CHAPTER NINE

The nature of identity

In 1937, a former slave from Oklahoma told a story about her childhood. The woman recalled how, immediately after emancipation, she was approached by her old master. He addressed her in the customary way: ‘What you doing, nigger?’

The woman had, however, been speaking to the Northern soldiers. She knew what the Civil War meant; she understood the significance of the South’s defeat. As a result, she didn’t reply in the usual fashion.

‘I ain’t a nigger,’ she said. ‘I’s a Negro and I’m Miss Liza Mixon.’

The infuriated white man attacked her with his whip.1

The story illustrates the centrality of cultural identity to the experience of oppression and resistance.

When Mixon retold the story in her old age, she did so with incredulity at her own naivety. It wasn’t that she thought the appellation didn’t matter. On the contrary, she knew it mattered so much that she was amazed that, as a child, she’d once been brave enough to insist upon dignified treatment.

Today, any debate about culture wars — indeed, about the contemporary political climate — needed to come to terms with so-called identity politics.

Unfortunately, this was not at all simple, since the term meant both too little and too much. It could be argued that ‘identity politics’ had been rendered an entirely unintelligible phrase, weighed down by decades of use and abuse, and increasingly used merely as a pejorative.

‘Perhaps the strangest thing about identity politics,’ commented the American activist Sherry Wolf, ‘is that it’s a political orphan — nobody wants to claim it as her own.’

But Wolf also argued that despite becoming ‘a philosophical punching bag’, identity politics ‘remains the underlying politics of the left over the last thirty-five years or so’.2

The term’s ubiquity meant that, for many people, both on the left and the right, ‘identity politics’ simply denoted opposition to racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other oppression, particularly one focused on language or culture.

Nevertheless, ‘identity politics’, in the way it was understood today, had a specific history, connected to the strategic shifts on the left — the progression from direct to delegated and then smug politics.

The term seems to have been first employed in 1977 by a group of African-American lesbian feminists organised as the Combahee River Collective. In a justly famous manifesto, they declared that their emphasis on fighting their own oppression was ‘embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression …’3

The statement reflected a broader interest in identity that developed and percolated throughout the New Left during the direct-politics period. Many of the more influential theorists of the time — from Frantz Fanon to Che Guevara — stressed, in different ways, the necessity for the oppressed to develop a new self-perception, one not marred by the passivity and despair instilled by the oppressor.

Different radical groups employed a technique known as ‘consciousness raising’, in which participants were urged to discuss their own lives and experiences so as to make public the effects of oppression in realms previously imagined as private.

‘It seemed clear,’ said Kathie Sarachild, an early activist in women’s liberation, ‘that knowing how our own lives related to the general condition of women would make us better fighters on behalf of women as a whole.’4

The emphasis on identity extended to celebrities who identified with the wider tumult.

In 1967, the boxer previously known as Cassius Clay fought a heavyweight bout against Ernie Terrell. But he did so under a new name, Muhammad Ali.

‘Cassius Clay is a slave name,’ the fighter insisted. ‘I didn’t choose it, and I didn’t want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name — it means beloved of God — and I insist people use it when speaking to me and of me.’

Terrell refused to acknowledge an identity associated with Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam. In the pre-fight publicity, he referred to his opponent as ‘Clay’.

Throughout all fifteen rounds of the bout that followed, Ali loudly demanded of his outclassed opponent, ‘What’s my name, fool? What’s my name!’

Ali’s example illustrated how, in the context of widespread political unrest, identity was a widely seen process as much as a state, an act of self-definition dependent on the recognition of political enemies and friends.

‘Identity was something to be stressed,’ noted Andrew Hartman, ‘it was something to grow into or become. Only by becoming black, or Chicano, or a liberated woman, or an out-of-the-closet homosexual — and only by showing solidarity with those similarly identified — could one hope to overcome the psychological barriers to liberation imposed by discriminatory cultural norms.5

By joining the much-maligned Nation of Islam and changing his name accordingly, Ali aligned himself not only with African-American militancy but with the colonial world in general and the Vietnamese liberation struggle in particular.

