Students, faculty, teachers, and activists across many venues have used intersectionality as an analytic tool to create more expansive understandings of individual and collective identities. Chapter 3 examined how the Combahee River Collective used identity as part of their process of empowerment. Their strategy of seeing identities as constructed and multiple was a core feature of their political analysis. These early expressions of identity within intersectionality exist today in many forms. For example, the scholarly essays, personal narratives, ethnographic inquiry, and creative writings in Critical Articulations of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation point out how complex sexual identities emerge within various configurations of interlocking systems of oppression (Howard 2014). Similarly, the essays in Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life investigate the complex entanglements between interpersonal experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and ability, and how they relate to larger systems of power, oppression, and social privilege (Boylorn and Orbe 2014). For many, this focus on the social construction of identities has been a space of individual and collective empowerment.
Yet there is another widespread tendency within intersectionality, especially intersectional scholarship, which merits analysis precisely because identity has been so central to intersectionality. Increasingly, many people who are involved in intersectionality understand it as a theory of identity. Take, for example, how the introduction to the special issue of a journal devoted to “Race, Class, and Gender” summarizes this perspective: “Another attribute of this special issue is the extent to which it expresses intersectionality − a multifaceted perspective acknowledging the richness of the multiple socially-constructed identities that combine to create each of us as a unique individual” (Lind 2010: 3). Certainly, intersectionality does value the richness of multiple identities that make each individual unique. But intersectionality also means much more than this. To understand intersectionality primarily as a theory of individual identity, often with the goal of criticizing it, overemphasizes some dimensions of intersectionality while underemphasizing others.
Much is at stake for getting the relationship between identity and intersectionality right. To explore these connections, this chapter analyzes the connections between the politics of identity and intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis. First, because questions of the connections between identity and intersectionality extend beyond contemporary debates within the academy, the chapter begins not with academic debates but rather with hip hop. Given the amount of attention devoted to identity debates among scholars, it is useful to examine a different project of critical inquiry and praxis that occurs primarily outside the academy but that may have important ties to intersectionality.
Second, the chapter examines selected dimensions of contemporary scholarly debates concerning the connections of identity and intersectionality. Because the tone of academic debates about identity often reflect efforts to disavow the relevance of identity and of intersectionality for meaningful social justice projects, the chapter focuses on one particular strand of these debates, namely, scholarship that criticizes intersectionality because of its ties to identity. Here, social context matters. Scholars who criticize the ties between identity and intersectionality may advance provocative arguments, but they typically do so from within colleges and universities of the Global North. There are many points of view on identity and intersectionality. Yet this small but highly visible group has a relatively loud voice.
Finally, the chapter concludes with three important ideas concerning identity that might be useful for intersectionality. None of these ideas is new, but they might help intersectionality sustain its focus on social justice.
When it comes to the theme of identity, intersectionality and hip hop share some noteworthy similarities. Because people who experienced discrimination of race, class, age, sexuality, and citizenship have been central to the creation of both hip hop and intersectionality, it stands to reason that significant parallels might exist between these two forms of critical inquiry and praxis. Specifically, putting intersectionality and hip hop in dialog potentially provides another angle of vision on the identity politics of both.
The theme of identity has certainly been important for intersectionality. The Combahee River Collective (CRC) provided one of the clearest expressions of the politics of identity articulated during a foundational moment of intersectionality. The CRC Statement constitutes one of the sharpest elaborations of the kind of identity politics within intersectionality. To briefly review CRC's central tenets regarding identity politics: (1) CRC members understood identity as multiply shaped by their shared social location as African-American women within interlocking systems of oppression; (2) they conceptualized identities as political projects that are achieved through consciousness-raising about shared life conditions within structures of power; (3) they envisioned black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that they faced as black women; and (4) CRC identified the importance of building collective identity as a political project for women of color and other disenfranchised groups like themselves. The Statement clearly views identity politics as a vital tool of resistance against oppression and relies unambiguously on an understanding of identity as a political location, not an essence (Alcoff 2006: 15). This is the conception of the politics of identity that Crenshaw had in mind in her important article on intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991).
Hip hop expresses a similar sensibility concerning identity, yet in less explicit forms than intersectionality. Regardless of the lyrics, rap music is a form of powerful personal expression where youth claim a voice that emphasizes individual identity. In today's global context, youth are positioned to craft an identity politics that criticizes the social issues that they face under neoliberalism. Young people are often among the first to see the interconnections among systems of power that put them at risk, primarily because they experience the contours of growing global social inequality in their everyday lives. Because they are young and experience social inequalities that are associated with age as a system of power firsthand, children, teenagers, and young adults have a special vantage point on intersecting social inequalities of ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and race. They know that their neighborhoods receive inferior services and special policing. They see how their schools have less experienced teachers, old and dilapidated buildings, and outdated textbooks. They know that jobs for teenagers are minimal, and that the legitimate jobs that do exist pay little and have few benefits. Race, class, gender, and citizenship categories disadvantage many groups under neoliberal policies, yet, because age straddles all of these categories, young people's experiences of social problems are more intensified.
