The personal is political: is identity politics eating itself?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ม.ค. 2016
- In her 1969 essay, ‘The personal is political’, feminist Carol Hanisch defended consciousness-raising groups against the charge they brought ‘personal problems’ into the public arena. She argued that most difficulties women experienced in private were rooted in political inequality, so personal problems could spur women to political action in public life.
Today, consciousness-raising groups are less common. Yet the idea that ‘the personal is political’ has survived, albeit giving way to an increasing fractious identity politics. The bizarre story of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman presenting herself as a mixed-race leader in the NAACP, has raised sharp questions about how we think about who a person is.
More broadly, there has been an explosion of different groups vying with one another for social recognition and respect. US writer Cathy Young argues this has led to a ‘reverse caste system in which a person’s status and worth depends entirely on their perceived oppression and disadvantage’. Burgeoning feminist clubs in universities and a diversity of gender, ethnicity, religious and cultural identity groups on college campuses and in the world of activism, reflects a substantial shift in how politics is understood and practiced in modern society. In particular, such groups are often divisively set up in competition with others’ claims to be the victim.
Feuds over ‘intersectionality’ and ‘hierarchies of oppression’ have created internecine warfare between ‘terfs’ and the ‘trans’ community, between black women and white feminists, middle-class lesbians and working-class men: checking ‘privilege’ has become a routine pastime. As some critics of contemporary feminism note, identity politics inevitably turns each individual into her own group: demanding the right to assert ‘who I am’ becomes the primary goal of political action. So when Rachel Dolezal claims to be black, who are we to argue against her self-identification?
Is this any different from the demand for public applause for Caitlyn Jenner - once known as Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner - who now self-defines as a woman? Is there a point past which we can’t choose our personal identity, as suggested by those who reject comparison between Dolezal’s ‘cultural appropriation’ (‘a glaring example of white privilege in action’) and Jenner realising who she/he always really was? Do today’s identity wars preclude possibilities for transcending gender, race, disability? Does the feminist war cry of ‘personal is political’ inevitably lead to such a narcissistic focus on self?
Speakers
Julie Bindel
journalist, author, broadcaster and feminist activist; research fellow, Lincoln University
Andrew Doyle
stand-up comedian; playwright; biographer
Sabrina Harris
technical author; longtime gamer; regular commentator on issues relating to freedom of speech and internet subcultures
Jake Unsworth
trainee solicitor, Bond Dickinson; convenor, Debating Matters Ambassadors
Dr Joanna Williams
author and academic; education editor, spiked
Chair
Claire Fox
director, Institute of Ideas; panellist, BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze
That woman calling all the panel “cis” is assuming everyone buys into the same political viewpoint that she does. No one is born “cis”, it is a word that stems from trans ideology. Which is political.
Whoever came up with "cis" & thought it was a fabulous idea is just an awful person.
🐍 Cis 🐍
People are criticizing the panel for not including a PRO-identity-politics speaker. Why?? Identity politics advocates are EVERYWHERE. I didn't need to hear for the BILLIONTH time about patriarchy, privilege, power, etc. I found it refreshing to hear people talking intelligently for once about why it's all a pile of nonsense.
BL1 i agree
I agree. Also, Bindel recognises the importance of identity politics but is very critical about how it has evolved and how is being used by most activists
@@marcosantos3381 But this is simply a function of privilege and example of it that no person of colour would be able to have a voice on this panel. It's proof.....and it would be useful to gain another perspective of someone who is affected by identity politics when it comes to race because no person - despite how much they may be a great ally - can speak to that experience and understanding. It's funny that the one guy speaks about being excluded from certain debates....I mean he's being INCLUDED in a big way - at an important university and getting 22 000 views here.
Oooooooh my loooooord this whole panel is narcissistic. But here I am being narcissistic....I guess !!?? We've always been narcissistic. We always will be. It's just that we have more and more public platforms to express that. There's nothing new - just new platforms. This panel is unbelievably boring and void of a lot of insights. Just a bit of "ooooh for the GOOD 'OL DAYS of REAL political activism".
aaaaah also just because there ARE reactionaries out there doesn't mean that the whole world is becoming totally reactionary. It just means that technology has made it far easier to see far more opinions all the time and that our human nature, unfortunately, is that we love to become voyeurs and we love to watch other people's drama's play out. ... that has never not existed. It's so obvious TECHNOLOGY + Greater Exposure = distorted perspective that we are now all MAD REACTIONARIES taking advantage of our identities.
