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Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics
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. Looking at the question of what it means to adopt an identity that is organized around issues of expressivism-neo-tribal identifications, structures of feeling, emotional communities and their expressive organization-the author offers a series of nonreductionist ways of looking at identity politics. By analyzing expressive identities through issues of performance, spaces of identity, and "the occasion," Kevin Hetherington argues that the significance of identity politics and the changes it brings about within society are local, plural, situated, and topologically complex, challenging the still persistent singular idea of new social movements as historical agents of change.
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First published September 14, 1998
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July 24, 2011
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.
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.
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