[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Good evening to everyone. Uh, and welcome to this year's I h Hornsey lecture.
It's a pleasure to introduce, uh, a lecture, uh, named after Charlie Hosie because, you know, pretty much for everyone,
students, faculty and actually one of the key figures in the history of sociology at Oxford and also in the UK.
Okay. So he joined Oxford fellow not to college in 1962.
He later became chair of Social and Administrative Studies and remained part of the Oxford community for more than 50 years.
His work on inequality, social mobility, educational access, um higher education helped define the field at Oxford and beyond.
This evening's speaker, professor, is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory and Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
He joined LSC in 2010. That's right.
Roughly, yeah. Um, Boston, director of the centre for the Study of Human Rights until 2017.
Before that he taught at Goldsmiths, Essex.
Um, Southampton. His most recent book, The Revolutionary Road to Me Politics on the Western Left, was published by poverty in 2025.
Available good bookstores near you? Um.
He's currently completing a book on the politics and ideology of a new Western far right.
Tonight, he's going to address the theme of the limits of identitarian ism.
I think this is a theme that would have engaged Jeremy Balls.
It's interesting. He was part of a generation that, to paraphrase Raymond Aron,
implicitly regarded British sociology as an attempt to make intellectual sense of the political problems of Labour Party.
And the substrate of that endeavour was, for many, at least, of that generation,
to come to terms with a certain sort of identitarian issue of a rather personal nature.
But then it was the significance of having themselves roots in the working class.
So in one way or another, issues to do with identity have always been lurking in the background of a sociological endeavour.
So please join me in welcoming Professor Park to talk about the limits of identity.
Thank you. Hello, everyone.
And, uh, and thank you. Thank you for coming here on a Friday.
Lovely Friday afternoon, uh, to listen to me. And I'd also like to thank the organisers and the Department of Sociology for inviting me.
And I want to talk to you about identity,
but in a particular way that situates contemporary conflicts about identity within a broader idea of identity terrorism and the historical
architecture that's relevant to identity terrorism and its emergence through the convergence of a range of social and historical forces.
So today's identity politics, I'm sure you're all familiar with it.
And the so-called culture wars are just one manifestation of this broader idea.
Now, what do I mean by a ban to terrorism? I'd like you to consider these ordinary moments.
So politicians says people like us are being ignored.
Or a rich owner of a social media platform declares that Western civilisation is in peril and Europe is dying,
or a public health service announces better representation of a particular minority group.
Or a genocide or conflict, depending on your point of view.
In the Middle East translates into a conflict between religious groups in the UK.
Or a social media storm rages not because of disagreement about ideas, but about the person who's speaking.
And these are familiar scenes. They seem normal.
And perhaps inevitable. And in many ways they are.
And they also contain markedly different political orientations.
But I want to suggest to you that they are all expressions of something broader, pervasive, that we really pause to examine in its fullness and reach.
And here I don't mean left and liberal identity politics, which I will focus on later in this talk,
perhaps in quite a provocative way, but a much larger field of identitarian ism.
And I want to work with the idea of identity terrorism not as a heavy theoretical concept,
but as a perspective and a point of orientation through which we might hopefully see things differently.
And I want to push this idea and see where we get to in a talk that is academic but inevitably crosses some political boundaries.
And over the next hour, and I'll try and limit it to less than an hour if I can.
But I'd like to try and persuade you that contemporary identitarian thinking within and outside
academic life needs to be interrogated far more deeply and far more robustly than it is.
And by this I don't mean simply criticising identity politics, but questioning a general mode of thought that is ubiquitous,
embedded and naturalised across social institutions and practices and across much academic life.
And we can see identitarian ism as a general instinctive, so as to be natural mode of social and political reasoning,
in which ascribed or assumed identities based on race, sex, gender, sexuality,
or others based on nation, ethnicity, religion, culture or civilisation.
I'm not just socially salient, but are seen routinely as foundations for judgement, action, politics, policy or law.
It's a mode of thought by which social,
political and cultural life is automatically instinctively apprehended through ideas of group and personal identity,
and these become the main way in which we understand social life and political life, make moral judgements, organise political politics.
And identitarian ism is not simply the acknowledgement that group identities might matter sometimes,
but instead elevates an aspect of social life into its governing principle, and it often has explanatory primacy.
So we explain actions in terms of the identities involved of a person or a group.
Or we judge claims in terms of the identities, or we see complex conflicts involving states, for example, as conflicts between identity based groups.
And similarly, identity can be treated as the foundational unit for social reality and of social relations,
which are recast as relationships between identity based groups.
And identities are typically seen as internally coherent properties of people and groups and their relations,
and they're treated as stable and enduring substances or quasi substances that seem to end here within people,
such that they're effectively natural, constitutive, and also claim to be socially constructed or socially created.