‘I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,’ he said in February 1966, while training for his fight against Terrell. Later, he was quoted as saying, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.’

Importantly, Ali’s new identity was also a repudiation of respectability within the African-American community. The Nation of Islam frightened whites, but it also appalled many middle-class African Americans, many of whom thought Terrell’s resistance to a then exotic-sounding appellation made sense.

Ali established his new sense of self, at least in part by differentiating himself from Terrell, whom he dismissed as ‘an Uncle Tom nigger’.

Throughout the 1960s, different political currents developed different strategic orientations to identity. In all the social movements, a version of separatism emerged: a tendency in which activists insisted that people belonging to particular oppressed groups should organise on their own, withdrawing from others who didn’t share their experience or identity.

Interestingly, though, when the Combahee River Collective coined the term ‘identity politics’, they did so explicitly in opposition to ‘separatism’. The women wrote:

Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand … We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses …6

In other words, theirs was quite clearly a direct-politics perspective. They were arguing to fight sexism and racism through systemic, radical change, conducted by the masses of ordinary people. More exactly, their manifesto called for the overthrow of capitalism. The assertion of identity — the point for which the document became famous — was intended to be read in that context. They thought that if black women recognised and fought against their oppression as black women, they would necessarily join a direct struggle against other structural injustices.

Yet by 1977, when the statement was published, the direct-politics tendency was receding, with the delegated politics that would dominate the next decades becoming ascendant.

The manifesto took for granted its members’ involvement in strikes, demonstrations, protest campaigns, and the like. It also took for granted a broader movement, in reference to which all radical tendencies defined themselves in one way or another. Increasingly, though, that context no longer existed, as the intellectual and organisational centre of the radicalism moved from the streets to the university.

The shift provided an opening for a different understanding of identity, one that related especially (though not exclusively) to the campuses of the 1980s. By then, the structural change (revolution, no less!) that the Combahee River Collective associated with identity politics no longer resonated with an upwardly mobile cohort of former activists now in mid-career. Alex Callinicos explained:

This was the decade when those radicalised in the 1960s and early 1970s began to enter middle age … Most of them had by then come to occupy some professional, managerial or administrative position, to have become members of the new middle class, at a time when the overconsumptionist dynamic of Western capitalism offered this class rising living standards.7

In his important essay ‘Identity Crisis’, Salar Mohandesi described how activists (particularly, though not exclusively, in the universities) ‘began to insist that personal experiences created relatively stable identities, that everyone possessed one of these identities, and that politics should be based on the search for that identity and its subsequent naming, defense, and public expression’. In the 1960s, he said, radicals had argued that exploring personal experience could help people identify oppression and spur them to fight against it. Later activists, however, came to argue for a direct and unmediated link between one’s identity and one’s politics, so much so that identity became ‘a political project in itself’.8

Advocates of delegated politics presented identity as a fixed category, a basis for political organising. They claimed that race, gender, sexuality, and other ‘identities’ correlated with particular political ideas, attitudes, and demands that wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t be embraced by those without the lived experience of that identity. Where the Combahee River Collective saw liberation coming through collective solidarity, the new version of identity politics held that those outside a certain identity could provide, at best, secondary assistance as so-called ‘allies’ to the oppressed.

As Mohandesi argued, the argument usually involved an unresolved determinism, with activists implying a simple correspondence between a person’s experiences and his or her political attitudes. In practice, however, identity did not work like that, as Stonewall had shown with especial clarity.

The riots in 1969 became so significant because, in the wake of the police raid, men (and some women) who had been ashamed of their sexuality fought back against the NYPD with chants of, ‘I’m a faggot and I’m proud of it!’

At one point, the officers — accustomed to brutalising gay men without resistance — found themselves confronted by a chorus line of high-kicking drag queens who were singing:

We are the Stonewall girls

We wear our hair in curls

We have no underwear

We show our pubic hairs!9

Afterwards, the poet Allen Ginsberg commented famously that ‘the guys [of Stonewall] were so beautiful — they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago’.10

Stonewall illustrated the relationship between direct politics and identity formation. The street resistance by (often) previously apolitical gay men depended on the construction of a new self, even as, by the act of resisting, the men recognised themselves as worthy of the liberation they’d begun to demand.

