Toward a Psychology of Ideas Rather Than Demographics: Commentary on Hommel (2024).

The public will rightly not value a science that is more concerned with demographic population matching than with ideas. Taking further steps in the direction of identity politics will reduce public confidence in psychology's conclusions and reduce trust and respect. If psychology embraces demographic quotas, there will be self-selection out of the discipline, and that self-selection will harm our science.

Indigenous DNA as a metaphor: Nation-building and scientific debates on the rediscovery of Taiwanese ancestry.

In this paper, I investigate the co-production of genetic research and national politics in post-martial law Taiwan. This entails analyzing two co-produced phenomena: the nationalization of biomedicine-in which the national discourse over racial/ethnic categories and ancestral origin increasingly shapes scientists' biomedical research; and the biomedicalization of the nation-in which people in public discourse increasingly use biomedical categories in characterizing national differences and identities. I analyze how the production and representation of scientific knowledge of the ancestral origins and genetic make-up of Taiwan have been embedded in Taiwanese politics. This includes the emergence of a new categorization into four great ethnic groups, multiculturalism, and the assertion of a distinct Taiwanese national identity, particularly in response to the People's Republic of China's claims of common ancestry. I also examine how the scientific findings produced in the lab have spilled out into both Taiwan and China through journals, media, history textbooks, and public disputes since the 1990s and brought about significant social impact.

Invoking Identity? Partisan Polarization in Discussions of Race, Racism, and Gender in 2022 Midterm Advertising in the U.S.

CONTEXT: Media messaging matters for public opinion and policy, and analyzing patterns of campaign strategy can provide important windows into policy priorities. METHODS: We used content analysis supplemented with keyword-based text analysis to assess the volume, proportion and distribution of attention to race-related issues in comparison to gender-related issues during the general election period of the 2022 midterm campaigns for federal office. FINDINGS: Race-related mentions were overwhelmingly focused on crime and law and order with very little attention to racism, racial injustice, and the structural barriers that lead to widespread inequities. In stark contrast to mentions of gender, racial appeals were less identity focused and were competitively contested between the parties in their messaging, but much more likely to be led by Republicans. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that discussion of race and gender were highly polarized with consequences for public understanding of and belief in disparities and policies important to population health.

The neoliberal multicultural state and the urban Indigenous associative model in Santiago de Chile.

This article argues that since the recovery of democracy in Chile in the early 1990s, the state has been reshaping the Indigenous socio-political landscape by adopting neoliberal multiculturalism as a governance model. By not posing significant challenges to the state's neoliberal political and economic priorities, Indigenous cultural activity has been carefully channelled to meet state expectations of what constitutes urban indigeneity. Drawing on the minority and multicultural studies literature and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses how Mapuche civil society navigates the complexities of two relational models of state/ethnic minority interaction: ethno-bureaucracy and strategic essentialism. Although Mapuche associations have tried to accommodate their interests within the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism, the article argues that this governance model has established incentives for inclusion and exclusion in the socio-political apparatus, resulting in a fragmentation of the Mapuche associative landscape in urban Chile.

On Her Own Terms: Ana Castillo Discusses Sexuality, Identity, and Life-Then and Now.

Ana Castillo is a prolific and celebrated author of novels, poetry, short stories, and essays on gender and sexuality, feminism, and Chicanx experiences. Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo's works include The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), So Far from God (1993), Massacre of the Dreamers, Loverboys (1996), and black dove: mamá, mi'jo, and me (2016) among others. Castillo is the recipient of several awards including the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the International Latino Book Award, and the Lambda Award. In this interview, Liliana C. Gonzalez and Stacy I. Macias discuss Castillo's reflections on the political and cultural moment in which Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About was published. Macias and Gonzalez also explore Castillo's encounters with the problematics of identity politics and consider Castillo's evolution as an activist and creative writer.

Contested Queerness: Identity Politics at the Party by Ostbahnhof.

Here, I provide a descriptive account of The Party by Ostbahnhof grounded in interview and ethnographic work. Ostbahnhof is an underground warehouse party that "puts queer people … first." By closely examining a polemic manifesto, calling for the exclusion of "basic white-cis-homo-normal" gays, I document the popular theories of queerness that determine which individuals can participate in Ostbahnhof's project, how, and to what ends. I use the aperture of an the ever-contentious question-who qualifies as a queer person?-to uncover the contradictory and multivalent nature of queerness as theorized in and outside of the academy. Following the party's organizers, I conclude by questioning the political utility of purely "anti-normative" queer ideologies and look to their example if a "positive" definition of queerness as a potential roadmap for navigating a rapidly expanding queer public sphere.

Militarizing politics of recognition through the Invictus Games: post-heroic exalting of the armed forces.

