Identity Complex

Abstract

In seemingly exhaustive arguments about identity as a category of analysis, we have made a critical error—one that this book sets out to correct in this revisionary look at the making and meaning of social identities. We have asked how separate identities—of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—come to intersect. Instead, the book proposes, we should begin by understanding such social identities as mutually constituting one another. Grounded in both theoretical and political practices—in the lived realities of people's experience—this book reinvigorates identity as a key concept and as a tool for the pursuit of social justice. The text draws on a wide range of examples to show that social identities are central to how exploitation works, such as debates about the desirability of sexual minority identities in postcolonial contexts, questions about the reality of race, and the nature of the U.S. prison crisis. Unless we understand precisely how identities take shape in relation to each other and within contexts of oppression, he contends, we will never be able to eradicate discrimination and social inequality. By analyzing the social interdependence of identities, the book seeks to enable the creation of deep connections of solidarity across differences.

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