Ordinary people changed themselves as they changed the society that oppressed them.

Resistance did not derive from identity — at least, not in any simple way. After all, not all the club-goers fought back or applauded the new defiance. Many of the middle-class activists associated with Mattachine Society — men who, for decades, had been some of most visible and courageous advocates of homosexual rights — were, as Wasserman noted, ‘incensed at the antics of rioters’.

Their commitment to the palliationist politics developed during the 1950s meant that they saw a resistance led by drag queens and street hustlers as a disaster, a wrongheaded street battle that undid their efforts to normalise homosexuality in the eyes of respectable society.

There was, in other words, nothing inevitable about the liberated identity that emerged from 1969. It stemmed from particular political ideas and a particular kind of resistance: it didn’t grow inexorably from day-to-day experience. Asad Haider argued:

A meaningful common interest does not somehow exist by default. We cannot reduce any group of people and the multitudes they contain to a single common interest, as though we were reducing a fraction. A common interest is constituted by the composition of these multitudes into a group. And this is a process of political practice.11

The people instinctively enthused by a battle against the homophobic cops were younger and often poorer than the Mattachine Society’s leaders. In Wasserman’s words, they drew on the ‘militant tactics and radical rhetoric of the New Left; the counterculture; and the black, women’s, student, and antiwar movements’. For them, claiming a new identity as ‘liberated homosexuals’ was a necessary part of a broader political project — one that they called ‘liberation’.

But the perspective that came to be known as ‘identity politics’ presented identity in a quite different fashion.

By the 1980s, the establishment of women’s studies, black studies, queer studies, cultural studies, and similar disciplines had profoundly changed the curriculum of higher education, dramatically increasing knowledge about literature, art and history previously excluded from serious study. At the same time, the context of the academy rendered the delegated left less able to examine the social and political tensions that it subsumed through a static, reified ‘identity’.

More precisely, as Verity Burgmann argued, the upwardly mobile trajectory of many campus activists predisposed them to deny that any such tensions existed. Identity politics, she said, allowed its proponents to proclaim ‘a community of interest between feminist bureaucrats and female welfare recipients, gay studies academics and working-class homosexuals, ethnic affairs advisers with unemployed immigrants, and so on’.12 This move was particularly necessary, given the gulf between the radical intellectuals speaking on behalf of the social movements and those movements’ original constituency, which was increasingly passive and disengaged.

Of course, not all advocates of identity politics were necessarily in supervisory positions. As Wolf said, identity politics was, by the late 1980s, becoming ubiquitous on the left, embraced as enthusiastically by impoverished student activists as by academics and heads of NGOs.

Nevertheless, the insistence on ‘identity’ as a concept eliding internal differences led to political projects in which the interests of the more privileged tended to dominate. In particular, identity politics emphasised symbolism, language, and representation, in ways that became crucial during the early debates about political correctness.

In his 1990 article ‘Taking Offense’ — one of the key early documents of anti-political correctness — Jerry Adler argued that as identity politics became ascendant, ‘the search for euphemisms [became] the great intellectual challenge of American university life’.13

Like identity, political terminology had become a key preoccupation during the 1960s. In April 1963, Martin Luther King, for instance, wrote an open letter addressed to church leaders in which he complained about the language used to address African Americans. He told his white peers of the deep humiliation felt when, as he put it, ‘your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”’

King penned his letter from inside a Birmingham jail, where he’d been detained after marching against segregation. He’d been arrested violently, thrown into a dark cell, refused a phone call, and denied even a mattress. He’d gathered together scraps of paper to reply to the religious figures who’d publicly opposed his agitation on the basis that African Americans should obey the law of the land and wait patiently for legislative change.