So historical contingent social classifications are substantially used as if the groups they uh, to which they refer,
harbour some definitive substance that makes them conclusively a group that behaves like a group and is different from other groups,
and through many historical processes, historical categories, and so forth.
These categories harden into moral persons.
So another way of saying identitarian ism is as this is as social and institutional
practices that turn historical classifications into morally saturated personhood.
Similarly, identity is also often the medium through which the social world is made legible.
So who can speak? Who can know?
Who counts as injured or oppressed? Who is represented and by whom?
Which political claims are made visible? Which ones are made to recede?
So identitarian ism converts messy social processes into a very simple social field,
dominated by groups who are not bearers of a common humanity, but a particular, seemingly durable attributes.
And in identitarian thinking, identities are morally endowed and drenched with normative meaning,
so moral charge and often a moral excellence accrue to those who make identity claims.
Moral judgement moves away from the evaluation of ideas, actions, and intentions,
and instead to the assessment of the good or bad nature or character of people in groups.
And the focus is typically on whether a person is good or bad.
The bad character of a person or a group, rather than the right or wrong of their actions and moral authority,
is conferred because of who individuals or groups say they are, rather than what they've done,
the reasons for what they've done, and the intentions behind their actions.
And indeed, identity, can often work as a credential for moral, political, or epistemic authority.
Now, these themes represent a shift in political legitimacy and justification and in the structure of political disagreement.
So interactions and conflicts are metabolised into contestations between identity claims.
Political conflict is organised around the recognition, contestation or defence of particular identities,
and they also represent a shift in how knowledge and truth are assessed,
especially when epistemic authority is tied to subjective personal experience, which by its nature is often unfalsifiable or incontestable.
Now you might be thinking, well, hang on a minute.
People have ethnicities. They have sexualities, their national belonging, their religion are meaningful to them.
So of course, we think in identity terms. How silly to think otherwise.
Maybe they didn't use the word identity, but ancient Greeks, Nubians,
medieval estates, industrial classes, emerging nations were all forms of identity.
So what's the big. What's the big issue here?
Or you might say people are rewarded, excluded, even killed as a result of categories of race, sex, nation, ethnicity and religion.
And that's reality. Identities often arise from shared experiences of injustice.
They are meaningful for groups and consequential for them.
And some identity labels may have been described by others, including by oppressors, but have been reclaimed now and are used to resist oppression.
So identities matter and unnecessary for recognition and resistance.
Now, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with some of these objections,
but contemporary identitarian ism is distinctive as a social logic because it is psychologically intimate and institutionally driven.
We're encouraged to become uniquely ourselves, while at the same time we are sorted into many demographic,
legal, therapeutic, political and other categories.
In this way, identity terrorism represents a synthesis.
Of the modern self. An inward selfhood, with many institutional fields that classify people and organise politics around that classification.
And today we see the convergence of several social factors.
Unprecedented individualisation. Mass classification.
New techniques for collective organisation and representation.
And the growth of vast institutional fields for identity making.
At an identity making. Identity promotion. And these lie well beyond the state.
And in some forms, entity making. We also see the convergence of a kind of hyper individualism with, uh, strangely,
a type of communitarian virtue ethics that generates morally exemplary, morally, morally unassailable, uh, identities.
Now these changes are coinciding with a period,
or during a period where the raw political energy of the populist right meets with the institutionalised,
technocratic,
corporate and perhaps ossified processes that have taken the place of political vitalism within liberalism and among much of the corporate left.
However, identity terrorism is not the feature of any single political or ideological camp, though that important asymmetries to register.
On the political left, it's often manifests as identity politics based on race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, and associated categories.
And you can think of much contemporary transgender rights activism.
Many aspects of, uh, academic coloniality and some dominant strands of anti-racism in the aftermath of
the killing of George Floyd in 2020 as examples of this left wing identity politics.
But I would put to you that identitarian ism has been historically associated with the political right, particularly in its ethno nationalist form.
And right wing and far right forms of identity politics, I think, are the most powerful today and represented by authoritarian,
populist and far right states, political parties and movements across much of North America and Europe and elsewhere.
And, uh, certainly amongst the far right, identity politics manifests as ethno nationalism, white nationalism,
Christian nationalism, many racial narratives of civilisation and civilizational catastrophe,
and the prominence of the idea of the replacement of white populations by others for which forced re migration,
which is essentially a form of racial and ethnic cleansing, is considered a legitimate, uh, political response.
Now. Right wing and left wing forms of identitarian thinking represent two different sets of ethical commitments or political trajectories,
and indeed manifest power in the world. So my claim is emphatically not about their moral equivalence.
