pc and identity politics

kelley oudies at flash.net
Sat Sep 18 16:43:43 PDT 1999


when i go to a conference and a woman argues in the course of presenting a paper that adrienne's rich's concept of "the lesbian continuum" is historically specific to north america/the west and is inapplicable in other contexts and that woman gets called on the carpet in front of 200 ppl because a contingent in the room wants to know if she's a lesbian or not because, on their view, she has no right to do such research or make such arguments unless she is a lesbian, then i say that this is PC bullshit and a form of academic identity politics.

when, in that same room, linda alcoff presents a paper in which she describes the eagerness with which faculty awaited a talk to be given by a well-known ps/pm theorist only to be greeted with his claim that he was going to speak about pomo architecture because he felt that, as a white upper middle class man, he couldn't not speak to oppression, then i say that's PC bulllshit based on an indefensible epistemology that grew out of some rather shallow readings of theorists in the postmodernist/post-structuralist tradition. a truly odd, essentializing sort of identity politics, eh?

when i teach a course on the family and public policy and choose, in a particular incarnation of the course, to focus on recent reforms in welfare policy and, in doing so, don't find the space/time to take up gay/lesbian families and i'm called on the carpet for that, i call this a form of bullshit PC/identity politics.

it happens a great deal in the social sciences when, because of their 'identity', a researcher's work is considered suspect. the critique is one which is often made in the name of the work of various authors lumped w/in the pomo-poststruc tradition, but it is an extraordinarily essentialist, humanist conception of identity that ends up being deployed in practice.i'm not asying that this critique is wholly wrong; rather, i'm saying that all too often i see it applied in facile ways.

dismiss these, if you will, of mere anecdotage, but there are far too many examples of such floating around to dismiss all of this as nothing but crap pumped out by conservatives. as much as it is the case that conservative wield PC and identity politics in ways intended to belittle leftist scholarship and poltics, they didn't just make it up. furthermore, while theorists themselves may not be advocating the actual positions taken by individuals and groups on campuses, the fact is their work IS taken up in the interest of pursuing rather poorly thought out political positions/practices/policies *on* campuses.

i agree w/ jim./ange about the strain toward identity politics w/in marx's thought. however, i think both miss the point insofar as there is a distinctly different twist because marx was speaking to the *structural* realization of the proletariat as a class--the proletariat as a class actor. i don't think marx gave a flying fig if individual workers embraced their identity as workers in quite the same way, say, that people often argue that various oppressed groups ought to embrace their identity--that is, to retrieve and revivify a positive understanding of what it means to be a member of the black community, or the queer community [noonan? ya wanna jump in here with a scathing crique of the concept of 'queer' community?], or the latino/a community, etc as a way of fighting against the negative valuation of those identities as an aspect of structural systems of oppressions--what iris young calls cultural imperialism.

speaking of which, did it escape everyone's attention here that entire books have been written on the subject of identity poltics--what the publishing industry preferred to call "the politics of difference" and so forth? i mean what the hell was laclau and mouffe's _hegemony and socialist strategy_ if a tract advocating an anti-humanist form of identity politics? iris young, too, wrote _justice and the politics of difference_ in which she argued for the absolute necessity of focusing on differences, of building a politics of difference [identity politics] based precisely on identity groups. she goes to great pains to explain precisely what a group is:

"I should allay sev'l possible misunderstandings of what this principle of group representation means and implies. First, the principle calls for specific representation of social groups, not interest groups or ideological groups. By an inter. group I mean any aggregate or association that seeks a particular goal, or desires the same policy, or are similarly situated with respect to some social effect--for example, they are all recipients of acid rain...." Social groups usually share some interests, but shared interests are not sufficient to constitute a social group. A social group is a collective of people who have affinity with one another b./c of a set of practices or way of life***; they differentiate themselves from or are differenteiated by at least one other group according to these cultural forms.

