Identity Politics In The Women S Movement

An essential collection that constructs the arguments of similarity and difference dividing and uniting women In recent years, identity has come to be seen as a process rather than a fact or deterministic force. Yet, recognizable identity traits continue to draw people together and provide them with a sense of empowering commonality. Although the plasticity afforded identity has freed up rigid definitions and guidelines for affiliation, some believe that nebulous demarcations of identity may deprive women of a solid position from which to effectively contest centers of power. Bringing together articles by well-known authors and theorists such as Audre Lourde, June Jordan, Daphne Patai, Barbara Smith, Marilyn Frye, Shane Phelan, Leila J. Rupp, Hazel Carby, and Adrienne Rich with lesser-known writers and scholars, this broad-based anthology ranges widely from personal narratives to empirical research. The book unpacks issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and age, contributing a mélange of sharp, lively perspectives to current debate. In a postmodern era of feminism, how do women come to identify, organize and mobilize themselves within a complex global network of relationships? Identity Politics in the Women's Movement offers critical examination of the inescapable role of identity in academic and activist feminism and the opportunities, challenges and conflicts identity politics pose.

In recent years, identity has come to be seen as a process rather than a fact or deterministic force. Yet, recognizable identity traits continue to draw people together and provide them with a sense of empowering commonality. Although the plasticity afforded identity has freed up rigid definitions and guidelines for affiliation, some believe that nebulous demarcations of identity may deprive women of a solid position from which to effectively contest centers of power. Bringing together articles by well-known authors and theorists such as Audre Lourde, June Jordan, Daphne Patai, Barbara Smith, Marilyn Frye, Shane Phelan, Leila J. Rupp, Hazel Carby, and Adrienne Rich with lesser-known writers and scholars, this broad-based anthology ranges widely from personal narratives to empirical research. The book unpacks issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and age, contributing a mélange of sharp, lively perspectives to current debate. In a postmodern era of feminism, how do women come to identify, organize and mobilize themselves within a complex global network of relationships? Identity Politics in the Women's Movement offers critical examination of the inescapable role of identity in academic and activist feminism and the opportunities, challenges and conflicts identity politics pose.

Identity politics refers to discourses and movements organized around questions of religious, ethnic, and national identity. This volume focuses on political cultural movements that are making a bid for state power, for fundamental juridical change, or for cultural hegemony. In particular, the contributors explore the relations of culture, identity, and women, providing vivid illustrations from around the world of the compelling nature of Woman as cultural symbol and Woman as political pawn in male-directed power struggles. The discussions also provide evidence of women as active participants and as active opponents of such movements. Taken together, the chapters provide answers to some pressing questions about these political-cultural movements: What are their causes? Who are the participants and social groups that support them? What are their objectives? Why are they preoccupied with gender and the control of women? The first section of the book offers theoretical, comparative, and historical approaches to the study of identity politics. A second section consists of thirteen case studies spanning Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Hindu countries and communities. In the final section, contributors discuss dilemmas posed by identity politics and the strategies designed in response.

This study focuses on a set of issues at the forefront of feminist thought in the late 1990s: identity, difference and their implications for feminist politics. As feminism moves into an era in which differences among women, the multiple identities of woman and identity politics are all at the centre of feminist discussions, new approaches, methods and politics are called for.

"Lesbian feminism began and has fueled itself with the rejection of liberalism.... In this rejection, lesbian feminists were not alone. They were joined by the New Left, by many blacks in the civil rights movement, by male academic theorists.... What all these groups shared was an intense awareness of the ways in which liberalism fails to account for the social reality of the world, through a reliance upon law and legal structure to define membership, through individualism, through its basis in a particular conception of rationality." In tracing how lesbian feminism came to be defined in uneasy relationships with the Women’s Movement and gay rights groups, Shane Phelan explores the tension between liberal ideals of individual rights and tolerance and communitarian ideals of solidarity. The debate over lesbian sado-masochism—an expression of individual choice or pornographic, anti-feminist behavior?—is considered as a test case. Phelan addresses the problems faced by "the woman-identified woman" in a liberal society that presumes heterosexuality as the biological, psychological, and moral standard. Often silenced by laws defining their sexual behavior as criminal and censured by a medical establishment that persists in defining homosexuality as perversion, lesbians, like blacks and other groups, have fought to have the same rights as others in their communities and even in their own homes. Lesbian feminists have also sought to define themselves as a community that would be distinctly different, a community that would disavow the traditional American obsession with individual advancement in the world as it is. In this controversial study of political philosophy and the women’s movement, Phelan argues that "the failure to date to produce a satisfying theory and program for lesbian action is reflective of the failure of modern political thinking to produce a compelling, nonsuspect alternative to liberalism." In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

Solidarity of Strangers is a crucial intervention in feminist, multicultural, and legal debates that will ignite a rethinking of the meaning of difference, community, and participatory democracy. Arguing for a solidarity rooted in a respect for difference, Dean offers a broad vision of the shape of postmodern democracies that moves beyond the limitations and dangers of identity politics. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

Recent debates in contemporary feminist theory have been dominated by the relation between identity and politics. Beyond Identity Politics examines the implications of recent theorizing on difference, identity and subjectivity for theories of patriarchy and feminist politics. Organised around the three central themes of subjectivity, power and politics, this book focuses on a question which feminists struggled with and were divided by throughout the last decade, that is: how to theorize the relation between the subject and politics. In this thoughtful engagement with these debates Moya Lloyd argues that the turn to the subject in process does not entail the demise of feminist politics as many feminists have argued. She demonstrates how key ideas such as agency, power and domination take on a new shape as a consequence of this radical rethinking of the subject-politics relation and how the role of feminist political theory becomes centred upon critique. A resource for feminist theorists, women′s and gender studies students, as well as political and social theorists, this is a carefully composed and wide-ranging text, which provides important insights into one of contemporary feminism′s most central concerns.

Over the course of thirty-seven chapters, including an editorial introduction, this handbook provides a comprehensive examination of scholarly research and knowledge on a variety of aspects of women's collective activism in the United States, tracing both continuities and critical changes over time. Women have played pivotal and far-reaching roles in bringing about significant societal change, and women activists come from an array of different demographics, backgrounds and perspectives, including those that are radical, liberal, and conservative. The chapters in the handbook consider women's activism in the interest of women themselves as well as actions done on behalf of other social groups. The volume is organized into five sections. The first looks at U.S. Women's Social Activism over time, from the women's suffrage movement to the ERA, radical feminism, third-wave feminism, intersectional feminism and global feminism. Part two looks at issues that mobilize women, including workplace discrimination, reproductive rights, health, gender identity and sexuality, violence against women, welfare and employment, globalization, immigration and anti-feminist and pro-life causes. Part three looks at strategies, including movement emergence and resource mobilization, consciousness raising, and traditional and social media. Part four explores targets and tactics, including legislative forums, electoral politics, legal activism, the marketplace, the military, and religious and educational institutions. Finally, part five looks at women's participation within other movements, including the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, labor unions, LGBTQ movement, Latino activism, conservative groups, and the white supremacist movement.