Left and right wing identitarian.
I do not usually share political aims or ethical orientations, nor do they have a similar kind of of moral reasoning.
Leftwing identity politics often emerges, or claims to emerge from histories of discrimination and injury and violence,
and it's often focussed on minority recognition, safety and representation.
But it can sometimes or often do this in a way that can enforce serious restrictions on language and people and institutions,
on freedom of speech, on freedom of assembly and the legitimate rights of others.
Conversely, identity politics from the authoritarian right often comes with fantasies of superiority and domination and racial restoration.
Much Western authority and right politics is obsessed with national purity,
with civilizational degeneration and decline and the terror of being replaced or extinguished.
So the so-called culture wars, which are really very old now.
On the outcome of this opposition between differing instantiations of identitarian logic on the left and right.
And I don't position myself in between these two left and right camps.
In large part, my concerns about the prospects for the Western Democratic left as a viable political
force that can appeal beyond the common Identitarian Alliance between urban,
middle class, university educated professional groups and urban ethnic minorities and some sections of the urban working class.
And this alignment leaves substantial portions of the country to the appeal of authoritarian populists and the far right.
But though identitarian tendencies on the political left and the right are vigorously opposed to each other,
they can share an epistemic space in which societies are apprehended primarily through bounded
group identities that are morally charged and determine the legitimate ground for politics.
And both can share languages of victimisation, discrimination, prior entitlement, and both can share the view.
Which is, um, I suppose this is a facet of polarisation that civic, civil,
democratic engagement with each other cannot be the means of finding a mode of coexistence.
Now I want to move to situating these ideas in identitarian ism historically,
and point to some key historical dimensions that can shape identitarian conflicts today.
And it's impossible to capture every dimension of identity historically.
Nor do I want to give the impression of historical continuity, where the often unconnected trends and books.
But the broad map here is of the rise of inward focussed selfhood,
the proliferation of a range of modern templates for personhood and the establishment of powerful infrastructures of population classification,
ordering and ranking. And then the institutionalised identities we see in more recent periods, especially on the left.
Contemporary identitarian ism can be seen as a late modern successor to older, large scale abstractions,
such as the individual rights of liberalism or socialist policies of class, or the salvation or damnation offered by religion.
Now. Premodern societies, of course, had groups based on religion, kinship, village rank, and so on.
But historians tell us that these were not articulated to something that was personal, inner to one's self,
that also made that person simultaneously socially legible, politically consequential, and requiring official and formal institutional recognition.
So one sense of self relied less on who am I and more on what is my rank or my job.
And it's not that prior to the 19th and early 20th centuries, personal identity didn't exist as an idea.
It certainly did in many non-Western as well as Western philosophies.
But with René Descartes in the 17th century and philosophers, art philosophers, after him,
we see a particular methodical excavation of the interior self, the interiority of ourselves.
And a critical example of the rise of modern inwardness that writers like Charles Taylor have tied to questions of authenticity,
freedom, and moral being. The modern person is a person who dives into themself because they have an
inner depth that is there to be discovered and which reflects some true self.
I also want you to consider how alive the idea of self-identity that emerges from Descartes's work remains today,
especially among those who would otherwise reject the work of dead, white and.
So I am self proven. And don't need empirical evidence from outside me for that proof.
I turn inwards and create a self grounding identity that is true to me.
A stable inner self that is certain, authentic, coherent, unified and dependent only on my thoughts.
My truth about myself can be accessed by only looking inside myself.
I don't need to be supported by empirical evidence from outside me and from foundation as a thinking entity.
I then go on to discover truths about myself and the world outside me and this inner contained self,
which in Descartes's case, of course, involves the famous separation of mind from body.
This is an example of the modern individual as something like a closed container Homo.
Clausius, as the sociologist Norbert Elias called it.
Another important idea is that of the person. And this emerges from Loks work.
But I want to use it in a different way. And this is the idea of personhood, the legal, moral, political, social person,
an entity that is not the human as a living body, but the socially created person,
like the bare body of the human being covered in the clothing of, for example, legal personhood such as the citizen or the bearer of human rights.
And there are many, many templates of these socially persistent persons that emerge in modernity.
And they include the individual moral person, Kant's legislator who makes moral judgements about right or wrong actions,
or the consumer who might make rational choices about what they buy.
And then many collectively defined personhood is characterised by nation and ethnicity and religion and many others.
The bourgeois family man, the industrial worker free to sell their labour, the suffragette woman fighting for political rights and so on.
And alongside these ideas of the contained in a self and socially legible personhood, there are important transformations that occur in taxonomy,
especially from the 19th century, and these provide the scaffolding for various later identity projects in the 20th century.
