Expressions Of Identity

This work explains what is understood by the term "new social movements", and provides a critical assessment of identity politics. It examines a range of issues including neo-tribalism associated with identity politics and alternative lifestyles. 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. This book questions what it means to adopt an identity that is organised around issues of expressivism - and offers a series of non-reductionist ways of looking at identity politics. Hetherington analyzes expressive identities through issues of performance, spaces of identity and `the occasion′. This important work shows how the significance of identity politics are at once local, plural, situated and topologically complex.