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.