Within and despite the commercialization of rap by major corporations, many hip hop artists have focused on the myriad social problems faced by youth. The practices associated with hip hop, for example, rap lyrics that criticize the police and schools, tagging public space with graffiti, and refusing to follow the rules, disrupt the neoliberal status quo. Originally seen as “noise,” hip hop is increasingly seen as a form of cultural politics that complements the traditional politics of voting and holding-office (Clay 2012; Rose 1994). Youth are too young to vote and they rarely have the skills and time to get elected to public office. So where do they take their protest? When youth confront schools, labor markets, and other social institutions as part of the structural domain of power, and experience policing of the disciplinary domain of power, they turn to other venues for political expression. Music, dance, poetry, and art of the cultural domain of power and personal politics of the interpersonal domain grow in significance. Both the cultural domain and the interpersonal domain focus on the significance of identity. In hip hop, teenagers and young adults tell the story of their own lives, the truths of their own experiences. Hip hop is not identity politics in the abstract. Rather, hip hop constitutes an important space for developing the kind of collective identity politics that informs contemporary intersectional praxis (see, e.g., Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013; Crenshaw 1991; Terriquez 2015).
When it comes to the links between politics and identity, intersectionality and hip hop grapple with a similar set of challenges that shape the politics of identity within each area. First, intersectionality and hip hop both experienced rapid growth as their ideas were dispersed within different global venues. Both were places where collective identity politics of disenfranchised groups moved into public space. This dispersal may have been important to the construction of collective identity itself. By the early 2000s, hip hop's global dispersal surpassed intersectionality's travels. Mass media and digital space have been crucial to hip hop's dispersal within global urban spaces. The spread of hip hop to become a global phenomenon comes both through the commercialization and marketing of its major figures and through bottom-up initiatives by youth whose identity narratives reflect their local conditions. Youth identity politics occupy this contested space between the conformist pressures of neoliberalism and the participatory ethos of hip hop, especially evident in spoken word, where everyone has a voice. In this fast-paced digital era, the aesthetics and politics of hip hop have been disarticulated and rearticulated by youth in multiple places. Because each local neighborhood or city has its own particular history and story, hip hop takes different forms and advances distinctive issues. There is no hip hop leader or archetypal form of hip hop. Instead, hip hop constitutes an assemblage of loosely linked local projects, where the meaning of local is constantly reshaped by social media itself.
A truly global phenomenon, hip hop's geopolitical dispersal has gone far beyond its US origin story. Youth use hip hop as a form of cultural politics to analyze important social issues in North America, the Caribbean and Latin America, Asia, and Africa. For example, Muslim youth use hip hop to protest the West's war on terrorism (see Aidi 2014). Similarly, the Aboriginal hip hop group A Tribe Called Red supports the Idle No More movement (see Shingler 2013). The Black Atlantic constitutes another important axis of hip hop's dispersal. Migration of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian populations has created new social problems for youth who often don't see a place for themselves either in sending countries or their new nations. The heterogeneity of youth experiences means that the issues raised by youth can look like one another on some dimensions but not on others. For example, because issues faced by youth living in the segregated suburbs outside French cities resemble those of urban youth living inside US cities, Francophone hip hop and US hip hop have a similar vibe. In contrast, youth who live in small cities and villages, where rural realities are different, often draw upon local cultures to adapt hip hop as an art form to express their identity politics.
Second, intersectionality and hip hop both recognize the significance of identities for political consciousness and behavior. Not only do they both offer alternative analyses of social problems, they point to reframing identities as an important component of politics. Hip hop communities understand personal identity narratives as highly influential in people's everyday lives, especially when responding to social problems. In his ethnography, 5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs, Bogazianos argues that hip hop provided an alternative narrative for drugs that, in turn, contested public policies of criminalization that demonized and locked up youth of color. Bogazianos advances a novel thesis of how hip hop accomplished this: “What rap, ethnographic literature on crack dealing, and research on America's declining violence rates suggest is that youth, indeed, have been engaged in very serious efforts to monitor, train, and restrain themselves” (Bogazianos 2012: 12). In other words, because youth saw the dangers of the stereotypical identities that were manufactured for them, they used rap music to resist these identities. Bogazianos suggests that the decline of crack markets and the associated declines in lethal violence that began in the early 1990s were “seriously influenced by the cultural stigma that youth in communities most affected by crack cocaine attached to its users, derogatorily referring to them as ‘crackheads’ ” (Bogazianos 2012: 4). Stated differently, not only did youth advance an alternative analysis of crack use but creating, politicizing, and censuring the identity of a crackhead was an important part of their political response to drugs. Youth had to craft their own self-defined identities, an important task for disenfranchised people who consistently have to create meaningful identities in response to stereotypes that are imposed from above.
