1. The first point I want to deal with falls under the familiar heading of essentialism. Is
it (a) possible and (b) desirable to categorise citizens for the purposes ,of political representation
according to characteristics like gender, ethnicity, or race? Is this a useful or viable way of
thinking about political identities? On the first aspect, there is clearly an issue about whether it
makes sense to talk as if women as women, black people as black people, Muslims as Muslims,
share enough experiences, perspectives, needs, interests to constitute a definite group. We know
how infinitely varied people are. We know that many members of these so-called groups will
explicitly reject 'their' group label (and this is not something we can just ignore or dismiss as
false consciousness). We know that the members of these so-called groups can disagree very