IDENTITY POLITICS

Identity Politics: On Redistribution, Recognition and Intersectionality Anavie R. Alegre University of the Philippines-Visayas

Political Science 164 Prof. Mary Barbie Badayos-Jover April 04, 2013

IDENTITY POLITICS The arising focus on identity subverts the body politic, emphasizing differences rather then commonalities in society. The struggle for recognition of these identities are mobilized in the lines of nationality, ethnicity, gender and sexuality (Fraser, 1997). Concerns for

recognition arise because of social injustices the derail the rise of individual self-identity and the undermining and absorption of the identities of these minorities into the majority that may lead to the vanishing of the culture and tradition identification among these groups. The vanishing of this identification arises the notion of the preservation of these cultures leading to identity-based movements. The discourse of recognition is primarily rooted in what Fraser identified into cultural injustice and socioeconomic injustice. Cultural injustice is rooted in social patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication (Fraser, 1997). Socioeconomic injustice on the other hand roots from the political-economic structure of society. These two are under a broader conceptSocial Justice. To uphold Social Justice it is essential to remedy the social ills that arise in Society. Fraser proposed that the remedies of these injustices are redistribution and recognition. Redistribution remedies for socioeconomic injustice dedifferentiate groups and that recognition remedies for cultural injustices enhance group differentiation. She argued that because of this, it is hard to focus on both simultaneously. Alcoff (2006) stated in her book Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self the concerns with regards to the redistribution and recognition dilemma. She stated that identity pathologize the society because it is a form of balkanization. However, according to her, there is a discrepancy between theoretical constructions of these realities and its practical use. She stated the stand of Liberalists and Leftists groups in the issue of identity and focused more on Frasers arguments regarding the topic. She pointed out that redistribution and recognition have conflicting aims. Redistribution aims calls for the abolishing economic arrangements that underpin group specificity (Alcoff, 2006). The demands that come with this can either enhance or subvert inequalities. On the other hand, recognition claims calls for the creation of group specificity and then affirming its value. Alcoff argued: neither class nor class identity can be separated from social identity. Redistribution is an important facet of society taking its roots from way back into history. According to her, it is the raison detre of identity-based organizations. Fraser argues that to be able to lessen and ultimately eradicate social inequalities, it is essential to veer away from asserting a groups identity and focus more on the struggle for class status. She constructed recognition of identity into recognition of status but Alcoff argues otherwise. According to her, recognition and redistribution are bound up and mutually reinforce each other. To quote her:

IDENTITY POLITICS Redistribution and recognition demands are interwoven not only at the level of the resource allocations for the marginalized group. The arguments of Alcoff assert that the redistribution and recognition is interwoven and that they cant be apart from each other. Her view is primarily based on the relationship of

the individual and society. Another different perspective was proposed by Ronald Sundstrom which pertains to the transformation of minority legal rights in public policy. According to this view the transformation of the browning of America threatens the long established racial and ethnic demographic patterns and associated patterns of distribution of resources and powers (Sundstrom, 2008). The browning of America pertains to the demographic change in the US that wishes to transform not only the population of the said country but also the meaning of race and ethnicity. This demographic change presents the shift from a country that is predominantly white towards its so called browning. The concept of race and ethnicity is a sensitive issue in the US. Many scholars for the past decades sought to delineate, clarify and critique these concepts, seeking for a more distinct and a more clear definition for better specificity. These specifications helped to structure the countrys political economy as well as the intimacies of social life in all aspects of society. Ronald Sundstroms book Browning of America concentrates primary on the issue concerning race and social justice in the US. He said that some scholars think colored blindness as are remedy for these racial ills that arise in this demographic transformation. He stated in his book that as a response to the browning of America there were four camps that wish to address this problem. The most notable camp I think is the fourth camp composed of African American intellectual elites and public figures who perceived the browning of America as a threat to long established claims of Social Justice. Advocates of color blindness have focused their ire on those who were hypersensitive with regards to race and ethnicity. Criticizing people who are race and color conscious. These criticisms are boils down to ethical and practical claims about recognition in public policy. According to Sundstrom, the concept of white supremacy does not directly address conflicts that pertain to race and ethnicity that arise from the browning of America. He argues that we should focus on institutionalized racism that divides minority groups leaving them to fight over limited resources. According to him color blindness has been transformed into a legal, political and social ideal that color, race and ethnicity should be irrelevant in all matters public and private. This triggered the failure of color blindness as a remedy for racial ills because of its desire to eliminate the concept of race without eliminating racism or as he puts it rectifying its past

IDENTITY POLITICS harms. This paper seeks to present the dynamics of redistribution, recognition and intersectional in identity politics. It also seeks to answer how the concerns over recognition and redistribution affected identity-based politics as well as how the trend of intersectionality analysis provide for the pursuit of the latter and the formers goals.

