force began to segregate knowledge and truth along lines of identity (Williams 2016, Bartky 1991). In demonstrating the significance of these developments, the thesis will argue that difference – while revered by identity politics – is treated as highly suspicious and potential dangerous when that difference represents a view that is contrary to the ideological assumptions and aspirations of identity politics. This section of the thesis will have by this stage delivered an answer to the question: how has identity politics developed an inconsistent treatment of difference? Having established how this inconsistent treatment of difference has emerged, attention turns to what the implications of this inconsistency are for freedom of speech and expression. Using what has been established by the conceptual history, the thesis will develop a comprehensive theory of how modern identity politics engages with discourse and knowledge. The theory will demonstrate that identity politics views difference as a virtue, only as an undeniable subjectivity and validity of personal experiences, sitting within a hierarchy of victimisation. In answering the second research question, the thesis will then apply this theory to a case study analysis of Google’s controversial firing of James Damore. The case study analysis will uncover the paradoxical elements of identity politics theoretical approach to discourse, knowledge, and difference – in which difference is not only a virtue, but a vice. By demonstrating the inconsistency in identity politics’ treatment of difference in the context of this case study, the thesis will finally come to demonstrate the risks that are posed to free speech and expression by an identity politics that treats difference as both virtue and vice.

References

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