Thurs. 3/31
On Tuesday, as we read Jasbir Puar’s work on homonationalism, queer exceptionalism, and queer assemblages, we discussed the complexities that arise when we explore the intersections and clashes between queerness and other marginalized identities. In our reading today from Jose Munoz’s book, Disidentifications, we can see this theme arising again as Munoz addresses the realities and possibilities that come with being a queer person of color in a white heterosexual dominant culture.
For Munoz, disidentification is a tool, a sort of in between space that many people occupy out of necessity in order to survive, a reality that breaks down the binary of good/bad or essentialist/constructivist identity formations. A few quotes stand out to me as being helpful in explaining the concept:
Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship. (4)
In other words, disidentification is meant as a negotiation mechanism, a survival tool to help marginalized folks navigate the dominant culture around them. Also:
To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject. (12)
So, disidentification allows marginalized individuals (particularly, for Munoz’s purposes, queer people of color) to see themselves in the world around them. Perhaps most clarifying for me is this moment from the text, though:
Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (31)
As we can see, then, disidentification isn’t about connecting with a dominant culture that neglects and rejects marginalized beings; but it’s also not about rebelling against it completely in a way that further marginalizes those people. It’s about making a new meaning and representations. Disidentification is about queering the culture and society around oneself. Like so many of Munoz’s ideas, it’s an intrinsically hopeful, positive way of thinking.
A few years back, a blogger on Black Girl Dangerous posted some great examples of disidentifications on the occasion of Munoz’s death. (As Teryn and Izabelle pointed out in their presentation, Munoz was absolutely beloved by the queer academic and activist communities and by scholars and activists of color.) For our reading response today, in a 2-3 page document in your Google Drive folder, I’d like you to write about instances of disidentifications you can think of that have manifested recently in contemporary pop culture. Where have we seen traditionally white- or straight-coded characters, figures, trends, etc. that have been “disidentified” in some way? How has that disidentification impacted the overall text/film/music/artwork/etc.? Offer specific examples from the text in your analysis, and build in connections to our reading from Munoz in your response.
