A Critical Cartography of the Mattering(s) of Identity Politics: Intersectional and Interferential Explorations

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 of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari and Rosi Braidotti. 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, conceptualises identity as an always-shifting myriad of the discursive-material-affective. 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.