Third, hip hop and intersectionality both reject views of identity that pit the individual against the collective. Instead, both highlight how collective political consciousness emerges when people see how their individual life experiences are connected to broader social forces. Hip hop's narratives contain a critique of many of the social processes that intersectionality also contests, but do so via an unabashed claiming of a collective identity politics as a vehicle of social commentary. For example, youth of color, especially in urban settings, are well aware of the effects of the defunding and neglect of public education on their lives. In urban areas, this educational neglect serves as a catalyst for outpourings of narratives from young people about forms of social injustice. The themes within hip hop are often raw, pointing to the effects on young people's lives of policies decided elsewhere. Initially created by poor and working-class African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino youth as a mechanism to express their experiences with and feelings about the economic, social, and political challenges in their lives, hip hop has grown far beyond critique to provide a space for an emerging identity politics.
Spoken-word poetry constitutes an important site where the content of youth identity narratives reflects an infusion of intersectionality's narrative of multiple identities. In spoken word venues, individual artists share experiences of sexual assault, racial profiling, being too poor to afford clothes, homophobic violence, being kicked out of families, being rendered homeless, and the terrible conditions of their public schools. Yet they do so not in the privacy of hidden conversations, but in public venues, in supportive communities that they create and maintain. Spoken word becomes a place of healing from the injuries of varying combinations of forms of oppression. But the narratives of spoken-word poetry do not exclusively emphasize anger or sadness. As part of a broader expansion of hip hop to include artists from multiple genders, sexual orientations, religious backgrounds, and even ages (“old school” rap happens too), spoken word events demonstrate the significance of art as a place of love, healing, and intimacy.
Finally, and significantly, intersectionality and hip hop both face the challenge of how to cast a self-reflexive eye on their respective identity politics. Colleges and universities have been important sites for intersectionality's emergence and institutionalization, a placement that has elevated scholarship as the visible face of intersectionality's cultural politics. In contrast, hip hop's institutional terrain consists of the music industry, an institution with a more visible history of exploiting artists. Hip hop's visibility within television, music, and fashion raises questions about cultural politics as a form of political activism. In many ways, the manipulation of identities and identity politics is more visible within the music videos of mass-media venues than within the textbooks and research articles of more respectable academic venues. The culture industry knows the power of its own practices. As a genre, hip hop confronts capitalist marketplace relations that are part of neoliberalism from a seemingly different vantage point − hip hop has been immensely profitable. Similarly, intersectionality faces the same pressures to turn intersectionality into a hot commodity for academic consumption.
Hip hop may have the potential to foster a collective identity politics that embraces a critical consciousness, but does it actually do so? Scholars and hip hop practitioners alike have criticized rap in particular for promoting hyper-masculinity, misogyny, and homophobia. Analyzing Billboard's top rap songs certainly provides evidence for this point of view. Yet the issue is to engage the contested politics of gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity within hip hop, not criticize it as a whole. More nuanced analyses by scholars and artists who want to develop hip hop as a form of critical inquiry and praxis bring more complex intersectional analyses to the forefront (see, e.g., Clay 2008; Pough 2004).
Scholarship that uses intersectionality as an analytic tool to study hip hop highlights sheds light on hip hop's identity politics. In Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and Global Race Consciousness, Sharma provides a fascinating and nuanced analysis of identity politics of Desis youth in hip hop (Sharma 2010). Sharma examines how middle-class South Asian youth, or Desis, navigate the terrain of race, class, gender, and immigrant status in the United States. Sharma examines how Desis craft identities in response to a mix of factors: (1) relationships with their parents who want them to retain Indian culture and middle-class lifestyles; (2) their varying social locations within diverse South Asian communities where being Indian and middle class privileges them; and (3) the neighborhoods where they live, which can be white or racially mixed. Sharma traces how hip hop provides an alternative space for Desis youth who use hip hop to carve out new identities within these contested politics. The complexities of Sharma's analysis lie in her attention to how Desi women within hip hop flip the scripts of gender and sexuality. She also interrogates issues of ownership over hip hop, illustrating that, while Desis see the connections with black people and global racism, they creatively employ hip hop for new projects.
In his ethnography, Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification, Anthony Kwame Harrison provides another angle of vision on the identity politics that is associated with hip hop, in this case an analysis of a diverse community of youth who identify as black, Latino, white, mixed, and/or LGBT (Harrison 2009). Harrison's ethnography of kids involved in underground hip hop in the Bay Area, or “West Coast underground hip hop,” sees “the erosion of barriers that have traditionally separated hip hop performers from audience members, or producers from consumers.” Harrison finds a cultural community constructed across multiple racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identities, a new place provided by hip hop. Moreover, this community is also political because it challenges prevailing power relations to craft a more democratic community (Collins 2010).
Imani Perry offers a more cautious analysis of hip hop's identity politics, pointing out how the norms of participatory democracy and neoliberal marketplace competition lie at the heart of this form of cultural politics. Perry's analysis of the contradictions within hip hop bear striking resemblance to those within intersectionality: “the combination of democracy (‘Speak your piece’) and meritocracy (‘Be the best MC’) that exists in hip hop is threatened at every turn” (Perry 2004: 7). She describes hip hop as a democratic space in which expression is more important than the monitoring of the acceptable. Hip hop rejects the silencing impulse about taboo topics that exists in various segments of American popular culture. This impulse to silence the disenfranchised not only occurs outside African-American communities, but also within them. Hip hop resists the silencing of certain politics, ideologies, sexual preferences, or other controversial matters. Hip hop may create a space of intellectual freedom, but Perry also points to the complexities within this space:
Hip hop may be democratic, but it is not, as a musical community, inherently liberatory. There are particular artists with liberatory agendas, who by their words protest racism, sexism, classism and thereby enlighten. But hip hop is not “liberation music.” The ideological democracy inherent in hip hop prevents the kind of coherent political framework necessary for it to be characterized as such.
(Perry 2004: 6−7).
As is everything else, hip hop too is a contested site of politics with its own specific form of identity politics.
Given the centrality of identity politics within both intersectionality and hip hop, contemporary academic debates about identity can seem strangely out of touch. Were the treatment of identity politics within academia just a matter of scholarly debate, exploring hip hop as a form of cultural politics would have been unnecessary. Yet because intersectionality has long been associated with identity politics, and shunned within some academic circles by the same token, intersectionality as a form of critical analysis and praxis has much at stake in getting this question of identity right. Here we focus on criticisms of intersectionality to ask what kind of identity do these critics assume to be associated with intersectionality? And if intersectionality is so compromised by its identity politics, should intersectionality divorce itself from any identity-related concerns and investigations?
Academic scholarship that focuses on identity as a defining feature of intersectionality typically offers a more narrow understanding of identity than those presented thus far in this book. Some critics construe intersectionality as inherently flawed due to overemphasis on identity, and even recommend abandoning intersectionality together. Others also point to the overemphasis on identity within intersectionality, counselling intersectionality scholars to pay less attention to it. Both strands of criticism see intersectionality as giving too much explanatory power to identity to explain social phenomena and political processes.
One criticism of intersectionality concerns the overuse of personal identity as a category of analysis. In other words, because too much attention is given to identity, intersectionality underemphasizes structural analyses, especially materialist analyses of class and power. Yet a careful read of intersectionality scholarship, past and present, reveals that these criticisms of intersectionality and identity become tenable only by ignoring the centrality of structural analyses that have characterized intersectionality from its beginning. For example, Beal's work, the CRC Statement, as well as the explicit focus on institutional transformation of key figures who introduced intersectionality to the academy suggest that, when it comes to questions of identity, intersectionality has long emphasized a combination of structural and cultural analyses. For example, Nirmala Erevelles approaches disability by focusing on “the actual social and economic conditions that impact (disabled) people's lives, and that are concurrently mediated by the politics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nation” (Erevelles 2011: 26). This is one example of many that illustrate that materialist analyses remain salient within intersectionality.
A related criticism sees intersectionality as being overly concerned with conceptions of identity that do not acknowledge difference. Essentialism conceptualizes individuals as having unchanged, fixed, or “essential” identities that they carry around with them from one situation to the next. In contrast to these essentialized, individual identities, individuals can be seen as having multiple “subjectivities” that they construct from one situation to the next. In other words, people have many choices and considerable agency about who they choose to be. Much intersectional scholarship supports this perspective on human subjectivity: individuals typically express varying combinations of their multiple identities of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and religion across different situations. Social context matters in how people use identity to create space for personal freedom.
