The personal is political. Since the 1960s this axiom has been a rallying cry for New Left social movements founded in identity. This phenomenon of cultural Marxist activism, rooted in the Frankfurt School’s anti-positivist sociology, signalled the transition of a post-industrial modernity and an epochal shift that began the process of resignifying symbolic representations and reordering episteme. If activists of the 60s and their progeny made the personal political, it is certainly true that since mid-twentieth century, the political has been made personal along a much broader social milieu. Although identity sits as a major paradigm in social activism for its epistemic and political relevance, it seems that contemporary responses coalesce into a pedagogy of post-structural criticism and conservative backlash surrounding the concept of “identity politics”.
It is precisely my skepticism about discourses of authenticity that informs this dissertation. As a humanitarian activist, my hypothesis lies in my philosophy – that personal experience is a motivation for action and a delineation of one’s politics. This, of course, is incompatible with the former post-structural rejection of a fixed, essential identity. My struggle with selfhood has led me into a morass of confusions and contradictions. Perplexed, but also fascinated by this metamorphic nature of continuities and changes in the political and academic canon, and its relative implications on the micro, meso and macro stratum, my Personal Interest Project (PIP) thus seeks to examine the politics of identitarian activism. My first chapter will draw on the postmodernist–essentialist debate that underpins conceptions of selfhood and identity. I then focus on two forms of micro-personal political activity, namely Dream Activism and the pandemic feminist activism of #metoo – both of which capture the cultural zeitgeist of modernism and form my cross-cultural comparative study.
To support my thesis, I delineate a wide range of methodological approaches: personal reflection, semi-structured interviews and content analysis, which provide both numerical and narrative data that will be synthesised into configurations and patterns of collective and individual human action. The utilisation of these common approaches will allow me to analyse the complexity of youth identities within the trajectory of the undocumented Immigrant Rights Movement (Dreamers) and the narrative activism of #metoo, and to clarify and critically engage those technologically mediated experiences that shape so much of our contemporary ‘identities’.
In sum, the chapters of this work serve three purposes: (1) to research the politics and epistemic status of identity, for it is the synthesis of social activism and the shibboleth of cultural studies; (2) to study two expressions of activism; and finally (3) to offer a solution in my enduring quest for an ‘authentic’, socially and culturally literate self-representation.
Log
My entry into studying the dichotomies of youth activism, particularly of identity politics, was more of a calling than a research project. It began as a feeling of personal discomfort, of conflicting cognitions and ideas that were seemingly fragmented. Trying to make sense of this, I started writing and translating my ideas into prose. As my thoughts became externalised in sketches, notes, drafts and annotations, these designs eventually became source material for my Personal Interest Project (PIP), more specifically for my personal reflection. When I realised that reflective understanding and tacit knowledge alone may not be able to drive my writing process, I began my secondary research and came across Michel Foucault’s ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’(1969); a critique of subject-centred thought and the demise of grand narratives – and certainly an elegant rendition of many of my developing ideas about politics and knowledge. Foucault’s writing on poststructuralism, along with my inquisitiveness and deep commitment to social justice formed the most apposite basis of my inquiry.
Although a theoretical framework allowed me to formulate hypotheses on the function of specific linguistic elements and the relationship between experience, identity and discourse, most of my work on chapter 2 was guided by a close analysis of the verbal exchanges that occurred over Google Hangouts. These quasi-ethnographic interviews were conducted between the 20th of December and 15th of January, with three undocumented Latino youth activists involved in the DREAM Act campaign in CA. My experiences as a refugee were also part of my analysis since they oriented me in the interpretation of data and contributed to a certain level of cross-cultural understanding with the interviewees. A qualitative perspective, particularly one based on discourse and analysis was much more insightful than quantitative methodologies because it helped bring to the surface representations of the self that would otherwise not have been apparent through statistics. This fact is very important in explaining the primary methodological choices in data collection for chapter 2.
