| Private
Selves, Public Identities
Reconsidering Identity
Politics
By Susan Hekman
June | 2004 | 6 x 9
168
pages
Political Science, Philosophy, Women's Studies
Hardback: $38.00 SH
ISBN: 978-0-271-02382-3
Paperback: $24.00 SH
ISBN: 978-0-271-02699-2
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| “In
Private Selves, Public Identities Susan Hekman explores one
of the most important political developments within the United States
in the past thirty years, the emergence of group-based or ‘identity’
politics. Her lucid critiques of the liberalism versus multiculturalism
debates, as well as her insights into the limitations of modernist
and post-structuralist conceptions of identity and agency make this
book well worth reading. Moreover, her sophisticated analysis of
the problems generated by conflations of personal identity and political
identity is an important contribution to contemporary debates in
political theory and feminist theory." —Mary E. Hawkesworth,
Rutgers University
"Taking
the insights offered by a performative understanding of identity,
Hekman demonstrates how identity can be fluid while retaining a
core that avoids the problem of relativism. In the light of a careful
development of the political concerns surrounding identity, Hekman
offers a new understanding of identity politics that enables her
to make some valuable suggestions about how identity might be articulated
and a richer politics achieved. Feminists interested in theories
of politics will find this a very important contribution to the
field."—Eloise A. Buker, Saint Louis University
In
an age when “we are all multiculturalists now,” as Nathan
Glazer has said, the politics of identity has come to pose new challenges
to our liberal polity and the presuppositions on which it is founded.
Just what identity means, and what its role in the public sphere
is, are questions that are being hotly debated. In this book Susan
Hekman aims to bring greater theoretical clarity to the debate by
exposing some basic misconceptions—about the constitution of
the self that defines personal identity, about the way liberalism
conceals the importance of identity under the veil of the “abstract
citizen,” and about the difference and interrelationship between
personal and public identity.
Hekman’s
use of object relations theory allows her to argue, against the
postmodernist resort to a “fictive” subject, for a core
self that is socially constructed in the early years of childhood
but nevertheless provides a secure base for the adult subject. Such
a self is social, particular, embedded, and connected—a stark
contrast to the neutral and disembodied subject posited in liberal
theory. This way of construing the self also opens up the possibility
for distinguishing how personal identity functions in relation to
public identity. Against those advocates of identity politics who
seek reform through the institutionalization of group participation,
Hekman espouses a vision of the politics of difference that eschews
assigning individuals to fixed groups and emphasizes instead the
fluidity of choice arising from the complex interaction between
the individual’s private identity and the multiple opportunities
for associating with different groups and the public identities
they define.
Inspired
by Foucault’s argument that “power is everywhere,”
Hekman maps out a dual strategy of both political and social/cultural
resistance for this new politics of identity, which recognizes that
with significant advances already won in the political/legal arena,
attitudinal change in civil society presents the greatest challenge
for achieving more progress today in the struggle against racism,
sexism, and other forms of oppression. |
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Susan
J. Hekman is Professor of Political Science and Director of
Graduate Humanities at the University of Texas, Arlington. She has
published two previous books with the Penn State Press: Moral
Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory
(1995) and an edited volume, Feminist Interpretations of Michel
Foucault (1996).
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