Introduction

A major strand in contemporary thinking about race, gender, class, and caste tends to view them as socially constructed modes of social and political division and as identificatory containers that structure various forms of group tensions and antagonisms. Three different but overlapping theories of production, exchange, investment, and circulation of cultural values may prove most useful in this reconceptualization: first, a Marxian theory of political economy applied to the terrain of cultural signification would permit the mapping of different kinds of cultural values and exchange mechanisms that are involved in the production of these modes of division; second, a psychoanalytic understanding of libidinal investments would permit a mapping of identificatory investments that suture the relations between individual and collective subjectivities that are crucial to the function of these modes of division; and, finally, a Foucauldian understanding of the circulation of power would help to trace the circuits of empowerment that charge these apparently static modes of division.