The Exclusionary Self: The Modern as Identity Politics in Unequal Intention

Democracy today is under serious attack. How does that danger connect to the construction of ‘the modern’ or the ways modern societies have organised themselves since the late eighteenth century? My short answer is: More than ever before, people try to implement the promise of equality that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions evoked, but did not mean to apply to everybody. In turn, non-democrats successfully rally people behind their claims that contemporary politics are destroying the allegedly ‘natural’ foundation of the world.

To better understand why democracy as we know it in Germany today can be so easily undermined and how we can more actively support and defend it, we must look at three historically interconnected processes. Firstly, Western, White historical actors in positions of power in the late eighteenth century defined human beings as inherently unequal.¹ They used newly created and allegedly natural and hierarchised categories of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or other dimensions to cast human beings as different and thereby legitimise inequality. For example, they acknowledged only men and women, and rejected all other ways to define gender or sexuality. Secondly, they organised all other modern structures and institutions along such essentialised notions of difference as to make their conceptions durable within and between societies and regions of the world. Thirdly, such thinking in difference continued when historical actors trying to undo its effects advanced democratisation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This became particularly relevant in recent decades as more people than ever before have begun to question the very identity constructs that still fundamentally organise our world, such as the modern binary, heteronormative idea of gender, or the racialising of sociality and all power relations. Those who favour more authoritarian politics use these democratising developments to attack democracy per se as destroying the presumed ‘natural’ basis of society and politics. Thereby, they are able to draw people from all walks of life into their camp who otherwise might self-define as democratic.²

For decades now, postcolonial work, gender theory and analyses of racism have problematised such thinking in difference, dissecting the gendered and racialised structures of modern societies and modern democracies. Evelyn Higginbotham and Stuart Hall have each argued that the discursive construction of ‘race,’ i.e. an allegedly unsurmountable difference between people, structured power relations on all levels of sociality.³ Studies on Western colonialism emphasised that the invention of ‘race’ in imperial contexts or the perpetuation of coloniality after formal decolonisation were not features external to Western history but constitutive for Western identity constructs and the development of modern capitalism.⁴ Furthermore, research since the 1970s has shown how hierarchical gendering with masculinity at the top pervades each crucial structure of modern societies: the state, the family, the economy, professions, and knowledge production, as well as less tangible but no less basic phenomena like temporality.⁵

Such research does not aim to condemn democracy but to improve it. These alerts to the aporetic character of our type of democracy could or rather should help us to become more sensitive to still ongoing processes of exclusion in politics, society, and scholarship. But it seems to me that much of what counts as theorising about ‘the modern world’ does not take this research seriously enough, still describing gendered and racialised processes as addenda or coincidental aspects instead of realising the fundamental character they were and are given. Thus, when we speak of racism, gender hierarchies or heteronormativity in modern society, the foundational character of the modern constructions of gender, race, sexuality or ethnicity and their essentialising meaning are ignored.

In turn, my analysis starts with the assumption that the notion of ‘the’ modern self was cast in exclusionary form, hiding its own racialised and gendered character by its self-description as universal reference. This then served to structure the world in hierarchical forms. My arguments are not meant to delegitimise modern democracy but to render us better able to protect it by understanding how anti-democratic practices work.

Theorising Identity Projections as a Key Structure of Modern Societies: The Male, White, Heterosexual, Western Individual as the Universal Reference

My central point is that modern identity constructs are a basic structure developed by Western historical actors in the eighteenth century and have been continuously used (and expanded through colonialism) to shape each and any other phenomenon of their modern world. Three processes are entangled even when they change with time and differ with context, but I only want to outline the basic idea. The first process is when Western modern societies defined ‘the modern individual’ as the creator of the world, instead of God or tradition – that is, during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions – they projected human beings as naturally unequal. Constituting gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or essentialised religion as allegedly naturally given, binary, and hierarchical phenomena, they justified and essentialised inequalities within and between societies. They gave their projection of ‘the’ modern individual a concrete embodiment; their maker of the world was male, White, Western, heterosexual, and Christian, not as a belief or religion but as a historical trajectory that equated, for example, German history with Christianity.⁶ Because these identity notions and hierarchies were represented as naturally given, anyone who did not fit into these dominant social criteria was relegated to the subordinate binary status.