King’s remarks on language appeared in this passage:

[W]hen you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society … when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’ then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.14

The ‘Letter from a Birmingham jail’ illustrated the dialectical relationship that direct politics created between the symbolic and the material. King was pushing for cultural reform — but not merely cultural reform. His opposition to racist language belonged to a program with immense implications for American society, a program about culture but also about violence and law and poverty. He linked slurs like ‘boy’ to structural injustices, and then demanded mass struggle to fight them.

The shift from direct to delegated politics introduced a different approach.

In a sense, the campus left, during the 1980s and the 1990s, made a virtue out of necessity. It could no longer mobilise the grassroots — and, in many cases, did not want to do so. But if structural change was no longer on the agenda, cultural reform was more viable than previously, given the new resources controlled by the delegated-politics left. Accordingly, for many activists, the symbolic victories that Adler mocked as a ‘search for euphemism’ became an end in themselves.

Reforms to mandate inclusive language (to take a common example) were important. But they mattered most for those already at the university. The so-called education wars of the 1980s and 1990s no doubt helped make higher education more palatable for students and activists from oppressed groups, through the spread of women’s studies, the appointment of queer officers, the enforcement of anti-racist codes, and so on. The fundamental structures of the university — and of the society as a whole — remained, however, little changed by the new lexicon.

The material reforms that King fought for were particularly important to the poorest African Americans. (It was often forgotten that, by the time of his assassination, he was organising in support of a strike by sanitation workers.) By contrast, the campus reforms fought for in the 1980s and 1990s were far more significant for the relatively small number of people already at university than they were for, say, working-class kids who never attended higher education, in a fashion that academic identity politics, with its confidence in a unified ‘community of interest’, tended to obscure.

In her introduction to a republication of the Combahee River Collective’s work, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor stressed that those women weren’t defining identity politics as exclusionary. They didn’t think that only those experiencing a particular oppression could fight against it. Nor did they envision identity politics as a tool to claim the mantle of ‘most oppressed’. They saw it as an analysis that would validate black women’s experiences, while simultaneously creating an opportunity for them to become politically active to fight for the issues most important to them.15

The discussions of identity facilitated through consciousness-raising were intended, in other words, to enable a new solidarity, a more profound unity in which those who had previously been excluded could find a place. By contrast, in the later understanding of the idea, identities were defined, first and foremost, as expressions of difference, rather than as a mechanism for collectivity. Not surprisingly, as Elaine Graham-Leigh explained, ‘There [was] an obvious tendency … for these groups to splinter in opposition to each other, particularly when they are involved in competition for scarce government resources, most notably in the fracture of political Blackness into Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Arab and so on.’16

Graham-Leigh was talking specifically about Britain, but similar schisms happened everywhere, a necessary result of the unresolved determinism Mohandesi noted. If ‘identity’ was equated with particular political attitudes, any manifestation of political differences among those with the same ‘lived experience’ became deeply problematic, with the establishment of a new and different identity a constant temptation. The African-American Marxist Adolph Reed thus wrote scathingly of a tendency for activists to present themselves not so much as representing particular political ideas, but rather as what he called ‘pure embodiments of collective aspirations’.17

Identity politics emerged out of the transition from direct to delegated politics. But its tendency to fragmentation meant that it was well suited to express the smug, individualised politics that prevailed during the 2000s, a period in which the rhetoric of identity both reflected and facilitated a new attitude to the masses.

The hegemony of identity politics during the Obama period played an important role in the left’s difficulties in responding to the new outsider anti-elitism.

The swearing-in of America’s first African-American president was, inevitably, a moment of intense drama. Within living memory, racist Jim Crow laws had prevented a man of African ancestry not only from standing for office but also from voting. The euphoria about Obama was real and widespread among African-American voters, who’d turned out in record numbers to support him. Many wept as they watched the footage of a black man taking the oath. A CNN poll on inauguration eve showed that 69 per cent of African Americans understood Obama’s election as the fulfilment of Martin Luther King’s vision. As Jay Z put it, ‘Rosa sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly.’18

How, though, would Obama make others fly?