Now. Today we are often living with, within and against these taxonomies and classifications from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And because much of the historical material may be familiar, I'll focus on themes that are relevant for today.
So firstly, nationalism and specifically 18th century and 19th century ethno nationalism
as a protean form and a major template for later forms of identity terrorism.
And this is a period where nations came into being with their nation states,
and the people emerged as the elites asked a singular question who are we?
And the people often responded through popular movements and in other ways that generated material for national identity.
And the collective national self here is morally charged, self-determining and travelling along a distant path.
And ethno nationalism was typically based on adherence to the traditions and values of the
chosen inheritors of the land who and relied on the virtues of more excellent people.
The fictive kinship between near and distant strangers, based on imputed ancestry and ethno nationalism,
of course, has the potential for chauvinism and xenophobia.
In this sense, nationalism offers a model for modern identity itself,
and there's a reason why contemporary identity movements are so focussed on self-determination and autonomy,
and declarations of collective identity, personal sovereignty, even ideas of manifest destiny in the belief that we can change the world.
And of course, it explains why there's so many flags around.
And crudely, crudely speaking, identity seems like macro nationalism without the nation state.
Another critical historical strand was the rise of the idea of race,
the development of modern racial thought, and related claims about inherited differences.
These resulting in racial classifications and hierarchy as globally relevant systems that are used to uh group rank uh and subjugate enslaved,
colonised, and other groups and classes.
And during the 19th and early 20th century, race ideology was institutionalised by colonial powers through law,
the colonial state and its management and administration,
as well as science and other processes as significant but not talked about as much today was the cataloguing of religious,
ethnic, caste and other groups, for example in Asia and in on the African continent,
including mapping groups to geographical territories and describing in copious detail practices of customary law, ritual, social organisation.
Race, caste and other cultural classifications are of course relevant today.
They have vital power today and they provide both the material for identity and its rejection.
We live in and against them and they allow for new processes of race, fication for racist as well as some anti-racist projects.
And they of course, often, uh, cause social theory to be trapped in a circuit of reification and rejection of essentialism that we'll consider later.
Adjacent to this is another development that becomes especially important in the early 20th century and indeed today.
And this is the ordering of civilisations and related to that cultures.
Civilizational discourse is powerful and mesmerising.
It gathers vast, discontinuous histories into a singular, majestic form.
Some monuments, texts, philosophies, technologies, manners, law,
aesthetics are absorbed by this entity that appears coherent once we call it a civilisation,
and in this way disruptions, borrowings from other cultures,
dependency and mixing, internal violence and heterogeneity,
and the textures of deep historical time are polished into an authoritative story that explains past grandeur and typically future decline.
And Oswald Spangler, of course, in the 1920s gave civilisational discourse its most powerful decline to form.
Cultures flourish, but then they harden into technical, urban, rational civilisation, after which they die.
So civilisation a civilisation. It's always a terminal form.
And civilisational discourse is therefore often animated by loss.
Whether the loss is a result of people becoming too weak or decadent,
or the losses feared because of the invaders that are amassing just outside the borders of civilisation.
And this is what makes Western civilisation such a politically charged concept today, amongst the populist and true to the far right.
It is often presented within a narrative of siege in which Greece, Rome, Christendom, the Renaissance,
the enlightenment, and then the post-war settlements are fused into a threatened inheritance,
while the savagery of colonialism, slavery, the two world wars,
the Judeo side occurring at the peak of civilisation are either ignored or excuses minor deviations from this grand story.
And historically, the idea of civilisation emerged from, uh, strange places,
legal commercial activities and then debates about morality and manners, especially in Scottish Enlightenment and French Enlightenment,
where civilisation became linked to the presence of unmoveable property systems of law and social refinement,
and stayed theory divided societies into stages of savage, barbarian and civilised.
Although early stage thinkers did not necessarily see this in racial terms,
the concept of civilisation neutralised hierarchy and it made European understandings of property, law,
commerce and culture the end point for civilizational development and civilizational thinking also supplied the taxonomy,
through which native populations in the Americas and other groups could be placed outside civilisation.
This is an idea that is both used today and inverted.
From other directions, including Aryan and Teutonic racial theories as well as eugenics.
In the early 20th century, civilisation was fused with race,
and during the 1920s numerous projects appeared in the United States and Europe
that proposed essentially white supremacist theories of global civilisation.
In them, white civilisation was the apex of human achievement, and, crucially, it was a fragile rarity.
Threatened by immigration. Racial mixing. Low European birth rates.
Internal degeneration. And the profound fear here was the white race would become extinct.
And liberal charity. Philanthropic empathy.