The personal is political refers to the fact our choices are a social construct and influenced by the system itself. For example we are encouraged to be heterosexual, feminine if female or masculine if male etc.
Why am I gay if I was encouraged to be heterosexual? When I started to realise I didn't want to be gay. Why didn't I became hetero?
I might add I heart Bindel.
Thankyou very much for this discussion.
I've got it all the way up and still can barely hear them
Holy crap, what an incredibly sane panel discussion. Maybe there's hope for us after all. Joanna Williams is awesome. "I wish identity politics would eat itself".
You found that sane? We're doomed.
This was the best debate I have seen in years. Well done and thank you Claire Fox
Honest John
a debate has more then one viewpoint. This was not a debate. Every participant had the same view on topic. It was a discussion at best.
Civil rights acknowledged black people were victims of racism on a personal level and institutional. 2nd wave Feminism acknowledged women were victims of male violence and sexual objectification. Among other things people often are victimized. It is important to acknowledge that.
SO glad someone said "throwing the baby out with the bath water"! That idiom repeatedly popped into my head watching this!
Saying gender is a 'social construct' is just a ridiculous begging of the question. Well duh. We are hardly going to have concepts of gender without a society. Petitio principii if ever I heard one.
It seems that people crave identity for a number of reasons, suppression is the primary. To live in world of acceptance because we all want to belong. There are also the people who follow for the "fashion" sense of it all, "everyone is doing it" theory. I don't identity should belong in politics, but I do think people should have a voice. Thus, identity separates us and is super dangerous when taken to extreme measures. Being the only white girl in my elementary school, I was constantly bullied by black kids, but if I talk about it, if I raise my voice about, I am considered a guilty racist. I see this is from 2016 but a good debate.
I love the audiences responses.
Wow. This was 2016? It’s much worse now.
Joanna Williams doesn't understand "the personal is political." Julie Bindel knows what she's talking about. Love you Julie!
Was that the blonde chick? Sorry, wasn't paying attention to the introductions. Did pay attention to this woman shaking with outrage who apparently didn't hear or comprehend a word that Julie said.
The woman at 43:00 thinks the are merely reaffirming each other’s views isn’t really listening. They are being civil but there is definitely disagreement between panel members.
0:57 0:58 0:59
"Feminism philosophically bifurcates the human experience, and in doing that it really is the mother of all identities." Confused much? The woman liked feminism "when it was about women's liberation." Silly! It still is! And to the dude who thinks that a father has no right to say, "speaking as a parent": You can't wave your magic wand and make the lived experience of caring for children on a day-to-day basis and of being legally responsible for them (there are consequences for doing it the "wrong" way) disappear. Academics, for the most part, are far removed from the real-life experiences of most people, on whom they can only "do research." Get real! I say that kindly, speaking as a "multi-degreed" person who could only shake my head as I watched this loony discourse arise in an elite university.
Julie Bindel is the only speaker worth listening to in this panel.
Yeah cause her problem isnt that a black person is always the victim and the white the oppressor but rather that a white person can identify as black now.
She is a piece of shit ! Im glad she is getting hell from her own camp. Nazis against nazis !
I'm guessing this has been cut in some areas
+gantmj Postmodernism could also refer to the 1950s. The anti-gender view wasnt always a part of post modernism. It was largely a view that started in the 1970s up until about 1990. Then it started to dwindle away. Now people think they have progressed when really they have gone backwards to the 1950s view that gender is not made up and is concrete. Men and women have a biological sex. However gender is totally different and is a stereotype, that wearing painful heels etc. is inherently feminine
44:44 why is there a cut there? Seems suspicious.
Okay it's picked up again at 51:50
Ha! 01:08:28 "Have we got a black face" ...what's a "black face" - is that anything like a headless woman?
1:15:56 A combination of Life of Brain, Alice and Wonderland and 1984? That would be Brazil wouldn't it?
Why would that be Brazil? Just curious about your insight, not that I necessarily disagree.
why would anyone be against collectivism, right? isn't that at the very 'root' of all these groups, this thing that's sometimes called collectivism?
Even though, being a catholic bog hopper, I can identify with some of their grievance
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung saw the ouroboros as an archetype and the basic mandala of alchemy. ... The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. Identity politics is the Ouroboros of humanity.
Insufferable one-note debate, Julie Bindel was the only decent-ish speaker there
Limiting identity politics to feminism really diminished the potential of the debate. There's identity politics in so many other subjects. Racism was one of the first to use that angle for example.