This criticism of essentialism has also been applied to collective or group-based identities. Critics claim that collective identity can also have a negative effect on group politics when it suppress differences within a group. For example, if hip hop elevates African-American men as the essential identity for this form of cultural politics, it limits its political horizons because it ignores women, Desis, Aboriginal rappers, and Muslim rappers. The criticism of essentialism and collective politics has some validity. In fact, it is one that has been raised by scholars who use intersectionality as an analytic tool. For example, Cathy Cohen's important book The Boundaries of Blackness: Aids and the Breakdown of Black Politics presents a compelling analysis of how essentialist thinking that ignores the needs of LGBT African Americans, sex workers, and other groups within African-American communities compromised political responses to HIV (Cohen 1999). Rather than maligning identity politics writ large, Cohen challenges African Americans to draw upon more complex, intersectional notions of community and politics. Within the space of developing a collective identity politics, the challenge to all groups is to self-regulate and try to identify and oppose the essentialist tendencies of their projects.
Yet challenging groups to avoid essentialist pitfalls in developing collective political projects is not the focus of criticisms. Rather, critics deploy a scorched-earth policy of doing away with identity politics altogether in the name of eradicating the negative effects of essentialism. Yet being attentive to power relations that produce social inequality means that deconstructing identities within a situation of social inequality will have a disproportionate effect on poor people, women, racial groups, young people, undocumented immigrants, and similar groups who are disadvantaged within intersecting systems of oppression.
These strands of criticism that conflate intersectionality with identity seem to understand intersectionality as a type of identity studies. Consider Robyn Wiegman's claim that “intersectionality circulates today as the primary figure of political completion in US identity knowledge domains” (Wiegman 2012: 240). By this, she suggests that intersectionality is an important framework for thinking about politics within areas that are considering how identity is important for knowledge. She claims that intersectionality “is ubiquitous in identity-based fields of study” (2012: 2). This makes sense if one assumes that intersectionality is primarily, if not solely, about identity. Accepting the first part of the claim as valid, namely, that intersectionality is about identity, opens the door for the second part. Exactly which identities have been central to intersectionality in the past and which are central now? Associating intersectionality with African-American women, Latinas, the poor, and similarly disempowered people makes intersectionality into an inferior form of identity studies because the people at its center are inferior. Most likely, this interpretation is not Wiegman's intent, but the initial conceptual slippage puts this kind of argument on the path to this outcome. In other words, the problem is not an over-focus on identity. Rather, intersectionality focuses on the wrong kind of identity, one deemed too particular: that of black women (e.g., Nash 2008). Here intersectionality as identity studies is viewed as “exclusionary” or “parochial,” given its focus on black women, women of color, or disenfranchised people, where it should better aspire to “universalism” (e.g., Hutchinson 2001).
This raises the question of whether the criticism that identity is an overused category of analysis within intersectionality, a claim that there is “too much identity in intersectionality,” is actually claiming that there is “too much identity politics in intersectionality.” In other words, criticizing identity becomes a way of criticizing identity politics without directly confronting the many groups who have historically laid claim to it. In light of the robust understandings of identity politics that influenced social movement understandings of intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry and praxis, taking a closer look at the three main criticisms of identity politics is important.
First, identity politics is branded as separatist and fragmentary. Intersectionality becomes guilty by association: it allegedly breaks groups into ever-smaller sub-groups − “the infinite regress problem” (Ehrenreich 2002). This view endorses fragmentary understandings of social organization, when it acknowledges the existence of the social at all. This charge of infinite fragmentation often uses identity politics as a foil to defend the concept of class and class politics against intersectionality (which is seen as being about culture). According to its critics, intersectionality weakens class struggle by turning people's attention toward cultural matters. This shift away from traditional politics of protesting the policies of the state serves global capitalism (Mitchell 2013). Influential leftist intellectuals not only meet identity politics with great distrust, they grossly caricature it. For example, philosopher John D. Caputo's charge against identity politics builds on important Marxist philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek:
[T]here is the proliferation of identity politics, of women's rights, gay rights, the rights of the disabled, of anti-Jewish or anti-Hispanic or anti-Italian defamation organizations, and so on, which both Badiou and Žižek treat with great cynicism. Žižek recently quipped that he wanted to start up a necrophiliac rights group. Each segment of identity politics creates a new market of speciality magazines, books, bars, websites, DVDs, radio stations, a lecture circuit for its most marketable propagandizers, and so on. By creating an endless series of proliferating differences, of new speciality markets, cultural identity fits hand in glove with the ever-proliferating system of global capital.
