Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics

by Kevin Hetherington

This innovative book sets out to question what we understand by the term `new social movements′. By examining a range of issues associated with identity politics and alternative lifestyles, the author challenges those who treat new social movements as instances of wider social change while often ignoring their more `local′ and `dispersed′ importance. This book questions what it means to adopt an identity that is organised around issues of expressivism - and offers a series of non-reductionist ways of looking at identity politics. Hetherington analyzes expressive identities through issues of performance, spaces of identity and `the occasion′. This important work shows how the significance of identity politics are at once lo

Paperback

First published September 14, 1998

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a challenging critique of a large body of contemporary social theory: Hetherington draws on a wide set of research (his own and other's) to explore contemporary lifestyle movements as forms of identity politics. Social movements as lifestyle politics is not a new argument, but Hetherington's use of an eclectic body of social and sociological theory makes this an argument that could take in new ways to new places.

Hetherington gets beyond several of the serious limitations of social movement literature here to do several key things. First, there is a powerful rebuttal of the structuralist notions of understanding social movements through such things as their ability to mobilise reasources for action. Second, there is a powerful rebuttal of identity politics as consumption. Third, he gets beyond the limitations of social movement studies that invoke notions of the 'tribe' - such as both, in their different ways, Maffesoli and Morris. At the heart of his approach is lifestyles, and he explores the idea of the affective or emotional community through the use of Herman Schmallenbach's notion of the Bund - little of Schmallenbach's early twentieth century work has been translated from the German, and he is not widely used in contemporary sociology.

Although Hetherington's research centres on obvious lifestyle groups such as new age travellers and other 'alternative' ways of living - such as eco-protesters, I found Schmallenbach's Bund model extremely helpful in making sense of activist movements at the heights of their confrontations with the state and power (I focussed on the anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand) as a way to get beyond the weaknesses of existing social movement theory in both psychology and sociology. There is much in this book that needs closer attention.