ABSTRACT
The final substantive chapter of this book explores three moments of protest or political action over which significant discursive battles have been, or might be, fought: the fictionalised version of the events at the 1985 Pride parade in London in the film Pride (2014); Brexit narratives that have tended to characterise the Leave vote as a ‘protest’ of the ‘left behind’; and debates about the England riots that took place in 2011. These narratives are examined for their reproduction of the material/cultural binary: following the previous chapter’s focus on disruptions in the private sphere, here my attention is directed at events in the public square over which significant battles of meaning have been fought, which I argue both draw upon and entrench the binary division between material and cultural political claims or ‘grievances’. This division contributes to a discursive separation of class-based politics from so-called ‘identity politics’, marking them as fundamentally different from each other – with significant effects on what kinds of political spaces, subjectivities and action are imaginable, or even legible. Finally, the chapter focuses on the broader understanding of the relationship between identity and politics that underpins this separation, arguing that identities might better understood as arising out of, rather than leading to, political participation and collective mobilisation.
