“Identity or Status?”
7/17/03
Page 18
These worries should be familiar from the now extensive literature on recent social
movements and struggles for the recognition of differences across and amongst groups
based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, nationality, etc.
The mistakes and simplifications of some forms of identity politics—and some
forms of theory construction about recognition—that Fraser is worried about here all
result, I believe, from an authenticity model of group formation and identification. Fraser
recapitulates these errors of the politics of authentic group identity: groups are taken to be
all-encompassing, internally undifferentiated collectivities holistically closed off to one
another; identity-constitutive characteristics are reified as cutting reality at its essential
joints, rather than as reflecting contingent, historical practices of human distinction and
discrimination; groups are taken to have an authentic character which all members should
seek to emulate and foster, thus encouraging intra-group conformity and illiberal
pressures on “inauthentic” members; the internal politics of active group self-definition is
closed off from view behind the cover of an appeal to the pre-existing “genuine” group
identity; inter-group separatism and conflict is encouraged since the definition of
authentic identity is constructed through invidious comparisons with other groups; and
finally, politics aims at the recognition and protection of groups themselves as distinctive,
rather than at the protection of the equal opportunity of individuals to be recognized
independently of subordinating cultural values. This particular conglomeration of ideas
about group identity has its heritage in German Romanticism and nineteenth century
nationalist movements, with their jargons of authenticity imported into recent debates
about identity politics. If Fraser is right that the identity model of recognition is
inseparable from these features of the authenticity framework, then she is right, I think, to
consign the identity model to the scrap heap.
Convention