Direct politics rested on participation. For activists in that tradition, a symbolic victory mattered first and foremost because of its effect on the mass movement from which symbols emerged. To use Jay Z’s example, Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat was a moment of great importance because it signalled the beginning of a campaign. The evening after her arrest, activists circulated a flyer throughout the African-American community explaining:

If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue … We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk.19

Parks was a respected figure in her community. But, as that leaflet stressed, her defiance mattered precisely because the discrimination she faced was commonplace and not anomalous. She sparked a collective protest, one in which thousands of working people took part. In that sense, she was, to use an almost oxymoronic term, a participatory symbol: Parks was inspirational because other could do — and did — what she had done.

Delegated politics, by contrast, stressed representation. Because the project of delegated politics depended on a relatively passive membership, a political achievement by a leading individual entailed that person doing what others couldn’t and wouldn’t.

Identity politics tended, then, to emphasise the importance of representation: high-profile members of oppressed groups obtaining visible and prominent positions in culture, politics, or the academy.

How, though, did the accomplishments of a minority change conditions for ordinary people? The question became moot as the institutions of delegated politics withered and weakened, leaving the gulf between the representatives and the represented more pronounced than ever.

As far back as 2000, Naomi Klein had bemoaned the new hegemony of identity politics at a time when the world market was spreading inequality across the planet. Klein wrote:

In this new globalized context the victories of identity politics have amounted to a rearranging of the furniture while the house burned down. Yes, there are more multi-ethnic sitcoms and even more black executives — but whatever cultural enlightenment has followed has not prevented the population in the underclass from exploding or homelessness from reaching crisis levels in many North American urban centres. Sure, women and gays have better role models in the media and pop culture — but the ownership in the culture industries has consolidated so rapidly that, according to William Kennard, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, ‘There are fewer opportunities of entry by minority groups, community groups, small businesses in general.’20

Much of the discussion about the racial implications of Obama’s victory emphasised the example that he offered young African Americans. His achievement proved, the argument went, that African Americans could accomplish anything. In the past, the man in the White House had been, well, white, and now a black president taught black kids that they, too, could be great.

The implication was that all the oppressed would be equally uplifted. But, as Burgmann argued, an ‘emphasis on equality of opportunity all too easily falls prey to neoliberal inflections, for what is demanded, in effect, is an equal opportunity to become unequal’’’.21

Obama was not Rosa Parks. He did not emerge from a mass movement that anyone could join. He’d become president through the traditional route: an elite education, a law degree, and then Chicago machine politics.

In that narrow sense, Obama’s triumph set a precedent for African-American leadership, showing aspiring politicians from minority groups that they, too, could play the game. In politics — and, to a lesser extent, in other professional fields — upwardly mobile people of colour could model themselves on Obama. But by the mid-2000s the African-American population was deeply divided, even in the context of a very divided nation. The richest white families in America possessed a remarkable 74 times more wealth than the average white family. For African Americans, however, that figure was nearly three times higher, with well-off households possessing 200 times more than the average.22

In that context, Obama’s career was far more relevant (inspirational, even) to some people than to others.

Early in 2007, Michael Toner from the Federal Election Commission warned that the looming election would be the most expensive contest in American history, a campaign in which leading candidates would need to have raised at least $100 million to be taken seriously.23 He was right. The Obama team eventually spent a record-breaking $750 million to secure victory.24

In almost any other context, the suggestion that ‘inspiration’ would, in and of itself, break down structural barriers would be rejected out of hand as patronising nonsense. Yet liberals often presented Obama’s victory as a self-help nostrum, motivating others to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

The smug tinge to such arguments was not far from the surface. For many, Obama’s election, in the face of the racism marshalled against him, showed that African Americans mired in poverty simply hadn’t tried hard enough. As Taylor put it, the increasing visibility of a black elite bolstered an argument that ‘Black inequality [was] the product of the slackening of Black communities’ work ethic and self-sufficiency’.25

This was particularly important given the evolution of Obama’s presidency. Elected on a wave of revulsion against the military adventures and economic inequality of the Bush administration, Obama quickly showed that he differed from his predecessor more in style than substance.