The Invictus Games is an international sporting competition involving military veterans who have become either wounded, injured or sick during their service. Having become a prominent event in the public sphere of participating nations that are drawn from Western security alliances, this article outlines results from a thematic analysis of Australian media surrounding the 2018 Sydney Games. While reporting of the Games included the use of cultural frames that reflect traditional symbolic relationships between sport and war, the data reveal new military-civilian discourses drawn from identity politics and focused on cultural recognition. These discourses emerge through the Invictus Games by (1) disability providing a cultural basis to demand greater respect for contemporary veterans and military service; and (2) empowerment narratives of rehabilitation being symbolically connected to participants' reengagement with their former military identity. Institutional problems central to rising political activism amongst contemporary veterans did not feature in the media coverage. It is argued that the Invictus Games illustrates the need for sociology to conceive of militarization in more multidimensional ways, appreciating both the prominence of a civilian-military gap in contemporary culture and how various social actors in Defense utilize post-heroic narratives in seeking to redress this cultural divide.

Hong Kong Universities in the Shadow of the National Security Law.

How did Hong Kong's transition from a largely free, semi-independent city to a full-blown Communist Party dictatorship affect its academic life? A watershed moment was Beijing's imposition, in June 2020, of a National Security Law. The author examines the impact of that law on the conduct of university senior managements, on local and expatriate faculty, and on students. Senior management responded to the new law by disciplining students, monitoring faculty, and cleansing universities of anything deemed hostile to the new order. Faculty rapidly capitulated to government and management edicts, though locals showed more grit than expatriates did. Students were the most defiant actors of all until university managements severed ties with their students' unions, effectively defunding them. A case of surveillance in Lingnan University, the author's former place of employment, is related and its implications considered. The author describes how, and explains why, journalists in Hong Kong acted with greater defiance than professors did. He suggests that Identity Politics, a Western import, is congenial to Chinese Communist Party rule in Hong Kong.

From Inter-Racial Solidarity to Action: Minority Linked Fate and African American, Latina/o, and Asian American Political Participation.

Recent literature in race, ethnicity, and politics has assessed how minority linked fate, defined as "the idea that ethnoracial minorities might share a sense of commonality that extends beyond their particular ethnoracial group to other ethnoracial groups (Gershon et al., in Politics Groups Identities 7(3):642-653, 2019)," shapes attitudes toward descriptive representation and support for coalition building. However, scholarship has yet to examine the influence of minority linked fate on political participation. We argue that similar to those who view the interests of co-ethnics as a proxy for their individual interests, Latina/os, Asian Americans, and African Americans who express linked fate with a more expansive minority community are more likely to take political action. This political participation results from senses of obligation to and solidarity with other racial minorities outside of their own. Results from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey show that controlling for conventional measures of linked fate, minority linked fate is associated primarily with more system-challenging modes of political activity for Latina/os, Asian Americans, and African Americans. We conclude by positioning minority linked fate as a complementary heuristic to traditional notions of intra-racial linked fate and note how shared inter-racial linked fate informs our understanding of recent political activism among people of color. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-021-09750-6.

The Colorblind Rainbow: Whiteness in the Gay Rights Movement.

Discourse on "identity politics" tends to treat political minority identities as distinct entities, discussing them as if an individual is either black or a woman or LGBT, etc. This separates race and sexuality in a way that, supported by white homonormativity and a possessive investment in whiteness, renders the LGBT community "white" despite racial diversity. This masks the ways that the policy preferences of LGBT individuals are structured along racial lines and hinders inter-minority coalition building. Utilizing a Pew Research Center dataset of LGBT Americans collected in 2013, I show that race is significantly correlated with economic policy preferences and perceptions of racial discrimination. While a majority of white LGBT Americans hold liberal positions, the significant differences between white and nonwhite individuals and the well-documented self-reports of experiences of racism by nonwhite LGBT Americans, suggest that white LGBT Americans must actively address the question of race in order to build successful coalitions.

Doing statistics, enacting the nation: The performative powers of categories.

It has been widely acknowledged in debates about nationalism and ethnicity that identity categories used for classifying people along the lines of culture, race, and ethnicity help to enact, that is, bring into being, the collective identities they name. However, we know little about how categories acquire their performative powers. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, it proposes a conceptual framework based on concepts and insights from science and technology studies for investigating the performative powers of statistical identity categories and possibly also other domains. Second, it demonstrates, through an empirical study of two examples from Estonian and Dutch official population statistics, that statistical identity categories enact more than the groups to which they refer. We argue that they also enact national identities and notions of national belonging of majoritarian groups in the host countries. Therefore, statistical identity categories can be used as analytical lenses to study nationalism and processes of nation-building.

