Politics of identity/identity politics: listening to Kae Tempest

Abstract

The essay addresses the theme of identity within the methodological framework of cultural studies, using as its guiding thread the identity of ‘woman’ and its various declinations from 1970s feminisms to current queer politics. Starting from the 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling that excludes trans women from the Equality Act, it highlights the exclusionary use of identity in ‘gender-critical’ feminism, showing the shift from a collective, destabilising identity to an individualistic, post-feminist model, which accepts difference only if compatible with the hetero-patriarchal and capitalist order. In contrast to this normative tension, the concept of ‘strategic essentialism,’ as it emerges in Lidia Curti’s feminist critique, can acknowledge multiplicity without fixing it into an exclusionary identity. This methodological framework put into dialogue with Kae Tempest’ work and public figure, particularly the poem Hold Your Own, which rewrites the myth of Tiresias. Through the rewriting of ancient sources, Tempest intertwines autobiography and mythopoesis, exploring alternative bodies and relationships while continuing a tradition of thought both feminist and queer. The essay invites reading the text in its ambivalence, avoiding both identity-based reductions and aesthetic restorations, and proposes the ‘house of difference’ as a political and affective space where identity and difference coexist. Tempest thus manages to embody a queer and inassimilable ‘whatever’, resistant to exclusionary logics.