Identity politics, or collective activism based on embodied experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity or nationality, existed before the late twentieth century, but the term was coined in the 1970s and widely circulated in the 1980s as a response to social injustice, widespread prejudice and even assault borne by members of specific minority groups. For lesbians, gays and transsexuals, for ethnic minorities like Native Americans in the US or First Nations in Canada, for women in many Western countries, identity politics has meant working proactively for full legal and social recognition. Feminism often flies under the banner of identity politics with the argument that gender equality is still far from the norm in Western societies and even less so in many Asian and African societies, and in those of the Arab world.

In Japan, it was in the mid-1970s when women artists started to create their own professional theatre companies. This period also saw the development of the women's liberation movement in Japan, but there was no exchange between women theatre artists and activists. While the women artists explored a variety of issues in their work, with some few exceptions feminism was not their primary concern. This trend continues to this day, and accounts for why Tadashi Uchino argues that there has been no feminist theatre in Japan.

Identity mobilises feminist politics in Australia and shapes discursive and theatrical practices. Energised by the affirmative politics of hope, celebration and unity, Australian feminism is also motivated by injustice, prejudice and loss, particularly among Indigenous women and minorities. During the 1970s, when feminist theatre opened up creative spaces on the margins of Australian theatre, women identified with each other on the basis of an unproblematized gender identity, a commitment to socialist collectivism and theatre as a mode of self-representation. The emphasis on shared experience, collectivism and gender unity gave way in the 1980s to a more nuanced critical awareness of inequalities and divisions among women based on sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. My discussion spans broadly the period from the 1970s to the present and concludes with some commentary on recent twists and turns in identity politics.

Identity politics, understood as the analysis of the ways in which social roles are inscribed on the body, affects and behaviour, and in which collective experiences of oppression also produce resistant practices, informed German feminisms and performances during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, major feminist playwrights have shifted into literary production, or abandoned gender as their central critical concern in view of other urgent issues that arose after reunification, including historical revisionism, economic restructuring, rising racism and xenophobia, and globalization fears. Younger white artists playfully unbundled gender and sex and supported the postfeminist consensus that feminist identity politics had become obsolete. The work of Bridge Markland, which can be found on YouTube, emblematizes a burgeoning transgender and drag culture that was transnationalized through film, video, photography exhibitions and workshops. In this critical vacuum, immigrant and minority women were saddled with intensifying, ever more essentialist discourses of gender and ethnic difference, and continued to grapple with them through deconstructive and historicizing, as well as essentializing, deployments of identity.

In April 2011, after thirty-five years in power, the left-oriented progressive rule in Bengal, India, was brought down. Masterminding the overthrow was Mamata Banerjee. Banerjee has enjoyed a political career spanning over twenty years, during which time she has succeeded in maintaining a high public profile in the media and public sphere to become Bengal's first ‘woman’ chief minister. Surprisingly, during her campaign Banerjee neither asserted her identity as a woman nor as the non-feminine, monstrous presence of the public woman (à la Indira Ghandi's media presence in the 1970s), but rather performed a non-threatening, gender-neutral didi (elder sister in Bengali). I attribute this ‘smooth’ identity construction to a comfortable entente between a Western globalized visual culture, indigenous images commodified and circulating on the periphery, and the sudden expansion of electronic media. The convergence of all these factors served to create a non-dialectical identity construction which stood against all feminist politics or, as I would call it, feminism with a political imagination.

The concept of identity has undergone such a major revision that it is difficult to know where one might begin discussing it. Generally, with movement across borders of all kinds, especially the geopolitical, identities are now considered problematic. Earlier views of individuals as self-determined and integrated human beings have been replaced by more complex notions that people comprise multiple subjectivities, sometimes described as fractured or split. This notion also relates to a political function in devaluing shared experience and shared identities. In recent decades, European political culture has increasingly emphasized neo-liberal economic gain and fast turnover, with the result that historical ties and collective identities come to mean less and less. Collectivity has been transformed into a plethora of individual confusion disguised as ‘choice’. Is there anything left to rebel against when everything is said to be open to all?