POL S101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Identity Politics, Gemeinschaft And Gesellschaft, Atomism

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POL S101
• Professor: John Church

Document Summary

Identity politics is a style of politics that seeks to counter group marginalization by embracing a positive and assertive sense of collective identity. Identity can be shaped around many principles ethnicity, gender, religion, culture : attempts to regenerate personal and social identity have given rise to new, and sometimes more radical, forms of politics. In seeking to challenge economic and social marginalization, black nationalism in the. Usa, for example, constituted the prototype for identity politics, especially through its emphasis on consciousness raising": consciousness raising: strategies to remodel social identity and challenge cultural inferiority by an emphasis on pride, self-worth and self-assertion. Gender politics (feminism: an awareness of the political significance of gender emerged in the nineteenth century and was shaped by the campaign for female suffrage: the right to vote. It should be noted that the word feminist is a label both for certain ideas and for people who hold such ideas.