ABSTRACT
Closing one’s eyes to imagine such a participatory structure, one might see a neighborhood meeting in which everyone speaks as someone particular at any one moment: black or white, Christian or Muslim, man or woman, gay or straight, rich or poor. I have attended some such meetings in Southall and found that in most cases it was one particular group that took over the meeting: sometimes the loudest, sometimes the best organized, sometimes simply the majority. But then, Young reminds us, we should not think of these identity groups as stable at all: “In complex, highly differentiated societies like our own, all persons have multiple group identifications [because even]…individual persons as constituted partly by their group affinities and relations cannot be unified, [for they] themselves are heterogeneous and not necessarily constant” (Young 1990, 48).
