Nation and Identification: Psychoanalysis, Race, and Sexual Difference

Group rights, or individual rights and privileges derived from membership within a group, have become a pressing issue within contemporary political theory, especially insofar as new social movements have challenged Western democracies' traditional liberal individualism. Given widespread geographical mobility, as well as the recognition that other types of collective identity (including race, class, gender, and sexual orientation) are central to the distribution of social and economic goods, many political theorists have argued that the latter identities have more political salience than collectives based on propinquity (Guinier). In one of the more systematic efforts to legitimate group rights, Iris Marion Young has tried to delineate a justice that takes into account the many differences politicized by the new social movements. She defines a social group as "a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or way of life. . . . A social group is defined not primarily by a set of shared attributes, but by a sense of identity." Young therefore privileges identification as the process by which a group is formed (43-44). But such identification is not voluntarist, since for Young the social group under consideration (which includes and encloses individuals regardless of will) is quite different from voluntary organizations based on religion, profession, etc.

Young's work has been subject to considerable critique, especially because the relation she posits between the collective and "culture" is unspecified (Fraser, 194-96). Will Kymlicka, one of the most ardent proponents of group rights, has suggested that Young's extension of such rights to every oppressed group within a liberal democracy would result in privileged treatment of 80 percent of the population. He therefore proposes that only those racial and ethnic groups that can be said to form a "nation" (though one without a state) should possess and exercise such rights, since only they have the cohesive and stable cultural institutions to engage in autonomous decision making (131-51). Kymlicka argues that, contrary to traditional liberal indi-vidualism, imposing change on such cultures becomes a problem because of the constitutive role that culture plays in constructingthe self: change the culture, and one has destroyed its individual members. He thus attempts to overcome the distinction between a procedural liberal individualism (in which individual rights are guaranteed by law) and a more communitarian approach to politics (which sees liberalism not as a disinterested set of formal procedures but as a primary component of a sociohistorically specific ideal of the good life). For Kymlicka, multiculturalism, with its strong sense of common cultural goods, need not therefore be inimical to liberal democracy (see also Taylor). But Kymlicka assumes, and fallaciously so, that cultural identities do not change. As James Clifford's "Identity in Mashpee" demonstrates, this expectation quickly transmutes into an impossible demand for immutability and authenticity. It is precisely in reaction to such a demand that postcolonial theorists have argued for the various notions of hybridity, creolization, and mestizaje that refuse the metaphysical underpinnings of ideals of authenticity.

Despite the distance between contemporary political theory concerned with group rights and postcolonial cultural studies, the debate between Young and Kymlicka raises some important questions about the relationship between culture and collectives. Though there have been various efforts to document the cultural practices or ways of life of racial, gendered, sexual, and class collectives, Kymlicka's critique of Young seems correct: not all ascriptive identities are supported by cultural practices in the same way or to the same extent. Nevertheless, I take issue with Kymlicka's efforts to limit group rights according to culture alone; I will argue that collective identities need not be coextensive with cultural practices. This essay interrogates the relationship between culture, cultural practices, and subjectivities, in order to argue that cultural practices are not sufficient to account for identity effects. I have pursued this task via a critique of current concepts of identification as they are used in postcolonial, antiracist discourse. However, I have rejected any presumed symmetry between...