Identity based politics and the Redistribution-Recognition Dilemma Identity politics over the decade can be described as a form of pedagogy that links social structure with the insights of poststructuralism regarding the nature of subjectivity while incorporating a Marxist commitment to politics (Bromley as cited in Bernstein 2005). It can manifest itself in both the psychological and the social sphere. According to Bernstein, identity politics is considered cultural because groups are advocating for recognition and fighting to gain respect of cultural differences. Identity based politics usually assumes that the core of the individuals personhood is their identities and that because of this they act or behave in accordance with it. Like for example, same sex desiring people relate to their sexuality as the core of their personhood. Identity is the core of an individuals personhood in identity-based politics they act to be able to preserve and uphold this identity (Misra & Chandiramani, 2005). The issue of the redistribution and recognition dilemma is important to identity-based politics because of the social constructed norm that subjects of identity-based movements try to fight. Social injustice is the reason why identity based politics exists and to be able to eradicate or at least diminish social injustice, these movements should be knowledgeable of the redistribution and recognition concerns. Identity politics is used to describe multiculturalism (Bernstein, 2005). Multiculturalism is one of the concerns in identity politics and is said to be a pathology in society because it accentuates the so called balkanization as argued by Alcoff. Identity politics politicized areas of life used to be considered as apolitical. Such areas are sexuality, interpersonal relations, lifestyle and culture. Leftist scholars most notably Fraser argued that identity politics is considered to be cultural because they see identity groups advocating for recognition of and respect for their cultural differences. These scholars also advocate the separation of Class politics from Identity politics. Struggles for recognition and redistribution are a product of the politics of transformation. The politics of transformation was brought about by the decline of the social

IDENTITY POLITICS democracy consensus. This collapse transformed the political landscape. Because of this transformation as Fraser argued, there was a shift from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition as a product of the change of the citizens experience of politics (Fraser, 1997). This shift is what she called as the Redistribution-Recognition Dilemma. Moreover, in relation to the politics of gender and sexuality, she argues for the politics of transformative redistribution by the liberal welfare state together with the cultural politics of the deconstructive politics (Walby, 2002). Frasers theory focused on the struggles for recognition, decoupling from struggles

for redistribution, and the decline of the latter, at least in their class centered egalitarian form. She illustrated this phenomenon ranging from the battles around multiculturalism to struggle over gender and sexuality from campaigns of national sovereignty and subnational autonomy to newly energized movements for international human rights (Thompson, 2011).

Identity Politics and Intersectionality Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) defined Intersectionality as a standing for the different ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of black womens employment experiences (Crenshaw 1989 as cited in Krizsan et al., 2012). Intersectionality primarily takes its roots in the feminist discourse. This concept of intersectionality showed the difficulties black women experienced in seeking social justice in legislation because of the anti-discrimination framework was only based on single-ground prohibitions. According to Krizsan et al. (2012) one could claim either gender discrimination or racial discrimination but not the combination of both. Crenshaws critique can be correlated with Sundtsroms argument of the notion of color blindness wherein people of color consider this as a threat to long lived traditions of civil rights that were given to them by the US constitution. The US constitution is said to be colorblind, howeveras Crenshaw arguesit failed to recognize the specificity of structural intersectionality and the specific forms of domination and suppression this entails (Krizsan et al., 2012). Crenshaw defined structural intersectionality as inequalities that people experience based on single grounds. Intersectionality was further defined by Davis (2008) in her buzzword as a term that refers to the interaction of gender, race, and other categories of difference in terms of private life, social practices, institutional arrangements and cultural ideologies, as well as the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power (Davis 2008 as cited in Krizsan et al., 2012). Furthermore, intersectional analysis is how oppression, subordination and privilege cut across different systems of differentiation (Borchost and Teigen 2012 as cited in Krizsan et al., 2012).

IDENTITY POLITICS

To exemplify intersectionality, Crenshaw presented the study of battered womens shelters located in minority communities in Los Angeles. To quote her:

In most cases, the physical assault that leads women to these shelters is merely the most immediate manifestation of the subordination they experience. Many 'women who seek protection are unemployed or underemployed, and a good number of them are poor. Shelters serving these women cannot afford to address only the violence inflicted by the batterer; they must also confront the other multilayered and routinized forms of domination that often converge in these women's lives, hindering their ability to create alternatives to the abusive relation-ships that brought them to shelters in the first place (Crenshaw, 1994).