He campaigned against the foreign interventions of the Bush years and the grotesque human-rights violations that accompanied them. Yet, as Pankaj Mishra noted, only three days after his inauguration Obama was launching drone strikes in Pakistan — a precursor to a strategy that would define his presidency. Obama, Mishra pointed out, ordered more strikes with civilian casualties in his first year than Bush conducted throughout his entire presidency. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, he made a point of announcing that he intended to intensify the war on terror. He massively expanded the US state’s surveillance and data-mining programs; he waged a savage campaign against whistleblowers and ‘invested his office with the lethal power to execute anyone, even American citizens, anywhere in the world’.

Around the world, the symbolism of the first black president — and the necessary opposition by progressives to the racist attacks on him — blunted the critiques the left should have been making of such policies and practices. Identity politics simply didn’t provide an adequate framework or a vocabulary with which to analyse a figure like Obama.

Mishra continued:

Obama occasionally denounced the ‘fat cats’ of Wall Street, but Wall Street contributed heavily to his campaign, and he entrusted his economic policy to it early in his tenure, bailing out banks and the insurance mega-company AIG with no quid pro quo. African Americans had turned out in record numbers in 2008, demonstrating their love of an ostensible compatriot, but Obama ensured that he would be immune to the charge of loving blacks too much. Colour-blind to the suffering caused by mortgage foreclosures, he scolded African Americans, using the neoliberal idiom of individual responsibility, for their moral failings as fathers, husbands and competitors in the global marketplace.26

An older politics might have been more able to critique the divisions within a certain ‘identity’. Malcolm X, for instance, warned about the dangers of African-American politicians he called ‘sell outs’. But identity politics was predicated on the gulf between the representative and the represented. It was precisely the distance between the history-making leader and his passive, impotent constituency that gave him his symbolic power. In a sense, ‘selling out’ became conceptually impossible, since the higher a representative figure climbed, the more ‘inspirational’ he supposedly became.

In 2018, news broke that Obama would earn $1.2 million for delivering speeches to Wall Street firms — taking as much as $400,000 from a single speech.27 The deal, so symptomatic of the structural ties between the political and financial elite, outraged many progressives, particularly in the wake of an election in which Bernie Sanders had captured the imagination of young voters by denouncing corporate influence.

But the comedian Trevor Noah, the successor to Jon Stewart, defended Obama against those he dubbed ‘haters’, on a symptomatic basis. Yes, he said, the American political system was broken and needed to change. But it was unfair to expect Obama to lead that change.

‘So the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards?’ Noah asked. ‘No, no, no, no, no, my friend. He can’t be the first of everything. Fuck that, and fuck you.’28

Noah didn’t defend the ex-president’s financial deals as an unfortunate necessity. On the contrary, he lauded Obama’s ability to cash in (‘Make that money, Obama!’) as a positive good for black America, a further milestone in his precedent-setting career.

Not all adherents of identity politics took the argument so grotesquely far. But Noah voiced a logic inherent in the politics of representation, which, by definition, celebrated the success of the successful and the power of the powerful.

A similar dynamic manifested itself in Australia during the great symbolic moments of the Labor administrations during the same period. Capitalism depended on the constant availability of labour power to individual capitalists. The economy could not function without a steady supply of people willing and able to work. As David McNally and Sue Ferguson pointed out, ‘labor power cannot simply be presumed to exist, but is made available to capital only because of its reproduction in and through a particular set of gendered and sexualized social relations that exist beyond the direct labor/capital relation, in the so-called private sphere.’29 Specifically, capital relied upon the individual family to nurture, raise, socialise, and educate the next generation of workers. As a result, a particular set of ideas about sexuality, gender roles, occupations, divisions, and similar subjects — the so-called ‘family values’ that underpinned conventional sexism — played a crucial ideological role. Even more than racism, sexism provided a compelling organisational principle for culture war, since gender roles were so caught up with people’s intimate and personal experiences.