Censoring political opposition online: Who does it and why.

As ordinary citizens increasingly moderate online forums, blogs, and their own social media feeds, a new type of censoring has emerged wherein people selectively remove opposing political viewpoints from online contexts. In three studies of behavior on putative online forums, supporters of a political cause (e.g., abortion or gun rights) preferentially censored comments that opposed their cause. The tendency to selectively censor cause-incongruent online content was amplified among people whose cause-related beliefs were deeply rooted in or "fused with" their identities. Moreover, six additional identity-related measures also amplified the selective censoring effect. Finally, selective censoring emerged even when opposing comments were inoffensive and courteous. We suggest that because online censorship enacted by moderators can skew online content consumed by millions of users, it can systematically disrupt democratic dialogue and subvert social harmony.

In Search of the Missing Links Between Economic Insecurity and Political Protest: Why Does Neoliberalism Evoke Identity Politics Instead of Class Interests?

The prospect of the social backsliding of middle-class groups in western countries has not benefited the left but fueled right-wing populism. This article examines mediating and moderating factors between economic threat and political choices. The shift of liberals toward conservatism and the activation of passive authoritarians explain sudden changes more than dispositional factors. Attachment to groups under stress activates coalitional mindsets, and coalitional competition for scarce resources matches the conservative propensity to detect threats from outgroups. Risk-averse right-wing authoritarians should recoil from social-dominance oriented risk-takers but they follow winners despite their mutual differences concerning family values. Authoritarian aggression unites RWA and SDO, but politically passive right-wing authoritarians can also follow their economic interests, when these are not entangled with cultural values. Right-wing populists have been able to compensate economic insecurity with epistemic security. Identity politics supports the coherence of right-wing populist parties but divides leftist/liberal groups due to intersectional competition for victimhood.

The personal politics of private life in the United Arab Emirates (UAE): sexualities, space, migration and identity politics in motion.

Activism on sexuality and sexual politics in South and West Asia has been increasing in the last two decades, resulting in challenges and opportunities to negotiate sexual subjectivity, intimacy and politics. But some people articulate a desire to disentangle sexual politics from identity politics. Against this background, a two-pronged investigation of the intersections of sexuality and migration was conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with the aim of understanding the role of sexuality in compelling migration. Data were collected by means of qualitative interviews and participant observation. Findings identify the existence of two contrasting forms of sexual politics: the strategic deployment of sexuality to affect social and political change, and activism with the goal of rethinking ideas and norms about sexuality. Challenges to sexual subjectivities resulting from the tethering of sexual politics to LGBT identity politics act as something of a 'push' factor for some individuals, encouraging them to migrate from places such as Iran, Pakistan and Nepal to the Persian Gulf countries in search of space in which to explore their bodies and sexualities.

Narrow bridges: Jewish lesbian feminism, identity politics, and the "hard ground" of alliance.

The emergence of Jewish feminism in the late twentieth century produced a contradictory site for engagement with the Israeli state and its claims to both Jewish identity and the territory of historic Palestine. While some mobilizations of Jewish feminist identity politics promoted nationalism, others engaged the self-reflexive mode to question the coherence of group identity, to work against its codification in the state-national form, and to engender empathy and solidarity with targets of both U.S. and Israeli racial states. This essay maps two forms of Jewish feminist praxis: one liberal, normatively white, invested in both heteronormativity and Zionism; the other radical, emerging in close collaboration with women of color feminism, attuned to comparative racial relations, lesbian-led, and saturated with discourse and debate on U.S. and Israeli racism, and Zionism's connection to Jewish identity.

Configurações e reconfigurações do movimento de jovens vivendo com HIV/AIDS no Brasil: Identidades e prevenções em jogo / Configurations and re-configurations of the young people living with hiv/aids movement in Brazil: Identities and preventions at stake / Configuraciones y reconfiguraciones del movimiento de jóvenes viviendo con VIH / SIDA en Brasil: Identidades y prevenciones en juego

Resumo: Construída como modelar durante as últimas décadas, a "política de AIDS" tem sido, entretanto, posta à prova tendo por base diferentes processos: o aumento de novas infecções entre "jovens" e "populações-chave"; a priorização por parte do governo de abordagens biomédicas; e o arrefecimento do ativismo. Partindo desse panorama, este trabalho discute parte dos resultados de uma pesquisa antropológica que analisou sete Encontros Nacionais de Adolescentes e Jovens Vivendo com HIV/AIDS. Observa-se a passagem da construção de uma "juventude" específica, os jovens vivendo com HIV/AIDS, para a configuração de outra "juventude" bastante genérica, que não distingue potenciais infectados daqueles já atingidos pelo vírus. A retomada da centralidade da noção de "risco" na compreensão da epidemia é percebida por alguns interlocutores do campo como uma possível retomada da velha e ultrapassada noção de "grupo de risco".

