ABSTRACT
The rise of "identity politics" forms a convergence of a cultural style, a mode of logic, a badge of belonging, and a claim to insurgency. What began as an assertion of dignity, a recovery from exclusion and denigration, and a demand for representation, has also developed a hardening of its boundaries. Identity politics is a form of self-understanding, an orientation toward the world, and a structure of feeling that is frequent in developed industrial societies. Identity politics presents itself as—and many students and young people experience it as—the most compelling remedy for anonymity in an impersonal world. Identity politics in the strict sense became an organizing principle among the academic cohorts who had no political experience before the late 1970s—those now in their twenties and early thirties. Thus, by the early 1970s, the goals of the student movement and the various left-wing insurgencies were increasingly subsumed under the categories of identity politics.