She further argues that women of color are not only burned by poverty, child-care responsibilities, and the lack of job skills but also gender and class oppression. She argues that in fact, poverty is a consequence of gender and class oppression compounded in the racial discrimination in the work place as well as housing practices these women face (Crenshaw, 1994). In a sociological perspective, Ferree and Choo (2010) distinguished three styles of understanding intersectionality in practice: group-centered, process-centered, and system centered. The first, research focused on multiply-marginalized groups and their perspectives. The second, intersectionality as a process presents power as relational, seeing the interactions among variables as multiplying oppressions at various points of intersection, and drawing attention to unmarked groups (Choo and Ferree, 2010). The last saw intersectionality as a factor that shapes the entire social system and situates analysis away from associating specific inequalities with unique institution and emphasized looking for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex (Choo and Ferree, 2010). According to them, recent feminist scholarship presents race, class, and gender as closely interwoven and argues that these forms of stratification need to be studied in relation to each other, conceptualizing them, as either matrix of domination or complex inequality(Choo and Ferree, 2010). Their paper entitled Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities sought to answer what it means for sociologists to practice intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality. In theorizing intesectionality, Choo and Ferree highlighted three dimensions that became part of what

IDENTITY POLITICS intersectionality signifies. First it emphasized the importance of the perspective that focused on multiply-marginalized people, especially women of color. Second, it presented the analytic shift from addition of multiple independent strands of inequality toward a multiplication and thus transformation of their main effects into interactions; and lastly a focus on multiple institutions as overlapping in their co-determination of inequalities and their productionas Choo and Ferree arguedof complex configurations from the start, rather than extra interactive processes that are added onto main effects (Choo and Ferree, 2010).

Conclusion Redistribution and Recognition arose from desire to remedy Social Injustices in both the cultural and the socioeconomic sphere. The concerns over redistribution and recognition merely focused on whether they are separate from each other. The left conceptualized the separation of these two concepts and asserted the recognition of class status. However, Alcoff asserts that redistribution and recognition is interwoven because in the first place, redistribution is the raison detre of identity-based movements. On the other hand, Sundstroms argument takes into consideration the importance of the politics of transformation which I think is the main factor for the paradigm shift from redistribution to recognition. This politics of transformation influenced how people interpret their experience asserting the recognition of their identities in the process. He concentrated his arguments on the concept of color blindness that resulted to the transformation that was brought about by the browning of America. To reiterate, the shift from redistribution towards recognition is a product of the fall the social democracy consensus. In turn this transformation also influence a shift in peoples way of thinking. They started to focus more on their experiences leading to the emphasis on the role that their identities play in how they are evaluated in society. The concept of intersectionality became an important component of this transformation as exemplified by Crenshaw. Color blindness in the US manifested this problem of intersectionality. Emphasizing Sundstroms argument that color blindness does not eradicate racism because it fails to consider the specificity of structural intersectionality and the specific forms of domination and suppression it entails. This then means that the trend of intersectional analysis introduced by Black feminists provides solid arguments of the pursuit of either or both recognition and or redistribution goals because intersectionality emphasizes that relationship between gender and race and the constraints that go with these terms. The

IDENTITY POLITICS case of a White poor woman is different from the case of a Black poor woman by virtue of intersectionality. Concerns over recognition and redistribution transformed the focal point of the theoretical analysis of identity-based politics. It emphasized the shift from focusing redistribution to recognition. It draw a new way of looking at the reason for the struggles of which identity based movements advocate. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg because the underlying basis for these concerns is the concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality is a more complex structure because it transforms the dynamics of the concerns over recognition and redistribution. Intersectionality analysis entails for the pursuit of the latter and the former as a form of upholding social justice and an attempt to eradicate social injustice.

References Alcoff, Linda. 2006. Visible Identities:Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford University Press. pp. 11-46. Bernstein, Mary. 2005. Identity Politics. Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 31, pp. 47-74. Cernshaw, Kimberl W. 1994. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. From The Public Nature of Private Violence. eds by Martha Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk. Taylor & Francis/Routledge. Choo, Hae Yeon, and Ferree, Myra Marx. 2010. Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities. In Sociological Theory. Washington DC: American Sociological Association, pp 129-149. Deranty, Jean-Philippe. 2003. Conceptualising Social Inequality: Redistribution or Recognition?. In Social Inequality Today. Macquarie University. Retrieved from: http://www.crsi.mq.edu.au/public/download.jsp?id=10573 Fraser, Nancy. 1997. From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a Postsocialist Age. Routledge. Retrieved from: http://ethicalpolitics.org/blackwood/fraser.htm Fraser, Nancy.1996. Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Stanford University. Retrieved from: http://www.intelligenceispower.com/Important%20Emails%20Sent%20attachments/Social%20Justice%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Id entity%20Politics.pdf.

IDENTITY POLITICS Krizsan Andrea, Skjeie, Hege, and Squires,Judith. 2012. Institutionalizing Intersectionality: The Changing ature of European Equality Regimes. Palgrave Macmillan. Misra, Geetanjali, and Chandiramani Radhika. 2005.Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia.India: SAGE Publications.

Sundstrom, Ronald. 2008. Colorblindness and the Browning of America. In The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice. US: SUNY Press. pp. 37-64. Thompson, Simon. 2006. The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction. UK: Polity Press. Walby, Sylvia. 2002. From Community to Coalition: The Politics of Recognition as the Handmaiden of the Politics of Equality in an Era Globalization. In Recognition and Difference: Politics, Identity, Multiculture, eds. Scott Lash, Mike Featherstone.UK: SAGE, pp. 113 -138.