Assumed Identities

One would think that the topic of identity (post-, or otherwise) would have been exhausted by now. When the word is mentioned these days, it tends not to meet with a straightening of the back and a defiant stare, nor even a wince and an evasive move, but rather a resigned sigh--"Oh, that again?" The constant probing, critiquing, stretching, shrinking of the term over the past two decades seems not to have resolved anything. At best it has marked off a set of common problems and positions to which one refers from time to time when the occasion calls for it. I shall not rehearse all those moves and arguments--they are well enough known. Suffice it to say that identity politics has acquired its own identity, which has made any inquiry into identity a suspect act that stands outside the decorum of polite academic talk. Identity politics has been reserved now to name a particular bad politics that intrudes upon what is taken to have been a polite consensus on how to seem not to do identity politics while all the while doing them. 2 It is minorities (sexual, racial, ethnic, class, and so on) whose articulation of identity is seen to be not only annoying, but impolite, for their voicing of these concerns forces others to engage in something they thought they had settled, and settled in their favor

Aesthetics · Art · Decorum · Identity (music) · Identity politics · Literature · Politeness · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suspect · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy

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