Using various practices, these historical actors built the idea of human beings as naturally unequal into their self-definition as modern.⁷ Reacting to knowledge about the non-European world, Western societies racialised slaves, Black people and People of Colour into Others, while masking their self-racialisation as White. Those with the power of definition framed the very idea of modern freedom as inherently White; they did not intend to include Black people or People of Colour, although excluded or marginalised groups could refer to it in their fight for equality.⁸ Similarly, Western European, White intellectuals and scholars in the eighteenth century discursively aligned Black people with apes, while correspondingly distancing Black and White human beings from each other⁹

Secondly, modern Western societies applied these identity constructions to the institutional and moral organisation of their respective times. Law, citizenship, suffrage, parliaments, the economy, knowledge production, the family, to name just a few examples, were developed in terms of gendered and/or racialised hierarchy, marginalisation or exclusion. Historical actors thereby institutionalised their thinking in difference and inequality, making it historically effective and almost impossible for individuals alone to change. Thus, we should not only ask how institutions impacted people. The more important question is, which identity constructs were and are used in which institutions to establish or perpetuate subordination and marginalisation of those defined as not belonging or who are expected to remain in subordinate positions.¹⁰

Individuals or groups who pinpointed these contradictions and created alternative visions of individuality and sociality have always existed, but they were marginalised and most often not remembered. For example, the French early socialists in the 1830s and 1840s thought about industrialising capitalism without wanting to structure it according to an allegedly natural gender hierarchy. But they were mocked by those socialists who masculinised the economy, like Engels and Marx, and were consequently excluded in memory construction.¹¹

Thirdly, processes of democratisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries neither made such essentialist notions of identity nor their impact on institutions disappear. Rather, two aspects intertwine. On the one hand, the idea of democratic equality had existed since the eighteenth century. Those excluded or marginalised could use it to claim their right to participation; for example, suffrage, citizenship and university entrance were successively extended or opened to groups that had formerly been excluded. On the other hand, this was not a slow and steady process towards ever greater inclusion. It is often overlooked that those who claim dominance by subordinating others became (or can become) dependent on those others remaining (at least discursively) in an inferior position. As a result, those who defined such processes of democratisation as a loss of privilege and power for themselves, or even as an alleged reversal of hierarchies, invented new practices to insist on inherent difference and keep inequality, even if in less formal forms.

Those who perceive themselves as having lost power by democratisation continue to draw on and perpetuate naturalised constructs of identity, especially in terms of race and gender, but also of religion and heteronormativity.¹² The history of Jewish Germans reflects these entangled developments. Whenever Jewish Germans advanced their formal rights in modern history, most notably during the Weimar Republic, the majority of non-Jewish Germans insisted ever more rigidly and violently on an alleged natural difference between ‘being Jewish’ and ‘being German.’ Casting Jewish Germans as ‘perpetrators’ against a fictitious ‘true’ German identity, they attacked the Weimar democracy as the wrong system because it allegedly allowed such ‘victimisation’ of ‘real Germans.’¹³

The Fluidity of the Present World and Its Use by Anti-Democratic Actors

In recent decades, processes of democratisation have not only intensified but also changed. It is precisely this change that assailants of democracy today target, most often with an ideology of White, masculinist suprematism. Since the second half of the twentieth century, modern democracies like the United States or Germany reinforced attempts to democratise institutions (though they were neither the first nor the only ones). But also, more people than ever before across the world began to question those essentialised understandings of race, gender, religion, sexuality, or other dimensions that continued to reinforce hierarchies and undercut the acceptance and implementation of equal rights. In other words: They critiqued not only the still exclusionary character of institutions, but also the discriminatory and hierarchical character of those very identity constructs that continue to shape our world in subtle ways, despite formal democratisation. As one example, more people than before rejected or at least began to doubt the modern construction of gender as a binary phenomenon, allowing for same-sex marriage or demanding the right to self-define in a non-binary or any other form. They highlight the historical and man-made character of modern identity constructs, to undo their exclusionary impact on sociality, institutions, and power relations (even though this happened less so regarding racialised and racialising structures). In turn, people who want to hinder democratisation, reinforce those essentialised identity constructs that served effectively for so long to draw boundaries and produce or bolster hierarchies. Thus, opponents of democratisation shift politics away from policy issues they would need to negotiate with arguments, and talk instead about gender, race, or other constructs that they present as naturally given and not needing any argument. On this basis, they delegitimise democracy as allegedly destroying the ‘natural’ foundations of the world.

This approach helps them to dismantle and undercut democratic institutions and procedures in at least two ways. First, it allows non-democrats to create a supposedly coherent way of making sense of the world. Secondly, it helps to gain a large constituency for non-democratic politics. If right-wing or other non-democratic actors focused on concrete policy issues, they would be confronted by conflicting interests they would have to navigate argumentatively. But by concentrating on identity constructs presented as natural, they attract more people throughout society who might otherwise self-define as democratic. These exclusionary identity projections are then instrumentalised to re-shape institutions and processes, such as migration, health care, universities, free speech and equal rights (to name only some), trying to bend our democratic world into exclusionary forms that we thought we had overcome.

