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A critical cartography of the mattering(s) of identity politics
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Date
2025-02-20
Authors
Geerts, Evelien
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Routledge
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Abstract
Currently the subject of polarising debates and political instrumentalisation, identity politics – together with how it is entangled with identity as a lived but also theorisable experience consisting of discursive, material, and affective dimensions – is rightfully regarded as a complex phenomenon. This chapter unpacks some of this complexity by mapping out the matters – and matterings of – identity (politics) by means of a critical cartographical methodology (see Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2005; Braidotti [1994] 2011). After sketching out several critical materialist philosophical conceptualisations of identity (politics), such as those rooted in feminist standpoint theory, situated knowledges, intersectional activism and scholarship, queer theory, and queer of colour critique, a critical new materialist framework that continues along these matter(ings)-emphasising lines is presented. This critical new materialist framework, or put differently, an interferential framework (cf. Haraway 1997; Barad 2007; Geerts and van der Tuin 2013, 2021), conceptualises identity as an always-shifting myriad of the discursive-material-affective (cf. Puar 2012; Lykke 2020; Tiainen et al. 2020). This interference-based framework not only allows for a more conceptually clear and multifocal theorisation of all things identity, consequently highlighting a coalitional identities-based politics, but it also demonstrates that contemporary critical new materialist thought builds on preceding feminist materialist paradigms.
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Keywords
Identity , Politics , Critical cartographical methodology , Critical new materialist framework , Interference-based framework
Citation
Geerts, E. (2025) 'A critical cartography of the mattering (s) of identity politics: Intersectional and interferential explorations', in Kontturi, K.-K., Leppänen, T., Mehrabi, T. and Tiainen, M. (eds.) New Materialism and Intersectionality. London: Routledge, pp. 180-201. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003404019-12
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© 2025, the Author. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Kontturi, K.-K., Leppänen, T., Mehrabi, T. and Tiainen, M. (eds.) New Materialism and Intersectionality, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003404019-12