This work explains what is understood by the term "new social movements", and provides a critical assessment of identity politics. It examines a range of issues including neo-tribalism associated with identity politics and alternative lifestyles, and challenges those who treat new social movements as instances of wider social change while often ignoring their more "local" and "dispersed" importance. The text questions what it means to adopt an identity that is organized around issues of expressivism and offers a series of non-reductionist ways of looking at identity politics. By analyzing expressive identities through issues of performance, spaces of identity and the "occasion", the author argues that the significance of identity politics and the changes it brings about within society are local, plural, situated adn topologically complex, challenging the still persistent singular idea of new social movements as historical agents of change.