Political Activist
The new system of the present Political Activist.
Updated on Wednesday 7 July 2021
Abstract
This chapter first describes the emergence of consciousness-raising, including differences among women. It then discusses collective identity, explaining the concept and describing activists’ attempts to reconstruct collective identity as women and to determine how to practice their collective identity in daily life. Next, it discusses coming out and other forms of visibility politics, which aim to display collective identity and change conceptualizations of the group and its issues. Finally, the chapter explains the controversies and debates over identity politics and describe some of its contemporary manifestations. Identity politics” refers to organizing around the specific experience or perspective of a given group and to organizing that has identity visibility as a goal. Identity politics has, from its beginning, grappled with the question of differences within each identity group. For women’s movements, questions of the intersections between gender and race, class, sexuality, and other dimensions have been fundamental. Identity politics is often dismissed as divisive. In contrast, this chapter focuses on its origins and development in terms of intersectional feminist theory and the construction of collective identity, conceptualizing it as a social movement practice. To understand the breadth of identity and visibility organizing by women, the chapter discusses a range of women’s movements, not just those that identify as feminist. Aimed less at policy and law than at culture and subjectivity,
Read here
Toward Change 