Hopefully, contemporary democracies have enough supporters to stay democratic. But still today, it often remains a task for groups like Black Lives Matter to highlight inequality, violence, and everyday racialising practices. The exclusionary self-understanding as White, Western, heterosexual, and Christian – in the sense of inherently non-Black, non-Jewish, or non-Muslim – that is then used to decide who might belong or not remains too often unarticulated. But it is exactly the apparently self-evident character of such identity constructions that allows non-democrats and White suprematists to attract followers in different milieux across society. How deeply ingrained essentialising identity constructions are, and how historical actors use them to organise the world, only becomes apparent when we take identity constructions seriously as a foundational structure of the modern world. They do not simply disappear when people democratise their societies and politics further but can be re-appropriated and functionalised in exclusionary or hierarchical manners.

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Martina Kessel was Professor of Modern History and Gender History at Bielefeld University from 1998 to 2026. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript entitled Masculinity in World History (16th century – present), to appear in the series Themes in World History.

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1. I have opted to use “White” in the uppercase to highlight its constructivist character. Of course, this could apply to other categories as well, such as heterosexuality. [↩]
2. This text summarises some of my arguments in: Martina Kessel, “Das exkludierende Selbst. Die Moderne als Identitätspolitik in ungleicher Absicht,” Historische Zeitschrift 321 (2025), 69-99. See also Martina Kessel, “‘Deutschsein’. Identitätsvorstellungen als Grenzziehung in der Moderne,” in Abgrenzen, entgrenzen, begrenzen. Zur Geschichte des Liminalen im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Franziska Rehlinghaus and Hannah Ahlheim. Bielefeld: transcript, 2024, 47-61. [↩]
3. Evelyn Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992), 251-274; Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 32-33, 46-47. [↩]
4. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995; Catherine Hall, “Gendering Property, Racing Capital,” History Workshop Journal 78, no. 1 (2014), 22-38. [↩]
5. Marion W. Gray, Productive Men, Reproductive Women. The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres during the German Enlightenment. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Other. New York: Columbia University Press 2014 (1983); Jana Hoffmann, Die Sexualisierung der Religion im 20. Jahrhundert. Diskurse um Sexualität, Familie und Geschlecht in der methodistischen Kirche in den USA. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2022; Levke Harders, American Studies: Disziplingeschichte und Geschlecht. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013; Margot Canaday, The Straight State. Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. [↩]
6. For the construction of Germanness as non-Jewish, see Martina Kessel, Gewalt und Gelächter. ‘Deutschsein’ 1914–1945. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2019. [↩]
7. For the intersection of temporality and gender in German culture, see Martina Kessel, Langeweile. Zum Umgang mit Zeit und Gefühlen vom späten 18. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001. For the gendering of German historiography, see Falko Schnicke, Die männliche Disziplin. Zur Vergeschlechtlichung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1780-1900. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015; Jessica Blatt, Race and the Making of American Political Science. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2018, analyses the co-production of ‘race’ and the social sciences in the United States. [↩]
8. Tyler Stovall, White Freedom. The Racial History of an Idea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. [↩]
9. Silvia Sebastiani, “Enlightenment Humanization and Dehumanization, and the Orangutan,” in The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, ed. Maria E. Kronfeldner. New York: Routledge, 2021, 64-82. [↩]
10. For the use of belonging as theoretical lens and for the complex and contradictory negotiations of belonging between different historical actors in modern societies, see Levke Harders and Falko Schnicke, “Practices of Borders and Belonging. Historical Perspectives,” in Belonging across Borders. Transnational Practices in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Levke Harders and Falko Schnicke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 1-29; Levke Harders. “Zugehörigkeit als Kategorie historischer Analyse.” Geschichtstheorie am Werk (25.01.2022), URL: https://doi.org/10.58079/pcww (29.06.2026). [↩]
11. Bärbel Kuhn, Pierre Leroux – Sozialismus zwischen analytischer Gesellschaftskritik und sozialphilosophischer Synthese. Ein Beitrag zur methodischen Erforschung des vormarxistischen Sozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988, 202-203. [↩]
12. The category of race did not work identically to gender, and their intersectional impact again meant something else entirely. [↩]
13. Kessel, Gewalt und Gelächter. [↩]

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