Across the borderlines - Coalitional feminist politics beyond identity and difference

Abstract

First lines of the Introduction (as abstract not provided): Class and identity politics have long had a vexed relationship. Proponents of purist class politics have dismissed movements based on gender, race, and sexuality as needlessly divisive, or as anathema to class solidarity. For their part, feminists, critical race theorists and queer theorists have critiqued this form of class politics as unable to give voice to the multidimensional forms of oppression experienced by various social groups. While this debate has been raging for decades in both political groups and theoretical spaces, a resolution or compromise between these two extreme positions has not been established. However, to my mind, the problem is more pressing now than ever, as we reach a global point of unprecedented economic, environmental and humanitarian crises that demand of us novel and coordinated political responses. As Eleanor Robertson writes in the Spring 2017 issue of Australian literary journal Meanjin: Neoliberalism is running into its historical limits, exhausting its ability to stabilise capitalism and pacify those to whom it has doled out poverty and misery. An identity politics that is detached from material and historical questions cannot help us now; neither can faithfully repeating the left tactics of the twentieth century. The process of reconstituting something new, something that addresses the unique situation in which we find ourselves, has begun (Robertson 2017, 69). Robertson identifies the need for a new way of mediating between the polarities of class and identity. This can also be understood in a philosophical sense as a question about subjectivity - what is the relationship between politics and individual subjects' locations or experiences? What aspects of subjectivity should politics take into account? Where identity politics focuses on membership to social groups and the dynamics of power and oppression arising from such group memberships, Marxist politics provides a more material approach to thinking about the subject and her location vis-a'-vis the means of production. There is, ostensibly, a particular tension between the dominant feminist conception of identity - that espoused in theories of intersectional feminism - and a material approach to the subject of class politics. This subject resists assimilation into an intersectional framework, which treats class as only one element of oppression amongst many, and similarly into postmodern frameworks, which tend to prioritise the discursive or normative aspects of power over the material.