+Lorenz Attractor Well identity is personal too.
An all-white panel!!!
I rest my case...
I like what the woman with the blue ribbon is saying but I'm very frustrated because she's wildly contradicting herself.
12:53 Here Julie Bindel is wrong. Feminism is not the only movement that has been rewritten. Ayn Rand and the right-"libertarians" have been appropriating and rewriting the working class movement from the very beginning.
38:06 That poor young lady looks so miserable sitting next to the chief of gulag.
No...IDENTIFY...as working-classes.
'What is the difference between identity politics and unconscious bias?' Erm, one is conscious and one is not?
The absolute ignorance of people and their assumed knowledge when it comes to racist police is astounding. Why is this a talking point so rarely challenged? It is an assumption made by identitarians, yet these panelists seem to accept it at face value. A uniform and a job don’t make someone racist AND correlation does NOT demonstrate a causal relationship. Police disproportionately stopping black people does not automatically imply racism. There may be other contributing factors. There ARE other contributing factors, as Thomas Sowell, Heather Macdonald, Larry Elder and several others have shown. It shouldn’t be necessary for them to point out the obvious flaw in the inductive and disjointed reasoning taking place in the mind of anyone who asserts the idea that police are racist because more black people get pulled over, arrested etc. It is the same kind of stupid reasoning to say that, because black people are over represented in violent crime (they are), that they are violent as a race. That would be a stupid assertion indeed but it’s somehow ok to assert it because someone has a certain job???
Transphobia: Fear of Transformer :)
Patriarchy is my second favorite feminist windmill.
49:47 she resorts to identity politics O_O
No.. because discrimination exists
@@opiatecordsprove it
so interesting that everyone there is white lol, how can you understand someone else's challenges or experiences when you are not discriminated on the same base? some countries in global south completely forget about people with disabilities because they are not allowed into power, some policies are completely harming lgtbqi and because they are not allowed into power in some conservative countries no one does anything to stop these policies. Policy impacts different people in different ways, we are humans are have loopholes or will mostly think about our similars. Which is why we need intersectionality, to see how policy will impact each person with different identity
Oh God not Julie Bindel lol
Bad hosting. Claire Fox should've invited more people of diverse view points to make things more interesting. There was nobody on the panel supporting identity politics which made this a one-sided boring debate.
She explicitly said she couldn't get pro-identity politics people to come and that's why they're taking so many questions from the audience. What would you have done differently?
Meg Mitchell I would have made more of an effort!
...Or at the very least, I would've invited guests to discuss something other than feminism. Identity politics are entrenched in race and religion also.
Hmm, but you don't even know how much effort she went to? As for not discussing feminism, I assume you mean you would have removed Julie Bindel from the panel... just like everyone else? :(
Meg Mitchell Let's just say that considering there are 53 million people living in England I'm surprised she couldn't find a single person pro identity politics to come. That's why I don't think she made much effort.
And no, I would not have removed Julie Bindel from the panel. I just would've preferred it if they talked about identity politics in race and religion as well as feminism.
I'm curious how familiar you are with Julie Bindel and her work? Yes, maybe if you surveyed all 53 million people in England you would find a pro-identity politics person willing to share a stage with her. If you're talking about anyone with any prominence at all, though, I seriously doubt it.
Well we all our products of our environment, life is based on identify politics, that's why people become democrats or republicans. It's no coincidence that our personal history, culture, and present situation exhorts us to identify with this group or that.
You only get identity politics where certain groups of people are oppressed and become estranged from mainline politics. This is the reason Five Dallas police officers were killed and seven wounded by gunmen
during protests against the shooting of black men by police,
DrMontague Oh please, the mainstream has it's own set of rituals and beliefs that are expressed in politics, but nice try on slandering a group of people for your self serving reasons.
DrMontague Well, you are the doctor so I yield to your expertise.
mark y
Cheers.
***** Have you heard of the NRA? They are identified politically around one issue. How does that square with your left wing genesis-only theory.
Jake is very interesting to me. 😘
i dont have time for this.
I've said it elsewhere and I'll say it here too: "The personal is political" is a truly evil way to conduct your life. Thinking this way about your personal relationships makes you, over time, a narcissistic sociopath who dehumanizes others for not agreeing with your political beliefs. This gives you an excuse to be an abuser towards them without feeling bad about it. After all, if they "don't respect you" then why should you have any compassion for them?
