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Angela Dimitrakaki is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative and Art and Globalisation, and co-editor of Politics in a Glass Case, ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century, and Depression Era: A Collective Lens in the Age of Crisis. Angela is also an award-winning fiction writer in her native Greek, her literary work exploring the imperceptible occupations of the self by living history.

In issue #180 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Dimitrakaki's latest release, Feminism. Art. Capitalism. In this extract, she sheds light on how feminism in art adopted identity politics, but this framework ultimately serves capitalist biopolitics by turning identity into owned property and controlled data, making recognition within the system a poor substitute for class-based emancipation.

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, feminism — including in art — has been associated with identity politics. According to a basic dictionary definition, ‘identity’ is the set of facts that make up what one is. The whiff of ontological essentialism is unmissable here. Then capitalist law comes in: always favouring property, it tells us that identity is owned and can thus be stolen, as exemplified in the criminal offenses of ‘identity theft’ and ‘identity fraud’. Identity now enters capitalist biopolitics: capital needs to know who you really are so that it can work out the taxonomies of control and fortify its enormous bureaucratic apparatus. Currently, streams of data making up individual identity and group identity enter the capitalist market, in the interdependency of capital and governance. This capitalist reality makes it all the more curious that in the late twentieth century, emancipatory discourses, including feminism, wilfully came under the tent of identity politics. At that point, a culture of pride arose around identity: subjects wished to be recognised publicly and formally on the basis of their distinct identities, seeking equal status. It was as if Joan Robinson’s famous quip ‘the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all’ was rebranded as: ‘the misery of being recognised by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being recognised at all’.

Equal status across the board cannot be achieved under capitalism as a mode of production and reproduction that both presupposes and generates the class relation. This is why we find a distinction between status and class in feminist thought that engages Marxism. This distinction has been helpful in examining why capitalism could at certain times confer status to some social groups while maintaining the class relation. In the words of Nancy Fraser:

"Misrecognition is an institutionalized relation, not a psychological one… In capitalist societies… where the institutionalization of specialized economic relations permits the relative uncoupling of economic distribution from structures of prestige, and where status and class can therefore diverge, misrecognition and maldistribution are not fully mutually convertible."

This raises the question: what does status mean in relation to identity? It means access of an inferiorised group to what a group higher up in the social hierarchy enjoys, thought of as ‘privilege’. As discussed in earlier chapters, for the illusion of equal status to take hold in emancipatory politics, the unsettling question of class had to recede — as it did in postmodernism.

However, Marxist art historian Nizan Shaked has been critical about Marxist thought that does not draw identity into the dialectical relation, highlighting how Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality can be mobilised to reveal social stratification.

"If, for example, we place the focus on the plight of the black woman worker, any resolution for her will necessarily mean a resolution for those who are already better positioned on the scale of social hierarchy. If we understand how identity‐based oppression serves the ends of capitalist exploitation we conclude that we should work from the bottom up, not from the middle and down."

Shaked signals the necessity of thinking from the bottom up as an occasionally sidelined commitment of Marxism, which, however, is what Marxist feminists were doing, especially in the 1970s, in finding a hidden abode of reproduction under Marx’s ‘hidden abode of production’. This commitment was disrupted, as seen earlier, when identity became embedded in the ideology of choice serving the diffusion of post-Fordist values as general social logic. In art, this also found expression in the exhibition-form, where identities find their recognition. 

In 2000, when a global art world was promoted as conferring anthologised visibility, Rasheed Araeen, founder of the postcolonial art journal Third Text, published in its pages an astute critique of how identity politics is practised in ‘institutional structures’ of ‘neoliberal agendas’ — structures being an almost forgotten concept at the time. ‘The issue’, Araeen wrote, is ‘not about the exclusion of others from the contemporary art scene and their recognition. Although there have been deliberate exclusions, the real issue is the way others are accepted and accommodated by the dominant culture’. Under pressure from globalisation as capital’s totalisation, questions about the pull of recognition as the sister-concept of identity politics arose in feminists’ dialogue with Marxism, yet mostly outside the art field: identity was being appropriated in ethnic cleansing projects while also leading to the ‘reification’ of groups, generating pressure to conform to the general/dominant tendency within an identifiable group. The structures mentioned by Araeen proved hard to keep in sight. Meanwhile, Marxist thinkers, such as John Roberts, were pointing out that ‘the exponential increase in under-employed and unemployed artistic activity exists in the gap between the relative decline of industrial labour and the rise of a new global proletariat comprising all those excluded from wage-labor’.34 Yet this and related assessments can hardly be unpacked outside the framework provided by social-reproduction feminism: ‘those excluded from wage labor’ are mostly women on the global scale, while the usual outnumbering of men by women in today’s art schools and art history classes indicates the need to look at the gender composition of the ‘under-employed and unemployed activity’ which gives us the nebulous lower strata of the art world pyramid. Moreover, thinking dialectically about subject formation and capital as a social relation is integral to overcoming the staples of postmodernism, which survives as pervasive ideology despite the term’s near-eclipse from the conceptual apparatus of contemporary art theory after the mid-1990s.

Identity politics built on the specificity of experience, especially in art where ‘marginalised’ subjects carried the burden of a struggle that always appeared as ‘particular’, exactly as Araeen argued: not only artworks, but also the bodies of artists, curators, historians, and theorists came to represent an experience that was immediately transmissible and expected to tie them to specific politics. A hegemonic feminism was always lurking, and, depending on the context, hegemony could assume various guises. It is not unusual to attend conferences where a highly visible art-biennial Black artist from America would address invisible and sometimes destitute white waiter-artists as carriers of white privilege — in crisis-ridden Greece in the 2010s, with migrants of any racialisation present, this appeared absurd, as if the private art institutions inviting the famous artists were committed to proving Araeen’s point about postcolonial theory celebrities affirming such institutions. Does a white feminist woman artist in Bucharest or Athens doing minimum-pay care labour four days a week embody hegemonic feminism as a wealthy white woman art collector inclined to feminist work, whatever their sexuality, embodies hegemonic feminism? Speaking of collectors, of whatever gender, the practice has been so problematic that a multilingual ‘code’ about the ‘ethics of collecting’ had to be drafted, instructing collectors to treat artists (called art workers) fairly. This plea forgets that capitalist markets, including art collecting, are not organised around fairness but around assets. Should we perhaps see hegemonic feminism as a shifting category that never quite materialises in full but that highlights feminists’ participation in maintaining the pyramid of hierarchy and exploitation that constitute art in the Long Modern? When in 2018 a report aptly named Panic! and subtitled ‘Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries’ highlighted ‘the significant exclusions of those from working class origins, women and those from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds across the cultural and creative industries’, it was the first of its kind in the UK36— which, it should be emphasised, is not a peripheral art scene. The issue the Panic! report brought up keeps being re-affirmed, but it was hardly accidental that the report subtitle prioritised social class, meaning one’s proximity or distance from capital. Yet it is not at all clear how the art field relates to class. In what conditions does the art field become the site of upwards or downwards classing? And should ‘being working-class’ be seen as an identity to be excluded from or included in a ‘diverse’ art world?

Excerpted with permission from Feminism. Art. Capitalism. by Angela Dimitrakaki, published by Pluto Books, 2025. 

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