From its first use in the XVI century, the concept of identity has evolved from essentialized and unified to fragmentary and fluid. In “Beyond Identity,” Brubaker and Cooper (2000) propose eliminating the use of identity... [ view full abstract ]
From its first use in the XVI century, the concept of identity has evolved from essentialized and unified to fragmentary and fluid. In “Beyond Identity,” Brubaker and Cooper (2000) propose eliminating the use of identity as a category of analysis altogether. Stuart Hall (2000), on the other hand, posited the need of identity as a political unifying force, even if only as a banner for resistance. Within the politics of identity, there have been numerous categories of practice created around race, ethnicity, and gender used both to unify and fragment communities. In this paper we propose to study two such identities as categories of practice – Liberal & Conservative – and explore how they are essentialized in conversation.
Using Lea Thau’s podcast, Stranger – a self-identified liberal trying to ‘reach out’ to self-identified conservatives after the 2016 election in the United States – as a corpus, we analyze how identity becomes essentialized in narratives that seek to bridge the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ In these conversations and throughout listeners’ reactions to them we see lines drawn, attributions and identifications made as we observe the essentializing force of identity at play. We propose that even when identities are fluid, non-essential and constructed, their formation in discourse creates lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that are difficult, if not impossible, to cross. The differences that individuals perceive and the attributes they assign to themselves and to others act as an essentializing forces that has concrete effects in society and cannot be dismissed by our theoretical analysis of identity as fluid.
From a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective, we are able to make visible the “us” vs. “them” in narratives of political import. Such othering is at the core of divisions between so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” in a US political arena. Through a thorough CDA analysis, we are then able to apply what Wodak (1989) terms “therapy,” and move from the realm of the academic to that of political action.
