Identity politics

I see three big research programs into identity politics in the humanities that could profit from a comprehensive background theory: religious studies, race studies, and gender studies. They are all concerned on how a particular trait, religious affiliation, race affiliation, and gender affiliation, help construct and affect the politics of group and individual identity. They spring of a common strategic concern, how to avoid or attemper discrimination of particular identities in an actual body politic. A mayor intellectual movement that taps into the common characteristics of this theories is the intersectionality studies, though these are concerned with the fact that in actual practice, systems of discrimination based on gender, race, religion and class, overlap and reinforce each other--as opposed to the suggested theory, that would search the common processes on identity creation, assignation, maintenance, and social success or repression in the diverse realms of religion, gender, and race. Cross-pollination has occurred throughout the studies' development, as evidenced by, for example, the interpretation of whiteness in terms of a system analogous to patriarchy, which itself is an abstraction of the idea of theocratic societies. In this sense, a reasonable program to bring about such a theory would be to take the central tenets of a particular study and apply it to the others. Of course, only the principles that can be applied to all this phenomena would eventually help kick start a theory that would eventually draw it own conclusions.
    An available point to be made by comparing such tenets is that race studies could profit from the discoveries on religious and gender affiliation. Is more or less standard to hear theorist say that gender identity or religious identity is first inaugurated in an individual by the speech act of claiming a particular identity: I'm gay, I'm Muslim, etc. However this develops as such in Western contemporary societies where the dynamics of religion, and to a greater degree, sexual practices, are regulated by particular institutions. It's clear that a comparable speech act would be meaningless or inconsequential in terms of actually assigning the identity in former incarnations of the West. Our current ratialitazion practices deem meaningless the speech acts that assign racial identities to individuals not perceived as belonging to the group in question, i. e., saying I'm black does not "convert" you into a black person, etc. Nonetheless, the multiple similarities with the former systems of gender or religious affiliation could help illuminate why this is so and how, if possible and desirable, race assignation can be as flexible as religious and gender assignation is in some Western contemporary societies. (A hundred years ago it was also impossible to imagine sexual behavior to be something aside genital sex--despite the fact that some societies had already distinguished both and even from gender itself--, in the same vein, it's clear that race is much a social construct as gender.)
    Such a theory could then help tackle other identities that are, despite their eminent social character, much more naturalized and internalized in Western societies, such as socio-cultural identities, state and national identities, and of course, class identity.