Unity Through Division? Reimagining Identity Politics

The politics of identity has recently experienced a resurgence at both extremes of the political spectrum. Gender Trouble by acclaimed author Judith Butler and prolific essayist James Baldwin’s My Dungeon Shook each actively address identity. Both authors draw upon their own unique experiences as intersectional thinkers who refuse to conform to pervasive yet archaic social structures which have systematically sought to erase them.

Though Butler is concerned with deconstructing gender and Baldwin with demystifying race, they both outline powerful arguments which challenge contemporary political actors to abandon these reductive typologies as a basis for identity politics and instead adopt them as tools by which to critique hegemonic power structures. In expanding upon the divergent yet analogous accounts of identity offered, the differences as well as the similarities between their work serve to further illuminate political insights about identity.

It is within the very first section of her landmark text that Butler outlines a critique of feminism as a form of identity politics and the mistaken assumptions which underpin the troublesome universalised category of ‘woman’ it relies upon. For Butler, identity remains an inherently oppressive illusion and identity politics is merely the manifestation of an essentialist theory which excludes and reduces people to restrictively narrow definitions.

Butler proceeds to argue that any feminist political theory which seeks to collectively define the subject of ‘woman’ through referencing their bodily form will only reproduce the very oppression and exclusion it seeks to oppose. Such a theory is thus guilty of ‘normative violence’ through the way that it prescribes fixed identity categories without critique.

Abandoned and persecuted by the liberal project, Baldwin also pursues an anti-essentialist account of identity which implicitly challenges the pervasive Eurocentric myth of an inherent essence which binds people of a particular race together. This infers that political organisation based solely upon such criteria is not only largely misrepresentative, but potentially harmful.

There is a racial logic of sociopolitical exclusion which manifests itself in the ghettos that black people are consigned to — policing their existence and ensuring that they do not strive for excellence, but embrace mediocrity. People of colour are forced to endure microaggressions in their everyday lives which remind them that the society they were born into still perpetuates the myth that they are inferior.

Baldwin believes that black bodies are racialised by the surrounding white population, not unlike the identity fixing white gaze famously articulated by Frantz Fanon, reinforcing that blackness is constituted in relation to whiteness. There is a passage wherein Baldwin describes black people through the metaphor of fixed stars in an otherwise white universe.

From public bathrooms to the colours painted on nursery walls, the gender binary is similarly inescapable. Whilst we are all born ‘sexed’ through a biological form, the socially constructed labels of masculinity and femininity, which Butler believes feminism is fixated upon, influence interpretation of our bodies. Butler not only problematises the belief that gender is an inherent fact or self-evident reality, but also feminist accounts of its societal construction.

She instead introduces a theory of ‘gender performativity’ which characteristics gender as a phenomenon which is actively reproduced by our behaviour and subscription to traditional norms. Gender emerges as “…the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance…” The way that we talk, walk and adopt particular mannerisms serves to consolidate received notions of masculinity and/or femininity.

Through formal institutions such as single-sex education and informal practices like bullying, gender is policed through a heterosexual grid of cultural intelligibility such that individuals are forced to conform to these ‘ideal’ norms.

By describing his nephew as truculent and tough like his father out of fear of being perceived as ‘soft’, Baldwin likewise captures the role of racial typologies in influencing identity. It is interesting that family lineage, a motif pervasive in discussion of racial identity, is all but absent from Butler’s interrogation of gender despite the influence of family traditions.

The formative experiences which shaped Butler as a queer white woman and Baldwin as a queer black man are profoundly different, however, their shared appreciation for the power of pervasive myths in dictating individual identity is a product of their intersectionality. Butler’s extended prose can prove inaccessible and politically distant at times, a critique famously advanced by Martha Nussbaum, but it speaks to her commitment to challenge the very writing conventions inherited from a patriarchal academy. Baldwin instead writes with a sermon-like passion that is universally understood in a brief yet evocative letter which reinforces the personal nature of his message.

In the end, Butler does not prescribe a solution, but draws on the work of Michel Foucault to argue that what contemporary feminism requires is a genealogy capable of revealing the historical construction of ‘women’ and demonstrate that its subjective interpretations can be altered through subversive repetition of ‘gender performativity’. Butler’s localised account of identity and disdain for unity as a goal of coalition politics, however, does arguably hinder the realisation of solidarity in a divided political landscape.

Conversely, Baldwin urges his nephew and all black individuals to remedy fractured race relations by forcing their white ‘brothers’ through magnanimous love “…to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” For Butler it is disrupting ‘gender performativity’ and for Baldwin it is collective compassion, but both are ultimately theories which seek to dismantle and naturalise identity.

In synthesising such dense texts, the profound prescience of Baldwin’s racial argument and Butler’s subversive thoughts on feminism as a theory of gender reveal much about the flaws inherent within the contemporary project of identity politics. Any theory of feminism or race which actively attempts to universalise the lived experience of its subjects merely embodies an exclusionary logic.

In championing an understanding rather than a denial of ‘the other’, the work of these distinctive thinkers is united through their endeavour to shatter the chains trapping individuals in illusory identities which have never corroborated with reality. Here stand two alternative approaches to confronting discrete identity categories, but both are imbued with hope that current conceptions are ultimately capable of change.

Works Referenced

Baldwin, James [1963] 1993 The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage Books.

Butler, Judith [1990] 1999 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity New York and London: Routledge.

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