What is sometimes today called suicidal empathy and socialism were often seen as the internal weaknesses of European nations,
causing something called race suicide. This latter being an especially striking theme in the US in the early decades of the 20th century.
And some of these ideas resonate very powerfully today within a newly energised
discourse about Western civilisation and the catastrophic threats that it faces.
Now if these areas around race, ethnicity and civilisation provide some elements for the scaffolding for identitarian thinking,
today I want to turn to some entirely different areas.
Because alongside the hierarchical ordering of peoples and civilisations,
the taxonomic ordering of bodies by sex and sexuality is also critical to this story.
And this is again familiar territory. But I want to point to some issues about how these areas emerged today in identity thinking.
And as we know, documenting sex difference was a major intellectual effort during the enlightenment and differently by the romantic movements,
the Romantics. Now across the social sciences, arts and humanities.
Today, it's frequently argued that biological sex is a social invention.
And these arguments often draw on the work of historians.
Queer theorists. That understandings of sex bodies change for social and political reasons,
and did not arise from new scientific discoveries about sex differences during enlightenment.
So it's argued that there was a transition from a one sex model in which female bodies, uh, you can laugh at this.
This is how it was seen. Female bodies were seen as lesser and colder versions of male bodies.
So movement from that to a two sex model grounded in absolute biological difference
that justified gender hierarchies for political rather than scientific reasons.
And this kind of argument can lead to many.
I don't know what you call them confusions or absurdities to today.
That often result from a failure to distinguish reality from its description.
We can accept the argument that gender hierarchies are quite major social and political meanings.
As a result of these vast efforts in the 18th and 19th centuries to delineate real and imagined differences between men and women.
But this is not the same as also accepting that biological sex differences are fiction.
So one aspect of the critique of patriarchal ideas of gender difference is that it
generates an altogether different set of arguments about biological sex difference.
And I think this can lead to the promotion of, uh, non artificial intelligence hallucinations.
In much identitarian academic work. Related to this is another popular idea through which it's claimed that binary binary biological
sex difference was imposed by Western colonists upon populations who who previously,
uh, presumably had, uh, very fluid sex, gender lives.
And in some academic work, pre-colonial people, uh, essentially might be something like queer theorists.
Uh, and this is an example of a very familiar Western romantic projective identification.
There is copious ancient and medieval literature, some related to physiology and medicine,
from Arabic and Indian and other sources that contains extensive descriptions of biological sex difference,
and it often extends from these descriptions of biological sex to normative patriarchal ideas about gender roles and gender hierarchy.
And some literature shows awareness of differences of sexual development and the difficulties of classifying these with some Indian texts,
for example, proposing a third category for groups that today would be referred to as intersex people.
And several of these texts also discuss same sex sexuality.
Now, to be sure, Western colonists in some countries did forcefully prevent the expression of certain kinds of gender and sexual expression.
But this is a different historical argument from one that says that they imposed
a novel patriarchal binary sex difference which hadn't previously existed.
Now with regard to taxonomies of sexuality. In 1886, Richard von Craftygaming, a German psychiatrist, published Psychopathic Asexuals,
a work that established the academic discipline of sexology and which detailed Western
sexuality and sexual practices based on his and other people's clinical reports.
And this is part of the contents page from the 1894 English edition,
and it illustrates the need to describe and list many sexual desires and practices within the Magisterium of psychiatry.
And here name sexual practices are linked to particular persons.
For example, the homosexual and the sadist and the masochist and fetishists of various kinds.
And uh. Further, he also described two desires among natal men.
One was about women's clothing, which he referred to as the fetishism, and that would be considered offensive today.
And that was the intense belief among some natal men that they were women,
and they perceived a transformation in which they wanted to have bodies like women's bodies.
And he had a particular term, what he called a scientific term for that.
And he saw both of these as distinct from homosexuality and male effeminacy.
And he also referred to androgyny and gallantry, some examples of which today might be called intersex.
And there are several recognisable persons here today persons that could be recognisable today gay men,
lesbians, transgender people and people with differences of sexual development.
And in 1869, Hungarian writer Carl Cut Benny first used the word heterosexuality at the same time as he, uh, coined another term, homosexuality,
and these classifications exist alongside the types of persons that, for example, Foucault identified, including, uh, what he, uh,
the historical woman and the so-called hermaphrodite and sexology became a major academic
enterprise and various other major works catalogued in copious detail human sexual behaviour,
the work peaking in the US in the mid 20th century and continuing in different forms to today.
Now. This is a fast journey through older taxonomies,
and it needs to make its way into social developments from the 20th century and in particular, the rise of the identity concept.
And firstly, during periods of mass immigration in the United States to the United States.
Late 19th century early 20th century,
there were fraught debates about minorities and national loyalty that occurred and intensified during the First World War.