In another example, materialist feminist Eve Mitchell targets intersectionality, which she conflates with identity politics, in order to recenter a class analysis: “Since identity politics, and therefore intersectionality theory, are a bourgeois politics, the possibilities for struggle are also bourgeois. Identity politics reproduces the appearance of an alienated individual under capitalism and so struggle takes the form of equality among groups at best, or individualized forms of struggle at worse” (Mitchell 2013).
Second, critics argue that identity politics values cultural recognition over economic redistribution. In other words, groups claiming identity politics want recognition of their own narrow interests rather than having a broader commitment to the social good. This claim circumvents a vast literature documenting how disenfranchised groups tackle the issue of social justice on both fronts and view cultural empowerment (race, gender, sexuality) and economic redistribution (class) as inseparable. Out of necessity, women of color integrated their claims for equality, recognition, and redistribution. Separating them was practically or analytically impossible when racism and sexism always structured the specific form of class exploitation that they face (Bhandar 2013). Treating these claims as separable and arguing that oppressed groups can favor one over the other does not match empirical evidence from political projects such as the contemporary Afro-Brazilian women's movement. Concretely, by categorizing gender and race-based claims as cultural and dissociating them from economic justice claims, this criticism fails to address the ways in which economic injustice relies on gendered and racialized structures in historically specific ways.
A third criticism of identity politics is that it fosters victimhood politics. In other words, people who claim identity politics are basically clinging to some sort of victim status − as women, or blacks, or disabled − as the basis of their separatist claims for recognition. Their political claims are based solely on victimhood, nothing else of value. Interestingly, within left-wing criticism of identity politics and, by implication, intersectionality as it gets equated with identity politics, bashing identity politics on the basis of its alleged victimhood culture brings together Marxists and postmodern leftists, two strands of thought that don't generally see eye to eye. Within Marxist critique, the victimhood argument is linked to class struggle and how identity politics purportedly serves the interests of global capitalism. Surprisingly, the postmodern left presents an especially scathing criticism of identity politics. For instance, political scientist Wendy Brown argues that identities invariably subjugate people and cannot be viable in emancipatory politics. For Brown, identities are “wounded attachments” that trap poor people, black people, LGBTQ people, and women in a cycle of rehashing their injuries and blaming their oppressors. Identity-based political movements thus rely on a compulsive repetition of traumatic events, holding us captive of our oppression. She speculates: “particular constituents […] of identity's desire for recognition […] seem to breed a politics of recrimination and rancor, of culturally dispersed paralysis and suffering, a tendency to reproach power rather than aspire to it, to disdain freedom rather than practice it” (Brown 1995: 55). In brief, identity politics disempowers oppressed people because it encourages them to cling to the status of victim.
Collectively, these arguments against intersectionality's claims to identity only work within narrow understandings of intersectionality that simultaneously emphasize intersectionality as a form of abstract inquiry and neglect intersectionality as a form of critical praxis as it actually happens. This book's expansive understanding of intersectionality provides an intellectual context for these particular criticisms of intersectionality and identity politics. It suggests that identity politics has had an opposite effect. For example, the case study of why black women in Brazil felt they needed a black women's movement speaks to this use of identity. The living identity politics of this group were decidedly not separatist: they valued both cultural recognition − namely, respect as Afro-Brazilian women − and economic redistribution in Brazil. They also eschewed victimhood politics of begging more powerful groups for intellectual and political guidance.
Several studies provide empirical evidence that confirm how disenfranchised people use identity politics for political empowerment. This empirical work both uses intersectionality as an analytic tool and refutes the main points of the depiction presented above of the identity politics within intersectionality. In the following three studies, researchers underscore how identities are primarily understood as a collective political subjectivity and conscious coalition that also leaves room for individual identity.
The ethnographic work of political scientist José E. Cruz counters the three major criticisms of intersectionality's identity politics: identity politics are separatist; they value cultural recognition over economic redistribution; and they incite victimhood politics. His study of Puerto Rican politics in Hartford, Connecticut, the oldest and largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the United States, demonstrates how identity-based political organizing, rather than causing isolation or wallowing in victimhood, encouraged greater political mobilization and citizen involvement (Cruz 1998). The Puerto Rican Political Action Committee of Hartford mobilized Puerto Rican identity as “a code that structured their entrance into mainstream society and politics” (Cruz 1998: 6). Their demands neither fragmented the political setting, nor artificially separated cultural recognition from economic redistribution.
