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Expressions of Identity
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Expressions of Identity
Space, Performance, Politics



November 1998 | 192 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
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. Looking at the question of what it means to adopt an identity that is organized around issues of expressivism-neo-tribal identifications, structures of feeling, emotional communities and their expressive organization-the author offers a series of nonreductionist ways of looking at identity politics. By analyzing expressive identities through issues of performance, spaces of identity, and "the occasion," Kevin Hetherington argues that the significance of identity politics and the changes it brings about within society are local, plural, situated, and topologically complex, challenging the still persistent singular idea of new social movements as historical agents of change.

 
PART ONE: IDENTITY, IDENTIFICATION AND EXPRESSIVE ORGANIZATION
 
Identity Spaces and Identity Politics
 
Tribal Vibes
Expressivism and Identification

 
 
Situations and Occasions
The Structure of Feeling and Everyday Life

 
 
Expressive Organization and Emotional Communities
 
PART TWO: SOCIAL SPACE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF IDENTITY
 
Introduction
 
The Elsewhere of Other Meaning
 
Marginal Spaces and the Topology of Utopia
 
Spaces for the Occasion
Embodiment and the Performance of Identity

 
 
Afterword
Telling Horizontal Stories