And this included debates about terms like Irish American, Italian American, with, uh,
Theodore Roosevelt famously saying that there was no room in the US for hyphenated Americanism.
And he also incidentally popularised the term race suicide. Of about which there were great fears because of immigration.
By the Second World War,
the United States also faced a problem of how to make a nation of desperate migrants become a unified nation that was ready for war.
But one change by then was the greater recognition of minority groups such as, uh, national groups,
and included black Americans, and, uh, led to the internment of Japanese Americans.
And the acceptance of hyphenated labels accelerated after the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
So terms such as Mexican-American Asian American became prominent in the 1960s and join terms like,
uh, Afro American, which had been used for quite a long time.
And it was also in this period that the identity concept, uh, emerged and spread in the United States, being virtually unknown before the 1940s.
Or at least that's what historians argue.
So following from earlier Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea of a psychological identity took particular shape in the United States.
And this was a pivotal moment, uh, one of two linked by historians to the influence of Erik Erickson's work in the mid
20th century and the dissemination of the concept of identity across psychology,
sociology and other social sciences, and in parallel, through the work of John Money, Robert Stoller and others in the 1950s and 60s,
the idea of an internal innate gender identity that was distinct from gender role and biological sex became highly significant and in a different way.
An earlier distinction between sex and gender became foundational for feminism in the 1970s.
And significantly, the identity concept was first widely deployed among academics in the 1940s and
50s to discuss Black American identity as well as ethnic identity in the US.
So the idea of a racial and ethnic identity takes shape as a concept.
Before, the word identity was used in civil rights and later movements as a concept to describe the self and the group,
and indeed in the writings of the civil rights movement, you'd be hard put to find the word identity used in relationship to selfhood.
The transformation occurs across the black, gay and women's movements in a very few years, from around 1966 67 to 1973.
So if the dominant civil rights language in the 1950s and early 60s is about rights, equality, anti-discrimination, police violence and citizenship,
by the mid 60s it has evolved into freedom, power and self-determination, turning into pride, consciousness, autonomy and self naming.
But at the end of the decade, and by 1967 68, the concept of identity is explicitly used across the black, gay and women's movements.
And this is a change from a demand to recognise my rights, to a demand to recognise me.
Though, of course, the former demands don't disappear. And the African American socialist feminist Combahee River collective.
Its statement of 1977, as well as the work of black nationalist groups before them, together with statements from gay,
lesbian and women's groups in the 1970s, often identified as and criticised as similar to identity politics today.
But this is really strong radical humanist tradition or position, and this first form of identity politics,
which isn't just focussed on one group, it's inevitably about universal issues, the world outside identity.
Other social and class movements and critiques of economic exploitation.
Now in the transition from the social movements of the 60s and 70s to today's liberal and left identity politics,
we have to account for several social transformations.
From a foucauldian perspective. Modern power does not repress identities.
It makes them. It counts them, it funds them, it represents them.
And it often makes us mistake them for freedom. And within these identity making processes, the post-war Western State,
the main entity concerned with the classification and organisation and governance of populations, becomes joined by other institutional fields.
That's a key difference, and a key institutional field is represented by NGOs.
So, uh, consider the growth of the LGBT NGO sector in the United States, uh, from from the late 80s.
So you really this is a really 90s kind of phenomena.
And I hope you can see from the figure on the left that the rise in funding of LGBT NGOs in the US is quite substantial.
Uh, nearly half $1 billion in revenue in 2018.
For perspective, look at the estimates of the Christian right, NGOs and their income in 2003.
This represents a parallel institutional field that is fuelled Christian nationalist identitarian ism in the US.
And in 2003. This was some 40 times higher than for LGBT uh groups.
And that would be a serious underestimate because of the difficulty in finding, uh, the amount of money going into the Christian right.
But within the field of liberalism and leftwing identity, processes of identity,
consecration are related to large institutions and institutional fields, including the state, international bodies, liberal corporations,
the academy, liberal political parties and NGOs that constitute the apparatus for identity making,
especially for minority groups in the West and within liberal corporate fields including the public sector.
Identity politics becomes institutionalised as a mode of governance,
through which social and political questions are transformed into technical managerial ones.
In this way, identitarian ism becomes embedded as a as technocratic practice.
Now, I've argued elsewhere, and I do have to mention my book at least once.
Uh, that in liberal environments, uh,
advocacy NGOs have been critical in disseminating and embedding identitarian policies across liberal corporate sectors,
public and private, through training, partnerships and lobby work.
And this is also linked to economic transformations,
including changes in the labour process for middle class work as the latter becomes, uh, routine, monotonous and alienating.
Liberal corporations respond not by addressing inequality, but by reorganising the experience of the worker.
