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feminism, humanity, identity politics, men, race, rowan williams, salman rushdie, trans, women
There has been some great discussion resulting from my piece on The Problem With Male Feminists, and I’m really grateful for everyone who responded. The most frequent and serious pushback on what I wrote has been that feminism needs to attract men because it is part of a much broader movement. Feminism, in this view, is the women’s branch of the civil rights/ human rights struggle, just as the black civil rights movement was a manifestation of the same principles for another overlapping group of people. We should be recognising each other’s humanity, and seeing everyone as human.
During the same time, a friend sent me an account of a speech made by Salman Rushie in which he made a similar point: that “identity politics” was narrowing people’s perspectives and calcifying their sympathies. Instead of defining ourselves by our love of family, friends or our chosen home, he argued, we have retreated into a rigid and fearful set of identities which only articulate what we hate and what we find offensive. I hear a similar argument from people who reject feminism, calling themselves as “true egalitarians” because they want everyone to be treated the same.
There’s a lot of truth in these perspectives, and I agree that it would be disastrous if the struggles against patriarchy and white supremacy had the effect of painting people into corners from which they could not escape. But I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that these forms of activism are simply aspects of one over-arching movement, which should encourage us to focus on our shared humanity instead of our political identities.
The problem is, I don’t know what humanity looks like. That might sound a rather glib statement, but I don’t. I can’t envision what it would mean to respect humanity or aspire to it (and as Rowan Williams has pointed out, some religious traditions have found a love of humanity provides a handy alibi for not actually loving or respecting the people around them.) I think there’s a risk in the language of “humanity”: that it allows us to gloss over the distinctiveness of other people for the sake of a rather bland ideal[1]. Honouring the humanity in another person sounds dangerously close to respecting whatever I can find in them which looks and feels like me. It short-circuits the arduous process of trying to know them as who they are, to respect their subjectivity and the ways in which they cannot be expressed in my terms.
It also forecloses my chance to learn from them. Because I’m certain that my instinctive idea of “humanity” is deeply and unfortunately shaped by the problems of the society I grew up in. Our culture tends to regard white, heterosexual, cis men as the standard, and other people as flawed/interesting deviations from that model. It’s the reason you don’t hear the newspapers talking about a male banker or a group of white lawyers. Our notion of the standard human is part of centuries of oppression and the devaluing of groups who didn’t hold power. Indeed, it was part of the process by which they were kept from gaining power.
Focussing on this “humanity” risks valuing whatever and whoever makes sense under a flawed, racist and misogynist system. It helps us to ignore the fact that feminism and black activism pose a challenge to what we think constitutes being human. They don’t simply ask for access to the category or the system, they demand that we rework the ideas behind it. “Just treating people equally” rests on an assumption that we know what equality means, that these movements are simply rephrasing an obvious and agreed set of abstract principles. Queer theory, feminist theology and trans activism are not examples of minority or disempowered people suddenly realizing that equality should apply to them as well as to the people in power. On the contrary, they continue to reveal the inadequacy of the principles we thought we had, and challenge us to rethink them. On the most basic level, they question who I think I am.
That’s the other problem with dismissing “identity politics”. It would easy for me to do so, because I don’t have an identity. At least, I don’t have the sort that people mean when they complain about identity politics. “Identity” is implicitly defined as that deviation from the standard white, heterosexual, cis man which marks someone out as different. When I act to further the economic interests and boost the political voice of people like me, no-one calls it identity politics. They call it building a career or being an engaged citizen. I could only have male colleagues, only vote for white candidates and only use heterosexual couples as examples in my writing, and no-one would ever suggest I was advancing some sort of identity agenda. It’d just look as if I was having a “normal” life. Entirely dismissing “identity politics” would suggest that the society we live in is equitable and keen to value everyone, when it demonstrably isn’t. I can understand the political risks involved in fragmenting a broad coalition into small groups, but appealing to a shared humanity doesn’t seem to be the answer. It lets us off too cheaply, too easily and ignores the intellectual and moral demands on us to change the way we think about ourselves, as well as other people.
[1] Yeah, I know I’m sounding rather too much like Edmund Burke for comfort. It’s making me antsy too. I think we should get past it in the next paragraph, so stay for the ride…
quiteirregular 
This is so perfect. The problem with “treat everyone equally” is that it tends, all too often, to mean “treat everyone the same, ie, in the way [dominant social voice] would like to be treated”. It just doesn’t work and dismisses the life experiences and needs of everyone who falls outside that dominant social group.
Keep doing this, you’re superb at it.
Great post Jem! I totally agree that ‘identity politics’ is far too often used to dismiss feminism (and within feminism to dismiss other issues such as those related to trans* identities and race). However, I think there IS a valid critique to be made, as Fraser does, of the ‘politics of recognition’ which sometimes appears to dominate within these movements, whereby damaging representations of particular identities become the focus rather than issues around structure, discrimination and socio-economic inequality. Do you know what I mean?
Hi Alison – thanks so much for commenting. I must admit the only Fraser I’ve read was advancing recognition (and I was working on community arts, so it was quite a key concept for us), so I don’t get the reference, but I absolutely agree that “representation” can become too much of a focus in and of itself.
