ABSTRACT
The "politics of identity" refers to state policies and practices that subordinate, marginalize, and exclude particular groups, while affirming, privileging, and securing the dominance of other groups. This chapter examines how states produce particular raced-gendered-sexualized identities, in ways that simultaneously create the dominant and the subordinate. It explains how racialization and gendering operate through microtechniques of power to create forms of inequality "written on the body", producing women and men as members of particular races, classes, ethnicities, nationalities, and sexualities. To deal with the related problems of omission and distortion, the chapter begins with an examination of the caricatures of identity politics associated with conservative, liberal, and radical politics. Drawing upon critical race theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, it offers an alternative account of both the politics of identity and identity politics that illuminates dynamics of group membership and group oppression, dynamics that make raced and gendered forms of injustice visible and actionable.