As soon as Julia Gillard became the first female prime minister of Australia, she received a barrage of gendered abuse from both the media and the opposition. Senator Bill Heffernan labelled her ‘deliberately barren’; Alan Jones told listeners he wanted to put her in a chaff bag and dump her in the ocean; Tony Abbott addressed supporters in front of a sign describing Gillard as ‘Bob Brown’s bitch’ and urging voters to ‘Ditch the Witch’.30

On 9 October 2012, Abbott attacked Gillard, arguing that unless she sacked the speaker Peter Slipper over crude text messages he’d sent, she was as much of a sexist and a misogynist as anyone.

Gillard rose and delivered an impassioned response. ‘I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man,’ she said, pointing at Abbott. ‘Not now, not ever.’31 Footage of the exchange went viral, first in Australia and then internationally. Dubbed ‘the misogyny speech’, Gillard’s words were hailed as groundbreaking by the progressive commentariat.

The academic Barbara Pini labelled the incident ‘incredibly significant’. ‘That the sexism which is so deeply embedded in the Australian body politic was named,’ Pini said, ‘may give some women licence to express and seek to counter the sexism they have experienced in their working lives.’32

Pini’s argument about the prevalence of sexism in Australia was obviously correct. Abbott and his supporters could only target Gillard in the fashion that they did because, for many Australian men, any exercise of agency by a woman represented an alarming transgression deserving swift retribution.

But Pini’s formulation illustrated the problem with symbolic politics. The circulation of Gillard’s speech may well have sparked broader conversations about sexism, perhaps even encouraging others to stand up against misogyny in their own lives. But, without question, its impact was greatest on professional women who, like Gillard herself, already possessed a degree of social power.

The suggestion that inspiration was, in and of itself, sufficient to alter gender relations for working-class women hid a deep and unconscious elitism: it implied that ordinary women endured sexism because they didn’t know any better.

Obviously, that wasn’t the case. Because of its association with the family — a basic economic unit — sexism was more than simply a set of prejudices to be shrugged off. It was fundamentally connected with material experiences.

In reality, insofar as female workers remained silent about discrimination and abuse, they did so, in most cases, because they understand the consequences of speaking up. A wealthy, powerful woman could deliver a speech describing a colleague as a misogynist in a way that most women fearful of losing their job could not.

Accordingly, a response to sexism meaningful to working women (who were, after all, the bulk of the population) necessitated direct politics. Without a change to the circumstances in which sexism thrived (in the form, say, of stronger protections against unfair dismissal, or greater bargaining power for employees, or more generous unemployment benefits), exhortations to ‘be more like Gillard’ would be useless.

In any case, Gillard delivered her misogyny speech on the same day that she helped pass the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Act 2012, which slashed payments to single parents. The measure — which had the effect of moving large numbers of women to the substantially lower Newstart allowance — had far greater material consequences for gender equality than any prime ministerial oratory.

The critic Anwen Crawford later spoke to one of the people affected by the changes, who was dumbfounded by the left’s emphasis on Gillard’s rhetoric rather than her actions.

‘The focus was on Julia Gillard and what an amazing feminist she was,’ the woman said, ‘but on the same day she’s hurting the most vulnerable women. That was particularly difficult to go through.’33

Not surprisingly, the accolades heaped by progressives on Gillard as a feminist champion did not change the attitudes of Australian women to her: by midway through 2013, polls showed that the majority of women disapproved of her performance as prime minister.34

Again, the left’s emphasis on the misogyny speech was emblematic of a certain kind of politics, one that highlighted symbolic resistance at oppression, even — or perhaps especially — when that symbolism barely affected the most oppressed.

Amory Starr noted how identity politics — a particular way of understanding the world — had become utterly dominant on the left, ‘naturalised as a way of understanding how individuals and groups make politics’.35 More and more progressives began to pin their hopes for social change on wealthy and powerful figures serving as a proxy for the dispossessed: the businesswoman smashing the glass ceiling; the outspoken musician; the feisty television personality; and so on. Indeed, as the structural challenge once implicit in the politics of the social movements faded, it became possible for politicians themselves to embrace identity politics.

By a bitter irony, the left had become incapable of recognising the material divisions within oppressed groups precisely at a time when those divisions had become particularly glaring and particularly important.