Visualising IdentityBeccy Kennedy B.M.Kennedy@mmu.ac.uk

Identity Politics

Theories about identity

Identifying your practice

Key concepts: difference,

appropriation, subculture

What is identity?• From the Latin idem meaning 'same.'

• Although based on dictionary definitions:

• What makes the characteristics of a person, object or a group distinctive

• The fact of being - what makes a thing a thing or a person the person they

are.

• So key theoretical perspectives that look at identity could relate to concepts

and reasons for being - human being and also material being.

• - ontologically - investigating being and existence itself through

philosophical thought.

• - sociologically - how individuals connect with or are sculpted by the world

around them in terms of social groups , structures and institutions.

• - psychologically - how the individual is formed in terms of the psyche and

its development in relationship to its immediate environment and the people

in it, which occurs whilst the mind and person is developing.

Relevant Theorists and Theories (potentially)

ontologically - investigating being and

existence itself through philosophical

thought.

sociologically - how individuals connect

with or are sculpted by the world

around them in terms of social groups ,

structures and institutions.

psychologically - how the individual is

formed in terms of the psyche and its

development in relationship to its

immediate environment and the

people/objects in it, which occurs whilst

the mind and person is developing.

Greek philosophical thought, such as

Plato's 'forms' or Hereclitus' idea that

'everything flows.' Later philosophers

who tried to prove the existence of god

by thinking about how we are innately

predisposed to experience reality -

Descartes (Cartesian Dualism of mind

and body), Kant…Then, the Empiricists

(Locke, Hulme, Berkely) and 20th C -

phenomenologists, Heidegger's

'dasein', Merleau Ponty, Post

structuralism - breaking down the

knowledge (cultural and linguistic)

systems of which we are a part -

Baudrillard, Foucault and more recently

New Materialist approaches to thinking

about the entanglement of mind and

matter.

'Fathers' of sociology- Marx, Durkheim

and Weber - classical (19thC)

sociology of the modernising world,

focusing on economic materialism or

Structural Functionalism of

institutions/systems/structures which

order and affect social life. Later, 20th

C sociology deconstructed earlie

sociological thought, e.g. Althusser on

interpellation – the significance of the

subject’s ideology within the capitalism

system; Symbolic Interactionism

(Mead) - we learn our identity through

our subjective observations and

interactions with others and Blumer

(1962). Giddens (1980s/90s)- structure

and individual agents are

corroborative. Conflict perspectives –

based on Marxism but considering

more diverse sites of conflict.

Freudian psychoanalysis (early 20thC),

Lacanian (mid 20thC) and Kristeva,

Cixious and Iraguray (late 20th C) - all

applying deconstructionist strategies to

examine the development of the

psyche. Key concepts: Freud - Id / ego

/ - which makes up the self. Lacan's 'le

manque/the lack' - we can never truly

become our full selves. Kristeva's 'the

abject.' - the horrific realisation that we

are mortal matter. Lacan, Kristeva, etc

de/reconstructed Freud in a post

structuralist manner, considering how

our psyche and our sense of being is

constructed and confined by our early

experiences with our mother or father

and the language systems of which

they are (and we become) a part. Also

Klein's subject-object relations theory.

• Lacanian psychoanalysis – the Mirror stage.

• Cooley (1902) – the looking glass self. ‘I’ behave in

accordance to how I think ‘you’ see me.

One / Other

Subject/ Object

I / you

• All these disciplinary perspectives

challenge our assumptions about

what identity is and, in turn, about

who we are. How are we unique if our

personal characteristics are

developed (and in a way determined)

by our experiences of childhood,

language and structured systems?

• We are complex combinations of our

experiences but we might find

ourselves fitting in with some other

'complex combinations of

experiences' more than others, as

some people's experiences and

responses of the world may appear to

overlap with your own.

Ingroups, Outgroups and

subcultures

‘the construction of a style, in a

gesture of defiance or

contempt, in a smile of a

sneer. It signals a Refusal.’

(Hebdidge: 1979: 3)

Cultural appropriation?

‘These “humble objects” can

be magically appropriated;

“stolen” by subordinate groups

and made to carry “secret”

meanings: meanings which

express, in code, a form of

resistance to the order which

guarantees their continued

subordination.’ – Hebdidge, on

the safety pin in punk

subculture (1979)

In different ways, Stuart Hall

and Dick Hebdidge

discussed appropriation.