By an ideological group I mean a collective of persons with shared political beliefs. Nazis, socialists, feminists.... The situation of social groups may foster the formation of ideological groups, and under some circumstances an ideological group may become a social group. Shared political or moral beliefs...however do not themselves constitute a social group [...] Second, it is important to remember that the pricniple calls for specific representation only of oppressed or disadvantaged groups."

and to buttress jim's original point, young does very much end up dismissing a marxist conception of class *exploitation* as a basis upon which to build a politics of difference. her policy proposals in that regard focus only on a reformist politics within the work place. and, i argue, this tendency to elide a serious engagement with the way in which capitalist exploitation is fundamental to 'groupness' and 'identity' results precisely because of the what she, herself, calls a postmodern critique of the logic of identity and the metaphysics of presence [sumps together kristeva, adorn, irigaray, derrida.

in sum, my point it is that it is rather facile to dismiss this all as nothing but the crafty work of conservatives. there is a very real body of scholarship out there that has and does advocate identity politics and one which derives precisely from the post-structuralist critique of humanist feminist, marxist, etc theory/practice. it tends to be more sophisiticated on the page but [i think] that it is too often put in practice in rather facile ways --though that practice really doesn't get altogether that far away from the campus.

HOWEVER, i have written here before about my work among people fighting the colonization of the lifeworld by the systems rationalization of the state andmarket: an anti-nuke dump campaign, an anti toxic dumping campaign, and a struggle against a plant closing. each of these struggles were divided in so far as, in broad brush strokes, one faction wanted to engage in politics as usual [fighting within the system] while the other faction wanted to engage in non-conventional politics. so, for ex, when they strategized about how to fight the nuke dump, one group insisted on fighting a consitutional battle and using the mechanism provided within the law to resist the siting. another group splintered off because they rejected politics as usual. they choose to stage parades and town meetings celebrating their rural identities in an in-yer-face way when ever polticians and bureaucratic officials hit town. or they'd go to meetings at the state capitol dressed as mutant farm families and dairy cows, engage in various antics designed to disrupt the meetings, antics which played on the "white trash" identity often assigned them. [that is, one of the major reasons for the siting in certain areas of the state was that the people that populated those areas were seen as backward, conservative farmers too ignorant to fight the state. pretty insulting and yet what prompted their ire and impelled much of their early protest and involvement.]

that is, these three movements divided precisely down the lines of whether to focus on and taken common cause around a shared sense of identity or to engage in conventional interest group politics in which the idea is to shed one's identity at the entrance to the forum.

see also shane phelan's workm_identity politics: lesbian feminism and the limits of community_

chaz, i think you misunderstand completely what catherine means by having the right questions to ask her answers. she's not suggesting that she just doesn't know the answer or is disingeuously posturing as if she doesn't. rather, she's suggesting that it's important how and what sorts of questions you *ask of your answers* --what you focus on, to put it quite simply.

finally, the term PC did not emerge in the women's movement. the following if from a list debate a couple of years ago, a number of prominent members specialize in contemporary usage.

Ruth Perry "A short history of the term politically correct" in Aufderherde, Patricia (ed.) _Beyond PC: Towards a Politics of Understanding_.

--Marxist-Leninists: to conform to official policy (c. 1930s_ --Maoist usage: the same (1950s) --Maoists in N.A.: same (1960s)

all of above refer specifically to the correctness with regard to politics, politics conceived as a public issue relating to policy stands taken by the party, as well as how to be a good party member--the official line to toe.

but the meaning today has shifted to one in which the 'personal is political' takes on a new twist to include political correctness in one's behavior in the entirely of one's life: dress, language, courses one takes, books on one's coffee table, etc: and started being used this way in early 1980s. the use was serious, not ironic, even up 'til late 80s. but mid-80s saw a shift to the mostly sarcastic use of the term as a put down of leftist academic idiocies of which my fave is the following, dedicated to julian:



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