New horizons

The slogan the ‘personal is political’ is now so well-worn that it has congealed into cliché, though the notion itself can still produce a backlash if we take regular diatribes against ‘identity politics’ as a measure. In such rants, it is as though only some of us possess an identity that we mobilise around politically, whether under the LGBTQI+ umbrella, as First Nations peoples, as part of ethnic communities, or as ‘women’, the world’s largest special interest group. Given that critics of ‘identity politics’ tend to be socially conservative, the targets of their reductive invectives are presumed to lean to the left politically.

What then of fathers’ groups who continue to target the family law system, or women’s groups such as Women’s Action Alliance, which mobilised as stay-at-home mothers to oppose no-fault divorce after its introduction in 1975 – or, more recently, the Australian Men’s Shed Association, commonly assumed to be ‘non-political’, and which has been successful in attracting mainstream support and government funding for its men-only spaces? All of these political actors have made claims on the state at least partly on the basis of gender and sexuality, but to date have mostly been analysed in opposition to other social movements, especially feminism.