Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies

Identity: The Politics of Identity Work

128 Identity The Pol it ics of Ident it y Wor k La na F. Ra kow Does identity matter? If so, whose? For those of us in the United States who are immersed personally and professionally in issues of race and gender, the answer is obvious. Our work in the academy, undertaken against the grain of tradition in our disciplines and departments, has exposed historically and culturally bound assumptions of self and other, untangling and revealing connections between group identity and the social formation . We argue for changes in content, pedagogy, and methodology to shake up settled assumptions about the human condition (see, e.g., Blum and Press 2002; McRobbie 1997; and Steiner 2002). Outside the academy progressive political movements, with our overt or tacit support, continue struggles that have spanned the history of the country since Western imperialism altered the physical and social face of the continent. Using various legal and political arguments (e.g., women’s right to choose abortion, gay people’s right to marry, race-based affirmative action admissions to higher education, Native American sovereignty), activists affirm rights that are based on group identities. Those whose identities and politics are bound up with these struggles—in and out of the academy—believe in the importance of this identity work.1 Ide nt it y 129 Of course, not everyone agrees. Critics of so-called identity politics can be found in the academy among those who count themselves in the Left. Meanwhile, the Right exerts its pressure both on the academy and outside it. In the climate of the George W. Bush presidency, the Right’s efficacy in challenging “liberal” professors on campus and in eroding legal gains made by progressive groups may have given credence to the arguments of some scholars that attention to identity politics had given the Right the upper hand. The 2008 U.S. presidential election, won by a black man in a contest featuring two white women, produced popular and academic debate about the place of race and gender in the contest and the possibility that the country had reached a turning point signaling transcendence of identity politics. If we have reached that point, are so-called identity politics an annoying, even dangerous, distraction from understanding the real political problems and real material conditions of contemporary societies? Have global changes and the election outcome reduced contemporary identity differences to the unremarkable, even trivial? Do critical scholars who attend to identities of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and age simply have a selfish axe to grind, clinging to a concept that stands in the way of progressive politics and a reformulation of a class-based movement? These are not hypothetical criticisms of identity-based politics but objections that come from American cultural studies scholars as well as political economists. For example, Todd Gitlin (1997, 28), critical of a brand of cultural studies that valorizes popular culture, attributes the failure of cultural studies to the state of social movements after the 1960s, when the Left lost its political project and gave way to an identity politics: “The general student movement was finished, leaving beyond a range of identity-based movements, feminist, gay, and race-based, each vigorous, in its own right, yet lacking experiences of everyday practices which would amount to embryonic prefigurations of a reconstituted world.” Echoing Gitlin’s critique, Robert McChesney (2002,91)criticizes a postmodern abandonment of politics. Acknowledging racism and sexism in traditional leftist politics and theory, he nonetheless calls identity politics a “nonrevolutionary movement at best, a reactionary movement at worst,” one whose pessimism and defeatism he predicts will be replaced with the reemergence of the Left. He maintains that “it is only through class politics that human liberation can truly be reached” (80). Nicholas Garnham (1997, 69) argues that understanding the economic formation of capitalism is necessary to understanding racial domination and patriarchy, criticizing the move of cultural studies “away from a concern with organized class-based party politics, redistributive justice and the State and their relationship to solidarity and a ‘common culture’ to an almost 13 0 Lana F. Rakow exclusive concern with the shifting coalitions of identity politics, with rights, with the validation of ever more fragmented ‘differences’ and with the local and the single issue.” Critical of the Left’s inability to develop a political program, James Carey levied sharp criticisms against identity politics and “political correctness.” He variously placed the greatest significance...