For Hall and other Cultural Studies and

post-colonial theorists (e.g. Homi Bhaba on

mimicry), marginalised groups would

appropriate elements of mainstream

culture and integrate into elements of ‘their’

‘ethnic’ culture.

For Hebidge, appropriation was about

subcultures appropriating objects for dress,

inverting the original mainstream and safe

meanings, associated with their parents’

cultures. Arguably, with punk, this was,

however, also about contesting the

bourgeoise.

Conflict(ed)

Perspectives

Less about a cultural identity which has

been chosen/carved as a rejection of the

mainstream - as in a subcultural identity.

It is where a social identity grouping is

automatically applied, based on racial,

sexual and physical ‘difference’, in

relation to policy making.

Identity strands, Identity

Politics

• ‘Activists involved in successful social movements, such as the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, who self-consciously invoked the concept of identity in their struggles for social justice held at least the following two beliefs: (1( that identities are often resources of knowledge especially relevant for social change, and that; (2) oppressed froups need to be at the forefront of their own liberation..’ (Alcoff et al: 2006; 2)

• Developed in the 1960s in relation to marginalised identities, including people of black and multi-ethnic origin (e.g. in the US, Chicano identities), women, homosexuals and people with disabilities. The worldwide 1968 protests were significant in the realisation of Identity Politics.

Womanhouse curated exhibition, (January 30 – February 28, 1972) organized

by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of

the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program. www.womanhouse.net/

‘Identity is brought to the forefront when something assumed to

be coherent and predictable is disrupted by experiences of

anxiety and uncertainty’ (Zineb Sedira, in , Fran Lloyd 1999:

215).

‘…we need to understand them as produced in specific historical

and institutional sites…they emerge within the play of specific

modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the

marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an

identity, naturally- constituted unity – an ‘identity’ in its traditional

meaning (that is, an all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without

internal differentiation.’ (Stuart Hall: 1996: 4)

What you are is what you’re not.

Intersectionality• Kimberly Crenshaw (1991)

• Where an individual experiences more than one site of conflict in relation to their identity.

• Intersectionality means that while part of each individual’s multiple experiences of domination and/or subordination may change over time, mixed minorities often face a much heavier and more inflexible cluster of oppressions constraining their actions for long periods or even permanently.

• Patricia Collins (2000) - despite the shared systems of oppression affecting people in the same social category, every individual’s situation is unique.

Intersectionality of material

experiences• Identity politics has been

criticised for its perceivable elitist or sectarian focus upon identity struggles whilst perceivablyignoring – or even evading - the increasingly plutocratic (arguably) world we live in,where the divide between the super-rich and everyone else can be deemed as the main problem, in a neoliberal capitalist system.

• Recently, it has been criticised from both the left and right.

‘It’s not racism that creates the difference between classes; it’s capitalism. And it’s not anti-racism that can combat the difference; it’s socialism. We’re frequently told that black poverty is worse than white poverty—more isolating, more concentrated—and maybe that’s true. But why, politically, should it matter? You don’t build the left by figuring out which victim has been most victimized; you build it by organizing all the victims. When it comes to the value of universal health care, for example, we don’t need to worry for a second about whether the black descendants of slaves are worse off than the white descendants of coal miners. The goal is not to make sure that black people are no sicker than white people; it’s to make everybody healthy. That’s why they call it universal’ – Walter Benn Michaels (pro-Sanders)

Alt-right gamers, anti-SJW memes and #gamergate

‘Yiannopoulos understood what was bubbling up on platforms such as Reddit and 4chan: a new gamified form of hard-right discourse based not on ideas but on memes, harassment and “saying the unsayable”, driven by white male resentment toward minorities and so-called “social justice warriors”, the au courant name for political correctness.’ (Lynskey: 2017)

Also, the working class, white right appropriating the language of Identity Politics

Your research• Is your own social grouping an aspect of your research,

in terms of who is or isn’t included within it? Are any groups excluded within the images you create or consider? How might this affect the way you look? If you are presenting your own work, how might you consider ‘the mirror’?

• Is subcultural identity significant?

• If your research involves people, what kind of conceptual framework might you use to study them? For example, might you integrate psychoanalytical analyses to account for the behaviours or creations of those you explore?

• Methods. For parity/equality of people’s insights, surveys can be useful as well as unstructured or semi-structured interviews. If you are more explicitly examining identity issues, more structured interviews or analyses may be useful in order to target concerns.