Now, groups can also come into being because the state activates a group related idea in, for example,
the census or social policy and groups often facilitated by NGOs and public sector initiatives may transform around that idea.
Uh oh. So I group around that idea and may transform it.
And the state then responds to that transformation changes the label, which may have impacts on the group and so on.
What Ian Hacking calls the looping effect of humankinds.
And one consequence is what hacking calls dynamic nominalism.
So the label Asian American in the United States has undergone many changes over the decades as a group such as Native Hawaiians,
and institutions such as the agencies responsible for the census have fitted,
changed or challenged the labels, and the changes in the labels are reflected in a different way.
Here. This is changes in what was gay and lesbian and what it's become today.
And the last contribution was from a Canadian politician very recently, and I very much doubt it will survive hacking snooping affect.
But I put it there because it illustrates the paradoxically colonising nature of Western gender identity terrorism,
in which the murders of indigenous women can only be articulated within the queer
and trans decolonial register with which they have no relationship whatsoever.
And the two s there refers to two spirit and a different looping effect attends to that term.
It's widely used today as an authentically indigenous term to describe, uh, sexually diverse,
non-gender conforming people allegedly accepted in Native American culture, especially before European colonisation.
But the term was invented in the English language in the 1990s.
It has no clear conventional meaning for many Native American groups, and it arose through the nexus of several institutional fields,
including a series of conferences between anthropologists and Native American gay men and lesbians, and at one such event in the 1990s,
the third annual Native American Gay and Lesbian Gathering in Winnipeg in Canada, the name of the event was changed to Two-spirit,
and the term became used by Native American gay men and lesbians as a way of trying to connect with
each other and try to connect with tribes and bands that were often very hostile to homosexuality.
Most significantly. And this, I think, is the main reason for the dissemination of initial dissemination of this term.
The phrase was used to develop HIV Aids outreach services among Native American men who have sex with men.
Institutional fields can also be highly significant in what counts for indigeneity itself.
So you be you may be familiar with the codification of indigenous people by the International Labour Organisation from the 1950s,
but especially during the 1980s. And then the United Nations, uh, which expanded the term and situated within a global human rights framework.
But deeper issues are also relevant to the idea of indigenous identity.
So the social anthropologist Tanya Marie Lee.
Her study of NGO environmental activism in Indonesia shows that the population that fitted the indigenous slot depended on the agendas of NGOs.
So urban activists who are critical of the Indonesian government's form of modern development looks for remote,
culturally bound, distinct indigenous groups living in the same area, which Lee says are very hard to find and in Indonesia.
But when they do exist. Something quite remarkable is revealed.
Dutch colonisers who wanted land and resources, had to create tribal structures and had to create traditional leaders with whom they could negotiate.
So the Dutch invented the idea of a customary law community that was required for colonial governance.
But where the Dutch had no economic interests, they didn't bother engaging with the populations that existed there,
and their identities and the social practices related to them were.
And the cultural authority for them remained very flexible and diffuse.
They didn't form the bounded indigenous groups that NGOs today want to foreground.
And so in this strange paradox, colonisation can be reflected in the work of contemporary decolonial NGOs who are making decisions
on what types of and indigeneity can be consecrated or not within their institutional field.
How are we doing for time? Are we? I could go on for hours.
Yeah. Okay, so, um, I think paternalism can also diminish our way of understanding, uh, social life in ways that have ethical consequences.
So today, the social conditions in which Native American populations live are tragic on virtually all indicators of poverty adopting infant mortality,
uh, violence, access to housing and water.
Health care. Welfare, education. And you can see this as a severe humanitarian crisis.
Yet this is rarely discussed by writers that tend to be more focussed on issues of culture and knowledge,
including ecological ideas that will help alleviate global, uh, ecological catastrophe.
If only we'd listen to the sacred coal in this case, claims about cultural identity mystify.
The real cultures, the lived cultures, the actual social lives of large numbers of rural indigenous people in North America.
Now, sociology is inevitably concerned with the study of power and hierarchy.
And it works best when it mystifies. Sorry. Demystifies.
Uh, it also often works today very well when it's mystifying things.
Um, and that has a lot of purchase as well.
But when it demystifies and reveals underlying social mechanisms and processes and, uh, so I just want to make a few points about that.
Uh, in this concluding, uh, part, identitarian academic work can often be less about the analysis of identity and more about its affirmation.
And in turn, this can mystify the role of institutions as well as other relations of class, economy and power and status that may be relevant.
And what outcome is the reduction of social complexity to identity categories,
the marginalisation of political economy or institutional analysis or state theory,
and the displacement of alternative accounts of social life, including more universal forms of affiliation and similarity between people.
