Identity Politics and New Social Movements

The political experience in the post-revolution Iran implies functional disorders of the governments and the rise of new forms of political conflicts between the discourses. All of these discourses, once dominated the government, became the hegemonic discourses and marginalized their “others”, i.e. for explaining their cultural world, in addition to expressing identity constructs, revealed the distinctions and differences with the others and rejected their rivals. As a result, the identities became centers for contest between political and social forces. By representation of the identity, the rejected political subjects confront the discourse of the dominant government and a new identity-focused form of social movements is created. Thus, the main question of this article is that “why and how identity is placed at the center of political disputes and how the politicization of identity results in the creation of new social movements”? By using the identity politics, we can answer this question and explain the response of the political subjects. Thus, identity politics implies the possibility of politicization of the subjects under the influence of identity. When a discourse becomes hegemonic and the identity derived from the discourse establishes ties with the sources of power, the communities which are pushed toward the corner in such a situation begin to resist the dominant discourse by representation of identity and then, identity-based social movements take shape.