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.

PART ONE: IDENTITY, IDENTIFICATION AND EXPRESSIVE ORGANIZATION
Identity Spaces and Identity Politics
Tribal Vibes
Expressivism and Identification
Situations and Occasions
The Structure of Feeling and Everyday Life
Expressive Organization and Emotional Communities
PART TWO: SOCIAL SPACE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF IDENTITY
Introduction
The Elsewhere of Other Meaning
Marginal Spaces and the Topology of Utopia
Spaces for the Occasion
Embodiment and the Performance of Identity
Afterword
Telling Horizontal Stories

Kevin Hetherington is Lecturer in Aociology in the Depatment of Human Sciences, Brunel University. He is author of Badlands of Modernity (1997) and co-editor of Consumption Matters (1996) and Ideas of Difference (1997).