Identity based approaches can also similarly evade class and elite dynamics within identities,
or the status and interest that identity claims can mask.
So the sociological logics of academic identity work are not necessarily equivalent to supporting oppressed or exploited groups.
They may, in practice, have nothing to do with this.
So maybe a case can be made that ideas from decolonial theory have indirectly informed initiatives
like Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission or other UN or NGO activities already taking place.
It's aligned, aligned with them. But over the last two decades, maybe more.
And I'm speaking about second generation decolonial theory here.
It hasn't changed relations of land and labour and capital and violence and policing and borders or militarism or war.
It's a change of reading lists. And this has sometimes been for the better.
And it can be genuinely liberating. But what must queer or decolonial theory claims it's different from its sociological function.
In part, which is to critique institutions of knowledge production,
in part to increase the representation of more global academic work and its consequences for academic disciplines, which can only be a good thing.
It is also to increase the representation and resources for diaspora and queer academics,
and it can also be to delimit academic work to identitarian logics.
A further,
hardly discussed aspect of second generation decolonial theory is the extent of its amenability to ethno nationalist and even racist thinking,
such that its ideas and its theorists are used regularly in far right intellectual projects.
Diaspora. Academics. Include elites who can manifest elite and status competition.
So the sociology of academic decolonisation might reflect the status and interests of elite and middle class academic groups.
So, in one sense, decolonial discourse in academia can mystify elite status through identity claims about marginalisation.
Now, of course, diaspora academics have as much right to elite status in places like this as elite Marxists do, or elite conservatives.
But the broader point is about how status competition is concealed.
And in terms of theory, there are large problems with identitarian academic work, which are not always easy to resolve.
So identities are treated in many overlapping ways in academic work as social facts, explanatory concepts.
Vehicles for advocacy, tools for self-affirmation, authorisations of the moral good,
intrinsic substances, and historically created, socially created products.
If identity often shifts back and forth between being an analytical category to being a self advocating,
self-affirming group ness, then our use of it can have important ethical consequences.
It can be difficult to use analytical categories about identity without advocating
for an identity or maintaining boundaries between inside and outside perspectives.
For example, I was involved in research in a research project looking at the reasons for serious
violence that broke out in Leicester in 2022 between some groups of young men.
Who are these groups? Because as soon as I say the violence was between Hindu and Muslim groups,
the events are immediately ordered and they intelligible in our minds in a particular way.
But to even use the terms Hindu and Muslim is to advance the logic of communal separation that caused the violence in the first place,
and partly to accept the communal framing that's informed Hindu, nationalist and political Islamist narratives about the violence.
Conceptual areas also pose other difficulties. Identities at the core of the individual, but it is also at the core of the collective,
and this property of identity enables a movement from inner truth to social category,
from personal experience to group affiliation, from psychology to sociology.
The concept wraps around two ontologically different entities,
so we can slide without friction from talking about group things to talking about personal things.
And much contemporary theory also slides from talking about real institutions to talking about structures that are linguistic,
but inclusively something else as well. So what, for example, does it mean to call whiteness a structure?
Similarly, as the political scientist Adolf Reed has said, reducing the social formation to a few axes of oppression tells us virtually nothing about
the phenomenology of oppression that might be experienced by those whom those axes represent.
And analysis also typically oscillates between incompatible positions stable substance,
contingent creation, wholeness, fragmentation, homogeneity, or division.
Identities must be deep enough to matter, but not so deep that accusations of essentialism start flying about.
Yet identities are regularly treated as deep and substantive,
certainly durable enough to support large claims about vast spans of historical and geographical space,
such as coloniality or trans historical structures of power such as the heterosexual matrix or all Western knowledge and truth,
as in much decolonial theory. And these tensions are not incidental.
They're constitutive of much academic identitarian thought, including queer, decolonial and critical race theory,
all of which deny the essentialism of identities while affirming identities of the most absolutist kinds.
In this sense, left identitarian ism is what happens when supposed anti essentialism becomes
institutionalised and the theoretical problems aren't here just about essentialism,
but about reification. Now, not everything that matters is identity shaped, and not everything identity shaped matters,
and a robust critical orientation to identity needs to be maintained.
How does it come into being? Which institutions and groups and powers are creating it?
Who benefits from it? Who loses? What interest does it serve and what does it conceal?
And the broader challenges are formidable. So for sociology, I don't think we can return to what is often referred to as colour-blind liberalism,
or ignore identity in favour of class and economy,
or propose a return to universalism without incorporating the darker histories of universalist projects.
The difficult tightrope is that it shouldn't be the job of intellectual work to critically, uncritically affirm identities,
but the human rights of identity groups who have come under genuine attack have to be defended.
Thank you for listening to me.