This innovative book sets out to question what we understand by the term `new social movements. By examining a range of issues associated with identity politics and alternative lifestyles, the author challenges those who treat new social movements as instances of wider social change while often ignoring their more `local and `dispersed importance.

This book questions what it means to adopt an identity that is organised around issues of expressivism - and offers a series of non-reductionist ways of looking at identity politics.

Hetherington analyzes expressive identities through issues of performance, spaces of identity and `the occasion. This important work shows how the significance of identity politics are at once local, plural, situated and topologically complex.