Svati P. Shah,
"Sexuality and 'The Left': Thoughts on Intersections and Visceral Others"
(page 6 of 7)
"Identity Politics and the Left"[23]: Eric Hobsbawm
Revisited
The persistence of sexual normativity as a structuring paradigm for
the left bears examination as a way into an analysis of the mainstream
left's historical disengagement with sexuality-based movements. While a
complete explication of the meanings of normativity on the left is well
beyond the scope of this piece, I offer a reading of Eric Hobsbawm's
1996 essay "Identity Politics and the Left" to in order to address a
fairly iconic leftist rationale for marginalizing political movements
that cohere around non-normative and marginalized sexuality and sexual
performance. In this piece, Hobsbawm positions non-class based
movements, including sexuality-based movements, as "identitarian" and
therefore not worthy of inclusion by "universalist" left movements. He
writes:
"Identity groups were certainly not central to the Left.
Basically, the mass social and political movements of the Left, that is,
those inspired by the American and French revolutions and socialism,
were indeed coalitions or group alliances, but held together not by aims
that were specific to the group, but by great, universal causes through
which each group believed its particular aims could be realized . . .."
"Identity groups," then, including racialized and ethnicized
minorities, women, and LGBT groups, have particularized concerns, rather
than those of the "great, universal causes." He goes to make plain his
meaning:
"So what does identity politics have to do with the Left?
Let me state firmly what should not need restating. The political
project of the Left is universalist: it is for all human beings. However
we interpret the words, it isn't liberty for shareholders or
blacks, but for everybody. It isn't equality for all members of the
Garrick Club or the handicapped, but for everybody. It is not
fraternity only for old Etonians or gays, but for everybody. And
identity politics is essentially not for everybody but for the members
of a specific group only. This is perfectly evident in the case of
ethnic or nationalist movements. Zionist Jewish nationalism, whether we
sympathize with it or not, is exclusively about Jews, and hang—or rather
bomb—the rest. All nationalisms are. The nationalist claim that they are
for everyone's right to self-determination is bogus . . .. Since the 1970s
there has been a tendency—an increasing tendency—to see the Left
essentially as a coalition of minority groups and interests: of race,
gender, sexual or other cultural preferences and lifestyles . . .. [L]et
me repeat: identity groups are about themselves, for themselves, and
nobody else. A coalition of such groups that is not held together by a
single common set of aims or values has only an ad hoc unity, rather
like states temporarily allied in war against a common enemy." [emphases
added]
Hobsbawm articulates a basic tension between Marxian movements and
all other social movements, and of "identitarian" ones especially—that
of the relationship between universalism and particularity.
Identitarianism is merged with liberal nationalisms in his formulation.
However, the italicized sentences betray more than this basic tension,
because they indicate the formulation of sexuality and race that informs
its inclusion in Hobsbawm's argument. First, regarding sexuality,
Hobsbawm's offhanded comparison between "old Etonians and gays" is
designed to suggest hyper-particularized absurdity, as it clearly does
not indicate an actual group of gay people who attended Eton. Second,
his location of identitarianism as a recent phenomenon, emerging,
according to his introduction, in the "middle 1960s," is written in the
mode of criticism, rather than critique. The longue durée of the
left's universalisms emerges as the vastly more substantial and valued
entity compared with formations that in 1996 were, for Hobsbawm, only a
few decades old. That he mobilizes his argument by dehistoricizing
identitarianism in social movements is reflected in the broad
descriptive statements afforded "identity politics," while "the Left" is
afforded history. This is important, given the historical ruptures
between mainstream left movements and the feminist, LGBT, caste-based,
race-based, and ethnicity-based movements that inform both
identitarianism and the development of social movements in relation to,
or by virtue of their exclusion from, mainstream left movements. Third,
the statement which prefaces Hobsbawm's charge of an almost
megalomaniacal narcissism driving identitarian movements defines
sexuality as an "interest," a "cultural preference," and a "lifestyle."
The linguistic clues marking queer sexualities without naming them in
this phrasing are unmistakable, indicating, at least, that non-normative
sexuality is subject to preferences verging on whims, rather than
constituting a substantial pursuit of history and politics.
In his essay in New Politics, Martin Duberman addresses
Hobsbawm and his contemporaries by discussing:
". . . a mounting attack by straight, white, and 'liberal'
male public intellectuals on an identity politics that emphasized issues
relating to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Among the
more prominent of these intellectuals were Eric Hobsbawm, Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., Ralph Nader, Richard Rorty, Jack Newfield, and Todd
Gitlin. Collectively—and curiously—they chose to focus on us, rather
than on corporate America (which of course they did denounce for its
greed and corruption), as the chief villain in the decline of interest
in the transcendent issues of class division and economic inequity.
We had abandoned the working class. We had destroyed the
Left."[24]
To be clear, I am not arguing, nor do I mean to imply, that
Hobsbawm's assessment can simply be explained away as "homophobia,"
which is also why I include Duberman's critique here. While homophobia
may play a part in the ability to club race, gender, and sexuality
together as a less worthy set of concerns than a "real" issue like
class, I include this reading of Hobsbawm to suggest that his argument
is representative of the analytic dismissal of sexuality, and that this
is a critical social context and construct within the mainstream left.
In this approach, sexuality is, perhaps, embedded within, but not
constituted by, material conditions. Hobsbawm demonstrates this by
reducing sexuality to gayness. He also conveys that gayness is not
subject to history, by virtue of its relatively recent emergence, and
that it, like so many other "identitarian" concerns, is a distraction
from the task at hand. Although homophobia may be salient in formulating
this argument, the question of history is the rationale on which the
argument turns.
The effects of the "identitarianization" of sexuality includes the
ways in which sexuality has been embedded in left critiques of "identity
politics," a term which refers to the theoretical organization of race,
gender and sexuality, for example, as individual, identity-based
constructs that have political valence. In the U.S., this mode of
understanding race, gender, and sexuality was particularly salient
during the 1990s, when Hobsbawm published this essay. (Although Marxists
also speak of "class identity," class politics were generally not part
of the dominant discourse on "identity politics" in the U.S.)
In discussing Hobsbawm's essay here, I do not mean to imply that the
same rubrics are relevant today as in 1996. I do mean to draw a link
between the ways in which sexuality remains embedded in left critiques
of identity politics, and the impoverished critique of sexuality from
the mainstream left that has resulted, alongside the ways in which queer
left analysis has a wider audience within the institutions of
sexuality-based struggles than the institutions of the left. There
remains a need to analytically draw out each category of analysis—class,
sexuality, race, gender—from the rubrics of "identity politics," rather
than aggregating together all categories of analysis that are seen to
have less historicity than class. The reasons for the need to draw out
sexuality are manifold, including the degrees to which the discussion on
identity politics has shifted since it was the center of discourses on
gender, race, and sexuality in the 1980s and 1990s. That sexuality is
now being framed as an ethnicized concern in the U.S., for instance via
the growing, politically produced "common sense" that queer sexualities
and transgenders are the result of innate biological characteristics,
has had profound impacts for political discourse, including the
discourses on gay marriage and sex work described above. An aggregated
view of sexuality cannot afford the textured critique of power,
normativity, and the state that are needed in this political moment.
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