Ah god Doyle mansplainin women's right to object to te menz discussing our uteri. I don't discuss the US black civil rights movement from my white girl perspective , why? Because it's not about me and never can be . Fox ache .
sinead connolly none of the arguments that can be presented about women's issues are dependent on the sex of who is presenting them. Unless you are claiming that a male cannot make a rational argument or that their argument is inheriantly less valid because of their sex (an inheriantly sexist notion) then what you are saying is that even though their views might be valid you want to hear a woman say it. because the validity of the stances are not what is being objected to you are making a claim based purely on sex and that is sexism.
unless you have a different reason?
I find it amusing that Julie Bindel would complain about postmodernism, yet espouse a view that could not exist without it (the social constructionist, anti-biological determinist view).
that's a modernist view, not a postmodern view... It's the source, partly of postmodernism, not the other way round.
Bindel likes to have her cake and eat it. As you say, that ideological basis to thought which enables her many positions also undermines them.
Intersectionality (which informs identity politics) replaces individuality with conformity to a group identity. That's the problem in a nutshell.... and Julie Bindel is a fucking man-hater. Sure people belong to different demographics, and different groups in society have advantages & disadvantages. It's just that this intersectionality model reduces everyone to the groups to which they belong and then makes claims that an individual is either privileged over, or oppressed by, those of another demographic. This essentially means that if you're a white heterosexual male, you need to check your privileges to redeem yourself so as not to be labeled racist, homophobic & sexist, at which point I just don't give a damn anymore.
Ooh boo boo. So, people taking back themselves from the hegemony of the white het male is what, all the hurtz? Jeez how fragile that must be if it can't share humanity with women and the LGB and BME.
+sinead connolly And I still don't give a fuck. I'm too busy living a productive life to worry about checking my privilege.
And don't forget that female tendency to always try and fix men!! don't tell me that not the UNsaid in this whole discussion. Fix men to conform to this spaghetti of ideas, give them unreachable ideals and goals, keep them forever puzzled, and if they accept it, you win.
@23:26
What Frank Mahoney says. "I was always jealous of girls". I think that sums it up for a lot of these of men.
www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/frank-maloney-sex-change-boxing-4030910
A true woman's nature is so powerful in the world within.
Anyone else notice for this discussion they didn't invite 1 person with an opposing viewpoint? How about how they relied on their identity to give their opinions credence? Or how they used others identity to denounce opposing points of view. An anti-identity politics discussion based on identity politics.
What about the fact human beings are more then a bunch of cells draped over a skeleton. We are also are a collection of the experiences we have had and the identity labels we take on from them. I never encountered a person who's self identity was 'i am'.
With out publicly offering a shared identity and the personal experiences that commonly shared within that group how would those past activist persuaded a public used to ignoring abuse, persecution, neglect or racism to actually support a change in society and law?
Sure like everything humans took it to far. That doesn't make the principle unsound.
The opposing viewpoint is trash. "The personal is political" is a way to dehumanize people who agree with you and make taking adverse actions against them a moral imperative. Besides, the cancerous view that "the personal is political" has been all over the place for a while now; it's time for them to shut up and let the adults talk.
You didn't listen, did you.
@amandag5072 I don't know if you noticed but that comment is listed as 7 years ago. I'm not going to have a conversation about a video I barely remember especially with my opinion on it. I am sure I did listen though. I always listen. I listen with out having any true relationship with either side as the topic is an interest not a personal view. You are allowed to disagree with me if you want. I will even read Amy points you make, but an accusation I didn't listen is not a point, not a defense, and offers nothing to the conversation.
I'm a member of the most marginalised group in Europe during the last 100 years. Yet, I am white, male Christian, heterosexual. I'm a Catholic who grew up during the height of the Troubles in the north of Ireland. The level of intellectual pride on display here, masquerading as empathy, is simply staggering. Luke 23:34. Ne Timeas.
Bindel says that gender is not innate but then, at the same time, she argues that the experience of gender IS. This is the only way to make sense of her belief that MTF transgender people "are not women". She would then also have to agree with the guy in the audience who stood up and said that his experience was a fact.
Is identity politics eating itself out?
Don’t worry, it ate itself and had a poop
The poop is continuing it's job, though. Much worse now than ever.
TERF
Julie Bindel = part of the problem here
Disagree. The point is that she is against censoring anyone and is pro open discussion. So she isn't part of the problem at all. Julie Bindle's views are pretty extreme and fringe, so she'll never win over the public in the open marketplace of ideas. She's a threat to absolutely no one.