Similarly, Kalpana Kannabiran's analysis of Dalit feminist resistance within India's National Federation of Dalit Women not only invalidates the critiques of identity politics, but also the postmodernist assumption that intersectionality is deeply flawed by essentialism. Kannabiran shows how the Dalit women's movement mobilized a collective identity that was forged “in several struggles at once” (Kannabiran 2006: 68) and that sought to create solidarities and dialog with other women's rights movements. Talking about “the intersectional articulation of the Dalit women's political position” (Kannabiran 2006: 67), Kannabiran views this identity as a creative expression of a political standpoint shaped by multiple and interrelated systems of oppression: religiously sanctioned casteism, patriarchy, capitalism, state, and religion. Vulnerabilities and violence generated by this organization of power are also multiple and interrelated: higher caste aggression perpetrated both by men and women, Dalit male aggression, patriarchal violence within the family and community, sexual assaults by men of higher castes, economic exploitation of both Dalit men and women by dominant caste-owned capital (e.g., landowners and factory owners), and the complicity of the state and its institutions. Kannabiran's work shows how, through identity-based resistance and struggle, Dalit women forged solidarities among race, caste, and gender at the local, national, and international levels. Moreover, they did so by using international soft-law mechanisms, as well as the theoretical framework provided by “intersectionality in race theory” (2006: 68).
Edwina Barvosa-Carter's historical account of the emergence of Latino/a identity in 1970s Chicago also refutes the understandings of identity politics offered by intersectionality's critics (Barvosa-Carter 2001). Her work shows how this new ethnic identity was a “politically strategic formation,” enabling the members of two discrete ethnic groups, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, to collectively understand themselves as “members of a single, larger, internally diverse, and politicized ethnic group” (2001: 21; italics in original). This new identity helped them collaborate across their differences to fight discrimination. Hardly a homogeneous ethnic identity, Latino/a signifies a political coalition aware of multiple differences − not only those between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, but also those within them. “In the process, Latino/a identified people both engaged a new identity and retained the identities they already had − including national, sexual, gender, age, ideological, class, professional, and other identities” (2001: 21).
Overall, scholars who consider intersectionality as flawed because of its ties to identity typically rely on understandings of identity and intersectionality that neglect how intersectionality as a form of critical praxis operates across many different venues. Instead, their criticisms constitute theoretical approaches to power and politics that remain plausible in the abstract. For Marxists, identity means being apolitical and obscuring class as the most fundamental oppression. For those who embrace postmodern anti-categorical thinking, intersectionality's identity conceptions are essentialist and exclusionary. Thus, in many of these critiques, identity gets either associated with bad politics or dissociated from politics in ways that resemble the decoupling of intersectionality from social justice. Yet, taking a more holistic approach to intersectionality, one that attends to intersectionality's critical praxis, creates space to rethink this relationship between intersectionality and the politics of identity.
The mainstream criticisms leveled against intersectionality's identity politics, namely, that intersectionality fosters separatism, overemphasizes cultural recognition, and exaggerates victimhood, could just as easily be targeted at hip hop. But when it comes to the identity politics of hip hop, these criticisms falter. As a form of cultural politics with tremendous global reach, hip hop can hardly be accused of being separatist. As a genre, hip hop contains numerous demands for better schooling, adequate housing, stopping police violence, and jobs. These kinds of social problems can only be met with some form of economic redistribution. Thus hip hop's cultural politics do not demand simple cultural recognition from the mainstream. Instead, hip hop uses identity politics as an important vehicle to criticize the lack of recognition of the social problems faced by disenfranchised youth. As for victimhood politics, what would be gained by youth who kept their victimization to themselves? The power of the voice in spoken word and rap lies in sharing stories not only of victimization, but also of triumph, struggle, disappointment, and a range of human experiences. Who benefits from the suppression of identity politics advanced by disenfranchised groups? And this is exactly the question that intersectionality must ask concerning its own practice.
Instead of dissociating intersectionality from these negative depictions of identity and identity politics, a more productive approach lies in examining how understandings of the politics of identity can constitute a starting point for intersectional inquiry and praxis and not an end in itself. Rod Ferguson captures this sensibility of identity as a starting point for intellectual and political action: “women of color feminism had to express a politics of negation and difference in which identity was a point of departure since the gendered and sexual regulations of national liberation proved that women of color, in general, and lesbians of color in particular could not take comfort in the presumed accommodations of nationalism” (Ferguson 2004: 130).
When it comes to intersectionality as a form of critical analysis and praxis, how might reclaiming identity politics speak to contemporary challenges of understanding social inequality and fostering social justice? This book cannot do justice to the heterogeneity and richness of scholarship that takes up varying aspects of this question, but it has made a consistent effort throughout this entire book to cite it. Three important understandings of identity have potentially important implications for intersectionality, namely, identities as strategically essential, identities as de facto coalitions, and transformative identities.