Simultaneously, between the 20th of February and early March, I archived just under 400 Twitter and Reddit posts for my content analysis, and the qualitative manual coding of these posts into typologies began shortly after. This iterative process proved to be more time consuming than I had envisaged, and was at times overwhelming due to the large amount of data available, particularly on Reddit. To counter this, I narrowed the parameters of my research to data posted on the 15th and 16th of October, 2017. The structure of Twitter, with its 140 character limit, also made it relatively easier to calculate.
Chapter 1 – The Politics of Identity
‘I contend that it is the lack of understanding of “the political” in its ontological dimension which is at the origin of our current incapacity to think in a political away.’
Who is the discursive ‘I’, which speaks and writes, to whom and with what purpose? At the outset of my evolving identity, my political adherences accorded with leftist and socially progressive ideals, overtly shaped by Marxist paradigms and practices. The latter, Marxism, was almost instinctual for me. My affiliation with it came as a means of making sense of many of the political and psychological sentiments which came out of my early years, distinctly that of cultural alienation. I was a naturalised Australian citizen, born into a persecuted gnostic-ethnic community in the Islamic hegemonic structure of Iraq. It was an abstract space to be raised in, one of fragmentation and disjuncture, particularly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. This was the beginning of a ‘War on Terror’ that would soon compel my family to seek refuge and asylum in Australia. Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, guilts, doubts, despairs, I want to be able to tear through my opaque body and represent my delirium to myself. Sometimes, in terror, I find myself stuck in an ethics dichotomy, between the turbulences of my passion, my experiences and the rationality and reason I try to embody. I want to understand. I want to know, express and to analyse myself. The ways protest chants roll off my tongue, the way these words feel and the pathos and anger in my voice when exclaiming, “Say it loud and say it clear, refugees are welcome here!” or “No racism, no war; this is what we’re fighting for!” My language itself trembles with passion, and I experience reality as a discourse of power. To know self, is that empirically possible? Or is it ideologically validated? It is this unruly roaming of my thoughts and the drifting account of my disposition that forms the essence of this personal reflection.
At 14, I became a Marxist of the Frankfurt school persuasion. For myself, Marxism was entangled in a generational rebellion against a society that punishes people for moving, for dreaming. My exploration of marxism was politically sharpened when I saw how we criminalised boat people. How we criminalised dreamers. How we punished those who were merely seeking a better life. We punished people for this crime. We captured them, caged them like wild animals, held them without bail, relocated them to places inaccessible to legal representation, and crippled them with political assault. Marxism also sensitised me to the power dynamics involved in the production and distribution of knowledge. It was Marx who allowed me to stake out a rebellious identity in opposition to the conservative religiosity of my parents. It was also Marx who allowed me to tear through society’s illusions of freedom and the clear inequalities produced by capitalism, by appealing to the reign of class and capital. These identity politics contributed to my own identity development.
As the heroic days of rebellion passed and my angst not yet quite subdued, I began a serious engagement with classical sociology and consequently, my assessment of Marxism proved decidedly mixed. Although I continued to value Marx’s historicist and political critique of ideology, it was here that my concerns of Marxism were most potent, as they hardly hardly spoke to my radical political impulses which pivoted on issues of the subjective and the cultural. It was at this time that I paid closer attention to feminism and its interaction with the New Left, a polemical riposte to what Peter Burke characterised as ‘an old historiographical regime.’ This was a cathartic force that had excited me and demanded that I carve some place for it in my intellectual, political (albeit not being eligible to vote) and emotional life. However, my fear of having a worldview that is overly subjective and as having overly positivistic tendencies was evident when I saw direct parallels between Marxism’s tendency to see itself as a meta-narrative and feminism’s tendency to develop theories about the universality of ‘patriarchy.’ These tendencies, as Jean-Francois Lyotard succinctly writes, an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’ is what ultimately defines the postmodern condition. Similarly, what Fredric Jameson also helped me see is that postmodernism was ‘schizophrenic’, meaning that it is characterised by a collapsed sense of temporality. Both these approaches, particularly regarding the temporality of identity and selfhood, were conducive in explaining my moments of cognitive dissonance in my scrambled identity.
