Identities and Politics

Critics of identity politics often wax polemically as they charge contemporary social movements with narrowly and naively engaging in essentialist politics based on perceived differences from the majority. Such essentialism, critics charge, inhibits coalition building (e.g., Phelan 1993; Kimmel 1993), cannot produce meaningful social change, and reinforces hegemonic and restrictive social categories (Seidman 1997). It is even responsible for the decline of the Left (Gitlin 1994, 1995). Social movement scholars similarly view “identity movements” as cultural rather than political movements whose goals, strategies, and forms of mobilization can be explained better by a reliance on static notions of identity than by other factors.