First, identities mobilized in political struggles of disenfranchised groups are not fundamentally fixed and unchanging but, rather, are strategically essentialist (Spivak 1996). Strategic essentialism is about the politics of performing different multiple identities from one context to the next. Drawing on the work of US-based postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak, strategic essentialism is best thought of as a political practice whereby an individual or group foregrounds one or more aspects of identity as significant in a given situation.
Rejecting criticisms of intersectionality as essentialist creates space for subordinated groups to use identity politics for political goals. In her 1994 essay, Chicana lesbian feminist Emma Pérez explains how unequal power relations and knowledge hierarchies shape strategic essentialism:
I essentialize myself strategically within a Chicana lesbian countersite as a historical materialist from the Southwest who dares to have a feminist vision of the future. My essentializing positions are often attacked by a sophisticated carload of postmodern, post-Enlightenment, Eurocentric men and by women who ride in the back seat, who scream epithets at those of us who have no choice but to essentialize ourselves strategically and politically against dominant ideologies that serve only to disempower and depoliticize disenfranchised minorities. […] As ‘disenfranchised others’ essentializing ourselves within countersites thwarts cultural and political suicide.
Strategic essentialism animates both the power analysis required for coalition building, namely, having a platform of some sort around which individuals and groups can coalesce. Black women in Brazil were able to incorporate so many different groups into their movement because they had shifting alliances with many groups. One sees in their work the use of strategic essentialism as an important legitimate political tactic in a struggle for social justice.
Second, and relatedly, identities are important for seeing how coalitions work. Conceptualizing identity as inherently coalitional creates space for coalitional possibilities among individuals, as well as new directions for understanding groups. This linking of identity politics and coalitional politics is not new. Anna Carastathis points out its presence in Crenshaw's work (Carastathis 2013). Carastathis examines how Crenshaw uses intersectionality as a framework to conceptualize identity-based groups as de facto coalitions, “or at least coalitions waiting to be formed” (Crenshaw 1991: 1299). Crenshaw writes, “[r]ecognizing that identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about categories at all” (1991: 1299). For Crenshaw, seeing identity as already coalitional creates possibilities for political organizing that attends to intersecting power differentials within the group.
Crenshaw argues that this recognition of “the intersectional experiences of women of color disenfranchised in prevailing conceptions of identity politics does not require that we give up attempts to organize as communities of color. Rather, intersectionality provides a basis for reconceptualising race as a coalition between men and women of color […] or a coalition of straight and gay people of color” (Crenshaw 1991: 1299). Understanding identity as a coalitional location stresses in-group and inter-group power differentials. In other words, conceptualizing identity coalitionally highlights the coalitional labour already at work within the group before deploying it for building inter-group alliances.
Finally, conceptualizing identities themselves as transformative constitutes another important understanding of identity with implications for intersectionality. Arguing that transnational feminist solidarities require a rethinking of identity politics, Allison Weir insists on the necessity of a shift to an ethical and political model of identity: a relational model that is pragmatic but also transformative: it “focuses on what matters, what is meaningful for us – our desires, relationships, commitments, ideals” and can take change into account: “a model of transformative identity politics” (Weir 2008: 111; emphasis in original). For Weir, this approach seeks to elaborate “a model of identification in coalition that can take account of our locations in power relations” (2008: 122; our emphasis).
This idea of a transformative identity politics comes closest to capturing the spirit of identity politics within various expressions of intersectionality. Many women of color point to the transformative possibilities of an individual identity that becomes formed within, and itself shapes, broader social phenomena. As pioneering Mohawk scholar, lawyer, and activist, Patricia Monture-Angus argues:
Some Aboriginal women have turned to the feminist or women's movement to seek solace (and solution) in the common oppression of women. I have a problem with perceiving this as a full solution. I am not just woman. I am a Mohawk woman. It is not solely my gender through which I first experience the world, it is my culture (and/or race) that precedes my gender. Actually if I am object of some form of discrimination, it is very difficult for me to separate what happens to me because of my gender and what happens to me because of my race and culture. My world is not experienced in a linear and compartmentalized way. I experience the world simultaneously as Mohawk and as woman. It seems as though I cannot repeat this message too many times. To artificially separate my gender from my race and culture forces me to deny the way I experience the world. Such denial has devastating effects on Aboriginal constructions of reality.
(Monture-Angus 1995: 177−8)
Identity is central to building a collective we. Identity politics rests upon a recursive relationship between individual and social structures, as well as among individuals as an existing collective or a collective that must be brought into being because they share similar social locations within power relations. A transformed individual identity is potentially transformative and long-lasting. Once people are changed on the individual level, they are likely to remain so. Focusing on the self, on its wholeness, provides a major impetus for individual and collective empowerment.