This paradoxical worldview of mine was nourished by internal developments within the feminist and refugee movements. The feminist/refugee model of identity that grounded our politics and community was under serious scrutiny. Voices of difference, including mine, threatened to unravel the fragile bonds of solidarity that rested upon the assertion of a common identity. I went through phases of being fetishised and used as a ‘success story’ by supposedly progressive groups of whom had particularistic agendas and wanted to show that they had been accommodating refugee needs. I felt like I was being commodified, portrayed as a sign of ‘otherness’, as a paragon of exceptional human survival… as if only the exceptional are deserving of living. Such tokenistic gestures dehumanised me, and I was a minority that had to assimilate within these subcultures; conform to their standards and their claim of ownership over what ‘real suffering’ engendered.
Had I gone overboard? Was I disillusioned in nihilistically rejecting all truth claims? For those on the right, I received backlash for having a potential receptivity to radicalism and ideologues, and on the left, I was seen as politically incorrect, threatening the progressive coalition and wallowing in victimisation. My cultural activism that had been associated with identity politics was thus castigated by both the left and right circles. It appeared evident to me that the process by which identity had been pathologised and all forms of realism demonised insinuated to me the epistemological and political limitations that essentialist conceptions of identity had entailed. Scholars as polar in their political perspectives as Nathan Glazer and Judith Butler seem to agree at least on this one point– that identity-based social struggles are ‘politically limited and misguided.’
Over time, my certainty and enthusiasm in both Marxist and feminist paradigms waned. I had a general suspicion of identities as politically healthy or reliable sources of truth, and an ongoing hostility toward universalist claims of whom poststructuralist theorists like Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Foucault, and Barthes condemned as ‘totalising’ and ‘deterministic.’ Foucault suggested that there is no inherent meaning semantically or syntactically, which allows for multiple meanings of language. By drawing on these poststructural conceptions that render identity as both pernicious, metaphysically inaccurate and problematic, I began vigorously questioning the authenticity and viability of identity politics in my social activism, my research and civic engagement.
Nonetheless, looking in retrospect, it is precisely this self-reflection and epistemic documentation of how civic praxis is developed, sustained and translated that delineates the nexus between identity politics and identity formation. The apprehension and uncertainty, the experiences of fragmentation, the crisis of identity and feelings of turbulence and dislocation that I am forced to contend with, highlights the very polysemic and dichotomous nature of a postmodern identity. It is these subjectivities that are in process, interacting and debating. Though ambiguous, ultimately, I still believe that to self-identify by a racial, gendered or sexed designation is not merely to accept the bitter fact of oppression but to understand one’s relationship to a historical community, to recognise one’s objective social location, and to participate and continuously question the meaning and implications of ones’ identity. It is these discourses that have not only conditioned my personal experience and positioned my selfhood, but also have traversed and intersected with public knowledge and macro-discourse. Although postmodernists discount the possibility of objective knowledge, a realistic identity politics is then one that recognises the dynamic, variable and negotiated character of identity, and avoids positivist assumptions about a fully knowable world. As Stuart Hall concisely puts it, it is this idea of ‘becoming rather than being.’
Chapter 2 – Ontology of the Dreamer Identity
The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.”
In the last quarter of a century, and especially since 2011, the national imperative of the United States has been the ‘securitisation’ of state sovereignty. This frenetic fixation with security and abjection, primarily through citizenship, border control and forced migration, has constructed a state apparatus of hyperpenality and criminal branding, a phenomenon that has been referred to as ‘governance through the criminalisation of immigration.’ The centrality of the ‘Wall’ in contemporarily public discourse, particularly in the Trump Administration, alludes to the colonial frontier between the United States and Mexican borderland, in which I argue acts as a monolith of violence, of a modern thanatological governmentality. This form of insidious criminalising of Mexican and Latina/o immigrants, constitutes the immigrant as criminal and thus gives birth to ‘migrant illegality.’ Through a series of semi-structured interviews with undocumented Latino youth activists involved in the DREAM Act campaign in CA, I attempt to reconstruct an ontology of illegalised immigrant youth identities (Dreamers), illustrating the chasm between their judicial identities (as undocumentees) and subjective identities (as U.S.-raised youth), and how they have developed frames to regain control of the narrative.
The U.S.-Mexico border is contemporarily veiled by a militarised, digitised and weaponised high wall; a quasi high-tech panopticon, with sensors in the desert. This hyper surveillance is further enforced by the penology of the U.S. legal framework, a modern iteration of a new form of slavery that continues to criminalise the immigrant body. This is particularly evident in the implications present in the naming of U.S. immigration policies, including Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, Operation Gatekeeper (1993) California, Operation Safeguard in Arizona, Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, and Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernisation Act of 2013. A foucauldian rendering of this border enforcement emphasises discipline, surveillance and the production of ‘illegality.’ In accordance with discourse analysis, these laws and policies are an outcome of discourse, in which a power-knowledge nexus exists. It is under such a legislative and political milieu that undocumented youth are socialised, through a dialectical interaction of the production of migrant ‘illegality.’
Furthermore, Judith Butler argues that this immigrant spatiality and disjuncture between inclusion and exclusion, produces migrant precarity by criminalising and illegalising non-citizens. The body has become a site for the politics of immigration, whom Foucault refers to as a ‘biopolitics of otherness.’ My interview respondents further elucidated how this space of invisibility, exclusion and repression materialised around them, “When they ask us to provide documentation or identification, I have to obscure my own identity and existence… When I see these things, when I see the worth of human beings measured by pieces of paper, .. from passports to money, and numbers and letters, .. I can feel my unfreedom all over my body n’ in my damn soul and it’s a shitty feeling.” Another respondent explained that “undocumented youth live in a culture of fear… ‘illegal’ often means being afraid …everything is a sense of panic. Will they catch my family? Will I be caught in school?” These convey a shared experience of ‘illegality’ and clearly display the consequences of paranoia and perceived surveillance, where an internalisation of the inherently penal immigration policies affect the human conscience and erase personhood.
The ’coming out’ practice of a Dreamer is fundamentally a negotiation of safety and vulnerability. Proponents of identity politics suspect that this form of oppositional consciousness, that is forged through the constant navigation of ‘illegality’, might be a particularly risky form of political participation. Such personalised political resistance, where an undocumented youth’s personal life, work and activism all become sites of political expression, has political implications as they are literally ‘putting their bodies on the line for the cause.’ It is also here that my cross-cultural component was most potent and transgressed into a sense of realism as I became aware of the immigrant epistemic-generational gap. While my parents had the task of ‘survival’, I was preoccupied with self-actualisation. As their illegality was constructed constantly, they managed their lives fundamentally marked by a palpable sense of their own deportability. I realised what both a luxury and austerity it is to search for purpose, meaning and fulfilment.
The broadening of a judicial identity (as undocumented) beyond good/bad immigrant archetypes, to embrace other stigmatised social identities, including the Dreamers, Bad dreamers, undocumented/or immigrant youth and Undocuqueer/Undocutrans, allows for new paradigms of belonging and inclusion. This careful articulation of identity that prioritises intersectionality and alliance, illustrates a coalitional subjectivity; a nexus of race, sexuality and ethnicity that provides the agency to resist in ways not bound by fixed identities or subjectivities. Since identities are plural, dreamers accept that they can be contradictory and polyphonic. Just as discourse analysis is anti-foundational and rejects the claim that there exists ‘a fixed, indubitable and final foundations that guarantee the truth of a given claim to knowledge’, Dreamer activism invigorates similar theoretics. Just as the philosophies of social constructionism and poststructuralist conception of language see reality not as a fixed state of being, but as a process of becoming, undocumented identity is constantly mediated and navigated adroitly within the fluid boundaries of citizenship and ‘illegality.’
In conclusion, the analysis presented in this chapter shows that identity in social constructionist terms is a process, not a product, and a process that takes place within specific semiotic and political paradigms. This delineates the complex intersections between the personal displays of identities, experiences and the fundamentally constructed nature of identity. It is evident here that social activists need identities and experiences for self-empowerment, to create and mobilise their politics.
