Identity Politics
Essay 3: “The Invention of HeterosexualitY’ by Jonathan Ned Katz
Essay 5: “Racial Formations” by Michael Omi and Howard Winant
Essay 9: “Bringing Classism Into the Race and Gender Picture” by Chuck Barone
Essay 12: “What White Supremacists Taught a Jewish Scholar About IdentitY’ by Abby L- Ferber
Explore the meaning of identity politics, drawing on the readings in the resources- Consider, for example, the following questions:
1- How did people become identified, historically, as heterosexual or homosexual (note that these specific distinctions were unknown until the latter part of the
nineteenth century)?
2-How have people become pegged, as it were, to their ethnic group? (Note that St- Augustine in the fourth century CE may have been “black,” that is, Afro-
Roman; it would not have occurred to the Romans to mention his “ethnicity-“)
3- Speculate as to why these distinctions are so important to Americans- What do they say about American culture?
