Introductory Meeting

Thursday, October 7, 2004
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, 4:00-6:00 PM

Reading: Draft version of "The Political Critique of Identity" from Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self by Linda Martín Alcoff

Abstract: The debate over identity politics continues to engage political theorists, especially those who are liberal or left-wing. In this paper, Professor Alcoff boils down the standing criticisms of identity politics to three issues, concerning separatism, the reification of identities, and the limiting of rationality. Providing careful and nuanced readings of such political theorists as Todd Gitlin, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Nancy Fraser, Alcoff demonstrates that these critics' arguments against identity politics depend upon certain basic assumptions regarding both the nature and the effects of identities. These assumptions, Alcoff notes, are "hardwired into western Anglo traditions of thought"; as such, they are rarely ever made explicit or defended. As a way of calling these assumptions into question, Alcoff examines the practices and claims of a wide range of political groups who attend to the salience of identityÑfrom the Puerto Rican Political Action Committee (PRPAC) to the Service Employee International Union (SEIU)--to see if the picture of identity supported by these assumptions corresponds to either the lived experience of identity or its politically mobilized forms.

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Syracuse University. She works primarily in continental philosophy, epistemology, feminist theory, and philosophy of race, and her research has largely focused on issues regarding epistemology and subjectivity, e.g. the epistemic significance of experience. Her books include Feminist Epistemologies (Routledge, 1993), Thinking From the Underside of History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), Epistemology: The Big Questions (Blackwell), Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory of Knowledge (Cornell, 1996), and Identities (Blackwell, 2002). She has written over forty articles concerning Foucault, sexual violence, the politics of knowledge, and gender and race identity, and has a new book forthcoming with Oxford, entitled Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self.