Chapter 3 – #metoo: Identity and the Digital Divide
In the fall of 2017, the Hollywood sexual harassment allegations instigated a populist discourse, where millions of social media posts and reactions from women, non-binaries, trans-persons and men took place. In support of two actresses coming forward in The New York Times about their experiences with Hollywood Film mogul and director, Harvey Weinstein, Actress Alyssa Milano tweeted on October 15, 2017: “Suggested by a friend: ‘If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” According to Twitter, 1.7 million tweets included the hashtag #metoo in 85 countries. This digital activism constituted a paradigm shift within feminist protest culture, as the virality of the hashtag attempted to alter the epistemic paradigm that exists in American discursive and material actions, by drawing attention to the habitual gendered assault and sexual harassment that women experience. However, it is also significant to recognise the limitations of such framing, particularly regarding the question of perceived authenticity of e-narratives and the online phenomenon of ‘slacktivism.’ In this chapter, I explore the performative functions of the #metoo hashtag usage and its variations, through a qualitative comparative study in the SNS spaces of Twitter and Reddit, collected over a period of two weeks. This also includes a hermeneutical approach, which implicates the interpretation of texts.
By obtaining two sets of manually-annotated data from Twitter and Reddit, 200 posts on Twitter and 190 on Reddit, specifically those posted on October 15 and 16, 2017, I attempt to code the key discursive themes from the corpus. The performative functions I identified to determine the authenticity of participation were in regards to how users label sexual abuse through their vocabulary usage, namely through the established categories of sole #metoo, self/narrative posts, and criticisms. Following this categorisation process, I completed a cluster analysis of the tweets and reddit posts, by both qualitative and quantitative means. The first category included tweets and posts with a sole #metoo, which constituted 54% of the total. The personalisation of politics was evident in my self/narrative classification (30%), in which I focused on for considering syntactic as well as semantic relationships to confirm my hypothesis. This category also served as an identity marker which was critical to facilitative mediated identification among like-minded tweets, in an increasingly cluttered cyberspace. The #metoo hashtag provided the context necessary for women to share personal experiences, yet simultaneously allowed these instances to become part of a collective story. As rendered in chapter 2, this conceptualisation of a collective identity formation in social movements implies that identity is created through an ongoing process of negotiation and meaning-making among participants. Women tweeting within #metoo, regardless of their initial intent, were automatically drawing connections between the private and public – the stories they shared were inherently personal, yet these experiences also revealed issues within an ostensibly broader milieu.
Interestingly, in relation to the gender of participants, I found that the users using the self/narrative mode appeared to be women, whereas the criticism category appeared to be made by men. Though nearly equal ratios of negative and positive posts were shared on both spaces, Reddit posts encompassed more of the self/narrative posts, including storytelling, details and experiences of sexual assaults within micro and meso realms, while twitter posts focused on an empathetic and supportive approach to encourage the movement by reposting relevant hashtags. These differences might be because of the character limit enforced on the platforms. Although these networks of political communication demonstrated relatively positive reactions upon first analysis, I found that, particularly on twitter, users exhibited a highly segregated partisan culture, with extremely limited connectivity between left and right-leaning users. The active users, whom I classified into the criticism category (10%), tended to organise themselves into insular, homogenous communities identifying as ‘alt-right’ and their content was frequently disparaging of the identities and views associated with users across the partisan divide. The anonymity of these users coupled with the emergence of far right-wing political activities draws allusion to ‘the dark side of the web’ where critics contend that such platforms act as partisan spheres instead of as true public spheres that imbue the notion of critical rationality.
This delineates the fracture nature of political discourse, and an understanding of the social and technological dynamics underlying this trend will be essential to attenuating the effect of #metoo on identity and on the public sphere. The #metoo campaign is not all benevolent, and by searching for alignment and similarity in experiences, it can create an illusion of solidarity and a fallacious form of consciousness raising that purports a universal type of struggle for women. This form of identity politics, can be viewed as an oversimplified version of feminism, and can lead to fragmentation and divisiveness as feminists must be wary of speaking on behalf of other women. Activism of such nature, is metaphysically inaccurate, in that it can ignore other narratives, inferiorise the ‘other’ and essentialise victims, and hence may not offer promises for change. This is intrinsically linked to the ontological premises of discourse analysis, that was reiterated in chapters 1 and 2, which claims that language gives structure and meaning to our experiences, and hence what we experience can be limited by such linguistic impediments.
