Abstract

Feminist and post-colonial theorists have embraced Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology of becoming-woman and nomadism, and have done so despite criticisms that these terms appropriate the struggles of real women and stateless persons. The force of the real has become especially acute in the twenty-first century in the wake of neoliberal mobilisations of feminism as yet one more marketing tool. Rather than repeat the criticism that identity politics deflects attention from real political struggles, we can see terms such as ‘becoming-woman’ as creating a different conceptual terrain that refuses the opposition between real politics and the fabulations of identity. The problem with identity politics is not that it divides the polity but rather that it freezes such divisions and identifications at the level of humanist recognition.