quoms:

for an example of how politics can engage with identity without being idpol, look at the way that struggles for gender and sexual and racial and economic liberated intersected and converged in the 1960s – ‘yellow peril supports black power’, etc.

this ferment – and i think partially as a result of it, the increasingly radical analysis of the american left over the course of the decade – was made possible by the fact that these struggles were organised on a basis exactly contrary to identity politics; that is, starting from a voluntary, autonomous basis and working outwards

struggles for identity were in fact a manifestation of struggles for autonomy, for self-definition. an identity category as simple as ‘gay’ wasn’t taken as divinely ordained and preexisting, in the way that identity categories are presented to us today, but as something deliberately created through the action of a community. consider also the way organisations like the black panthers consciously abandoned use of the words ‘colored’ or ‘negro’ in favor of ‘black’ – an attempt to take a category that had been imposed on them from outside, as something divinely ordained, and to lend it some quality of autonomy and self-determination

identity politics reverses this understanding of the situation. in idpol, instead of the community being ‘real’ and identity a social construct dependent on it, identity is ‘real’ – a preexisting and immutable phenomenon – while the community is relegated to secondary importance and in fact atrophies to assume purely imaginary status

while idpol easily predates the ‘60s (like i said, nationalism operates on the same basic logic), contemporary liberal idpol is a sort of particularly dead-end offshoot of the way organising was done in that era that the democratic party specifically fostered in order to make sure the ‘60s never happens again

I quite like this analysis