Also, the power relations through which some movement identities become dominant over others are significant to note, as parenthesised in Melucci’s notion of collective identity, especially in a digital landscape that is colonised by corporations and multimedia companies that dominate attention and visibility. It is essential for movements, such as #metoo to not act as ‘unified empirical datum’ or ‘personages’ with coherent identities and pre-defined interests, but rather act as a framework that views political identities as contingent and fluid, recognises the plethora of voices and allows for diversity and tolerance. This can be done by articulating new materialist alternatives, such as intersectionality, to grapple with the onto-epistemic limitations of identity politics.
Furthermore, the online domain is inextricably interlinked with the market logic of neo-liberal globalisation, fostering a system of commodification which privileges lazy politics, a form of self-aggrandising politics that does not involve commitment to social change. This is described by critics as ‘Slacktivism’, a low-cost, low-risk, technology-mediated participation that reduces the capability for meaningful interpretations and authenticity, and is certainly not indicative of mobilisation. According to the postmodernist critique of the public sphere (a concept formed by Jurgen Habermas), this space has been dominated by educated, wealthy, white men, whereas private spheres have been compromised mainly of women. Using such an approach, it seems fair to argue that online participation requires time, money, internet access and literacy, which is not widely available to the global populous.
In essence, the complexities and intersections of a physical-digital culture, as seen in content and production of hashtag activism, encourages users to take control over their identities by highlighting their subjective narratives which differentiates from mainstream media discourse. Indeed, it is here that the personal is political. The performative functions of the #metoo tweets and Reddit posts were at times found ambiguous and inter-discursive in nature, in that they served different and multi-purposes. Through my content analysis, I was able to deduce the functions that were appropriate to consider as authentic contributions to social activism and identity formation, namely those in the self/narrative typology. This category affirmed my hypothesis as it conclusively demonstrated a dialectical cycle of populist discourse shaping identity and identity shaping populist discourse.
Conclusion
Looking in hindsight, my self-critical reflexivity in chapter 1 was certainly a daunting, if not unfeasible, task due to the impossibility of such a quest to know fully both self and identity. However, I do think that writing such a vulnerable narrative, a philanthropy of the body in activism, allowed my personal reflection to truly act as a sort of metaphysical laboratory, for examining my very sense of reality. And this not only informed my understanding of a greater social and cultural literacy, but mostly allowed me to generate a sense of dialectical ingenuity in my own activism. This definitely added personal character to my central material, as it succinctly linked my micro-experiences with those of a macro-discourse. There was also a prevalent merging of my cross-cultural perspectives in regards to the parallels drawn in the activism of the Dreamers and the #metoo, in chapters 2 and 3. This ultimately affirmed my hypothesis and demonstrated the truth-value in experientially-based identities that, when properly theorised, are crucial to social movements.
Although I tried to be critical of the way my biases and limitations may have directed and affected my research process, and sought to keep a high level of reflexivity, I acknowledge the existence of some biases and pre-understandings, and I am furthermore aware that there is a matter of subjectivity when it comes to interpreting texts and doing interviews. In regards to chapter 3, there were also impediments in terms of academic material or rather a lack of. If this project had been performed in a few years, perhaps there might have been a more comprised amount of secondary academic research that could have enriched the study. However, it is a dual-ended sword, in that the lack of material was also the answer to my interest for the subject matter. Moreover, the difficulties of switching back and forth between empirical material and theory were evident over the course of my writing.
One of my most important findings, that was indicated to me in chapter 2 and 3, was the fact that although the formation of a collective identity is based on a shared consciousness, this does not imply homogeneity and constancy. The multiplicity of conflicting identities is particularly true in a post-modern digital world where the temporality of alliances are formed and disassembled in the blink of an eye. I also learned that no single identity can ever resolve all the epistemological and political problems that are inscribed within the current dominant rationality of identities. If I am to be certain of any finding, it is essentially that counter-identities will continue to come and go, to flare up, and to become dormant in an evolving epistemic cycle of continuities and changes.
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