Introduction: Reconceptualizing Identity Politics in a Post Identity Politics Age

Abstract

As the first decade of the twenty-first century is rapidly coming to a close, another book on identity politics might be considered anachronistic. Popular, political, and scholarly opinions have it that we live in a post identity politics age. The ’80s’ and ’90s’ debates over essentialism have long ago subsided, but not before raising important questions about the self in relation to identity that have yet to be successfully resolved. The antiessentialist view that prevailed causing those debates to come to a close at the end of the ’9 0s provided an important insight that also came to be, ironically, the most important obstacle to the effectiveness of an ongoing feminist project. That insight consisted in the claim that universal understandings about women’s physical or metaphysical nature are false; there is no fixed, universalizing biological essence, nor are there sociocultural patterns of conduct, activities, or structures of feeling that bind all women together as a group. Whether celebrating women’s biological traits or social attributes in order to compensate for racist and patriarchal representations, or simply deconstructing the mind/nature dichotomy in order to dismantle Western binary thought that marginalized women in the first place, feminists, so the argument goes, had mistakenly reproduced stereotypical femininity.