Identity Work in Social Movements

Edited by Jo Reger, Daniel J. Myers, and Rachel L. Einwohner

University of Minnesota Press

Identity Work in Social Movements is a collection of essays analyzing how communities cultivate group identity in order to effect social change. Each movement profiled illustrates a strategy for managing an internally fractious collective identity. In one essay, Cincinnati GLBT advocates fail to mobilize against anti-gay legislation because they have not addressed the needs of ethnic minority members. In another, an American organization must reconcile its mission of non-paternalistic engagement with a Salvadorian peasant group and its members’ desire to provide those peasants with unsolicited clothing and shoes. These case studies demonstrate how streamlining group identity can delimit the boundaries of personal identity.

This view of identity somewhat coincides with the theory that within each person is a community of selves, all jostling for prominence within one consciousness. Identity, this theory contends, is ephemeral—one snapshot in a lifelong process of negotiating with shifting desires, audiences, and politics. Readers of this book must interpret its essays this way, as portraits of identities in flux, or else the analyses become quite reductive.

This kind of research tends to pull behaviors and psychological motives into sterile abstraction. For example, “Passing as Strategic Identity Work in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising” by Rachel Einwohner is an engrossing account of Jewish resistance fighters who passed as Aryans in order to smuggle weapons into a Warsaw ghetto. When they were outside of the ghetto, activists concealed their identities by feigning contempt for other Jews. One described watching the destruction of her home from outside of the ghetto: “We stood holding our flowers, listening to the explosions, while Swietojerska street burnt, and we stood laughing.” Of this heartbreaking account, Einwohner stiffly summarizes: “As the preceding discussion has shown, passing can have emotional consequences, which can be intensified in extremely repressive contexts.”

The most intriguing analyses of this book are perhaps also the narrowest. Todd Schroer offers a fascinating examination of a white supremacist movement’s attempts to re-brand itself as “racialist,” rather than “racist.” This research relies almost exclusively on interviews with movement leaders, who could hardly be expected to deviate from their own talking points (insisting that “racialists” harbor no antipathy for other races).

The book makes it clear that the manufacture of a public group identity undermines the flexibility of personal identities. However, examples of this are occasionally clumsy. In “Being ‘Sisters’ to Salvadoran Peasants: Deep Identification and Its Limitations,” Susan Munkres concludes that Americans advocating on behalf of Salvadorian peasants have become oblivious to their own economic privilege. Kevin Neuhouser’s essay about Brazilian mother-activists, “I Am the Man and Woman in This House,” warns that activists’ maternal identification reinforces gender barriers. In both essays, I found the opposite to be true. In the former, American activists offered vestiges of their own privilege—shoes and gifts—to their Salvadorian counterparts in an implicit acknowledgement of their economic inequality. In the latter, the mother-activists spoke of being empowered to leave abusive husbands and find employment, redefining their roles as wives and dependents.

Ultimately, this research does yield insight into the inchoate and often turbulent workings of collective identity, revealing that identity, like most things, is a work in progress.

Review by Rebecca Zerzan