Identities and Freedom ─ Feminist Theory Between Power and Connection

How can we think about identities in the wake of feminist critiques of identity and identity politics? In Identities and Freedom, Allison Weir rethinks conceptions of individual and collective identities in relation to freedom. Drawing on Taylor and Foucault, Butler, Zerilli, Mahmood, Mohanty, Young, and others, Weir develops a complex and nuanced account of identities that takes seriously the ways in which identity categories are bound up with power relations, with processes of subjection and exclusion, yet argues that identities are also sources of important values, and of freedom, for they are shaped and sustained by relations of interdependence and solidarity. Moving out of the paradox of identity and freedom requires understanding identities as effects of multiple contesting relations of power and relations of interdependence.

Allison Weir is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Gender Studies in the Doctoral Program in Political and Social Thought at the University of Western Sydney, and is a member of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity.