In Defense of Identity Politics: A Queer Reclamation of a Radical Concept.

Abstract

“In Defense of Identity Politics” analyzes the uses to which radical feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, and sexual radicalism put identity politics during the 1970s and early 1980s. It seeks to reinterpret queer theory and politics as the continuation rather than the reversal of those movements. Their identity politics was not typically essentialist, and queer theory, despite its claims, largely re-activated and expanded the constructivist models of gender and sex it inherited from earlier radical, identity-political movements. To counter the equation of identity politics with essentialism (Diana Fuss, Judith Butler), the first chapter analyzes the writings of early radical feminists (Ellen Willis, Jo Freeman, Anne Koedt, Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Gayle Rubin), gay and lesbian liberationists (Carl Wittman, Radicalesbians, Martha Shelley, Dennis Altman), and French materialist feminists (Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Colette Guillaumin, Christine Delphy, Monique Wittig). It reconstitutes the anti-essentialist definitions of sexuality and gender which those writers formulated within structuralist, Marxist, Freudo-Marxist, and materialist frameworks. In Chapter Two, a reinterpretation of the writings of Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, the Combahee River Collective, Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa refutes the notion, promoted by recent proponents of queer of color critique (Roderick Ferguson, Judith Halberstam, Rinaldo Walcott), that women of color feminists in the 1970s criticized identity politics. Actually, they invented it. Their politics of difference conduced not to the abolition but to the multiplication of identity political standpoints. Chapter Three recovers the history of The Eulenspiegel Society, the Society of Janus, Gay Male SM Activists and Samois, examining the emergence of sadomasochist political movements in the United States. This instance of identity politics is best conceived as what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe call an “articulation”: a discursive and political transformation that has the effect of unifying, redefining, and radicalizing pre-existing social (medical) identities. The concluding chapter confronts the hostility of contemporary queer theorists (Siobhan Somerville, David Eng, Jasbir Puar) as well as feminists (Bell Hooks) to drawing analogies among different oppressions. Such hostility fails to recognize the productivity of what Laclau and Mouffe call “equivalences” among struggles. Analogy turns out to be a crucial tool for radical democratic politics.