A form of politics premised on the idea that all people are different and that difference not only has to be respected, it also makes it impossible for one person to completely understand or empathize with another. At this level, identity politics would just be another word for anomie, but it is rarely played out at the level of the individual subject. identity in this context is generally thought of in terms of belonging to collectives determined by one or more of several basic social categories such as class, race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and so on. The effect can be paradoxical, as the womenâs movement discovered in the 1970s, when lesbians, women of colour, women from the Third World, and others, began to argue that gender by itself was not a universal category capable of uniting all women under one banner. By the same token, as a politics it is fraught with the difficulty of separating it from a special interest view of the world which might just as well serve the interests of merchant bankers as any other minority group. Since the late 1990s, however, the politics of social movement, which is issue-driven and inclusive, has largely replaced identity politics. See also strategic essentialism.