“I treat everyone equally” usually translates as “ignore my privilege and I’ll tolerate your presence.”
Great Post! I could not have said it better myself. I do love anything with a Rushdie quote mind you, so I am easily pleased.
I personally find the whole concept of identity fascinating but when it comes to identity politics I do feel like it does sometimes throw up barriers in what is/should be/could be [delete as appropriate] a collective struggle. To borrow from the marxist movement slightly we are all fighting to overcome oppression of some sort and while #solidarityisforwhitewomen …it bloody well should not be. I recognise that I have no right to a say in the struggles of other oppressed groups but will stand in support of them and would hope they would for me in my struggles too. We *are* all one humanity but we live in a system which oppresses and holds many of us back for what are, to my mind, quite arbitrary distinctions like gender, colour of skin etc. Creating a better, more inclusive world is what we all want – if we don’t stand together then there is the possibility surely for one identity to win its struggle and begin to join in the oppression of the others? Much as I have seen certain individuals do on twitter already dismissing women of colour as irrelevancies within say the wider feminist movement.
““I treat everyone equally” usually translates as “ignore my privilege and I’ll tolerate your presence.”’ – Brilliant, and sadly true….but am I wrong in being optimistic in hoping that one day we live in a world which does treat everyone equally? What that world would look like, or what we even mean by ‘equally’ I don’t know and is something this post has pointed out quite lucidly.
I am very grateful to your post, and queer thinkers et al for challenging my preconceived notions of who I am and what I/we want from the future. Keep writing, I will keep reading and thinking. 🙂
As a woman who spends a lot of time in Lefty circles, it’s become my pet peeve to be told by men there that we have much more in common with each other and more common cause than conflicting interests: that is a barefaced way of denying your own privilege and the way you (generic) benefit from the system that oppresses me. I wrote quite frustratedly about it here: http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2013/07/why_this_class-conscious (and the men commenting beneath illustrate my point better than I could have) but I now recognise that the problematic result of this frustration is that what identity politics often lead to is class politics becoming the preserve of (cishet) white men. Class is ‘what’s left’ after women have taken our bit of the social justice movement, POC have taken their bit, etc etc. Except, of course, INTERSECTIONALITY. Class affects us too.
The irony is that I think the men who oppose identity politics are often (alright, sometimes) doing it precisely to avoid that happening, because they know that nothing in the way of social justice can be achieved if at least half the movement is left behind, barefoot and pregnant. The thing is though, people of other identities than the cishet white male standard don’t like being weaponised like that: we matter in and of ourselves too, not just in so far as we’re useful to the class cause. I can only speak as a woman (and a lesbian), not as a Woman of Colour or a trans* woman, or a member of many other oppressed groups, but my feeling is always ‘if it’s a working class man telling me that the class struggle is more important than the women’s struggle, or that I have more in common with men of our shared class than women of other classes, then instinctively I want to prioritise what I have in common with women’. In that moment, I see the (working class) men he purports to represent directly as the problem: after all, if you have the presumption to think you can tell someone else about their oppression and what their priorities in fighting it should be, then that speaks volumes about the power dynamic between you and what working together would be like.
You are quite right to point out the ambiguity in the term humanity. But, this ambiguity, and it’s potential to be appropriated by those who would cast it in terms of some dominant norm, should not be cause for us to give up on the idea of a “humanity politics.” Rather, it shows that we need to seriously consider what it means to be human, and what value lies in humanity as such. If such an inquiry is carried out with rigor and honesty, there is no way that a dominant norm would hold water as a definition of humanity. After all, the qualities of the dominant norm are themselves arbitrary.
The value of focusing on humanity is that it gets beyond judging people based on external qualities like gender, ethnicity, etc., which is at the root of sexism, racism, etc. It does not, however, devalue those qualities. In fact, I would suggest that our capacity to have such a rich array of individual characteristics is part of what is intrinsically valuable about our shared humanity.
It seems to me that if we want to know what humanity is, what the humanity is that we should value and respect in every single person, we should look at our potentials. The potential to feel and act on moral responsibility, to make decisions freely, to love, to reason, to ask questions like “what is humanity?” and to care about the answers.
Every form of oppression ever has denied one or more of these human potentials to a select group. The recognition that everyone has them is thus the key to overcoming oppression. But, of course, that means that, in a fundamental sense, we are all in this together, even if some don’t realize it.
Thanks – you make good points. I think we have a differing definition of “politics” though: I don’t see how there could be a “humanity politics” if politics is the balancing and negotiating of competing interests. That’s the kind of collapse I’m worried about – from a specific political stance which calls us to rectify injustices which are demonstrably affecting some groups more than others, to a general veneration of “humanity”, which we all share to the same degree and thus takes the focus off those injustices. I don’t disagree with the idea that we share humanity, I just don’t know where that gets us for the moment.
Yes good, thank you. I see the concern, and I agree with you that it’s a problem. Maybe we can restate the problem as a question. How can any given branch of the human rights movement address its specific concerns and at the same time remain true to the overarching purpose (genuine, mutual respect for all people insofar as they are people)? It seems that any successful equality movement has got to do both, and the notable successes have (consider King and Gandhi, e.g.). Could be a good dissertation topic.
Reblogged this on feimineach.com.
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