Abstract: Having been constructed as a model over recent decades, the "AIDS policy" has, however, been tested by different processes: the increase of new infections among "young people" and "key populations"; the government's prioritization of biomedical approaches; and the cooling of the activism. Based on this perspective, this work discusses part of the results of an anthropological study that analyzed seven National Meetings of Adolescents and Young People Living with HIV/AIDS. It can be seen that the construction of a specific "youth", young people living with HIV/AIDS, has moved to the construction of a rather generic "youth" which does not distinguish potentially infected individuals from those already affected by the virus. A return to the centrality of the "risk" notion in understanding the epidemic is seen by some interlocutors in the field as a possible return to the outdated notion of "risk group".

Resumen: Construida como modelo durante las últimas décadas, la "política de SIDA" ha sido, no obstante, puesta a prueba a partir de diferentes procesos: el aumento de nuevas infecciones en "jóvenes" y "poblaciones clave"; la priorización por parte del gobierno de enfoques biomédicos; y el enfriamiento del activismo. A partir de dicho panorama, este trabajo discute parte de los resultados de una investigación antropológica que analizó siete Encuentros Nacionales de Adolescentes y Jóvenes Viviendo con VIH/SIDA. Se observa el paso de la construcción de una "juventud" específica, los jóvenes viviendo con VIH/SIDA, a la configuración de otra "juventud" bastante genérica, que no distingue entre potenciales infectados y aquellos a los que el virus ya alcanzó. Algunos interlocutores del campo perciben la retomada de la centralidad de la noción de "riesgo" en la comprensión de la epidemia como una posible retomada de la vieja y superada noción de "grupo de riesgo".

Our genes, our selves: hereditary breast cancer and biological citizenship in Norway.

The concept 'hereditary breast cancer' is commonly used to delineate a group of people genetically at risk for breast cancer-all of whom also having risk for other cancers. People carrying pathogenic variants of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are often referred to as those having predisposition for 'hereditary breast cancer'. The two genes, however, are when altered, associated with different risks for and dying from breast cancer. The main risk for dying for carriers of both genes is from ovarian cancer. These biological facts are of philosophical interest, because they are the facts underlying the public debate on BRCA1/2 genetic testing as a model for the discussion of how to implement genetic knowledge and technologies in personalized medicine. A contribution to this public debate describing inherited breast cancer as 'biological citizenship' recently printed in Med Health Care and Philos illustrated how fragmented and detached from the biological and socio-political facts this debate sometimes is. We here briefly summarize some of the biological facts and how they are implemented in today's healthcare based on agreed philosophical, ethical and moral principles. The suggestion of a 'biological citizenship' defined by hereditary breast cancer is incorrect and ill-advised. 'Identity politics' focusing hereditary breast cancer patients as a group based on a bundle of ill-defined negative arguments is well known, but is supported neither by scientific nor philosophical arguments. To those born with the genetic variants described, the philosophical rule of not doing harm is violated by unbalanced negative arguments.

Coming-Out Confessions: Negotiating the Burden of Lesbian Identity Politics in South Africa.

For lesbians, "coming out" or disclosing one's sexual orientation has come to be seen as a marker of self-acceptance, actualization, and the imperative first step in the authentication of a liberated subjectivity and social identity. However, other critical schools of thought, largely informed by Foucault's middle writings, have argued that "coming out" is merely a confessional response to an incitement to discourse about sex. This study explored constructions of coming out by a group of self-identified lesbians in South Africa. Data were collected via eight semistructured interviews and subjected to discourse analysis. Although the coming-out stories appear to conform to some discursive practices characterizing confessional modes of response to incitements to speak, they are also de-emphasized as central to the constitution of selfhood. The changing conditions of possibility for the production of sexual subjectivity in contemporary South Africa seem to disrupt understandings of coming out as either solely a confessional or liberatory practice.

Strange Bedfellows: Anachronisms, Identity Politics, and the Queer Case of Trans.

This article explores trans identities, as articulated within a few historical texts. From early literary depictions of gender difference, to medicalized conceptions of transsexualism, to a proliferation of trans and queer identities represented by an ever-expanding "alphabet soup" of identity labels, our understandings of identities, sexualities, and queer community-building continue to change. I use the notion of "kind-making," as elaborated on in the work of Ian Hacking, to illustrate that some queer and trans identifications are affiliative, whereas others are contrastive or oppositional in nature, and these structural differences have important implications with respect to understanding identity and sexuality, and also trans inclusion within LGBT communities and activist efforts.