Disidentification Intro Notes

Munoz engages in disidentification throughout his book by: 1) Analyzing disidentification as a survival strategy and process of self-creation used by queer people of color. 2) Exploring how disidentification works by centering queer and minority spectators, imagining alternative lives and worlds, and creating counterpublic spaces that contest dominance and allow for agency. 3) Examining how public performances of disidentification are important strategies for survival in the public sphere and creating queer counterpublics.

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Disidentification Intro Notes

Uploaded by

Alonso Pierre Pena

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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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How does munoz engage in disidentification throughout his book?

- Culture as theory
- Queer of color
- Engagement with theoretical concepts which have been historically toxic for queers of color (ie
psychoanalysis, queer theory, feminist studies, etc)

Performing Disidentifications

What is disidentification?

- Disidentification is a survival strategy and a process of self-creation. (p. 4)

- Disidentification is also a hermeneutic or an optic (p. 5)
- Munoz argues that disidentification is not always the best for all situations, what kind of
disidentification does Munoz argue for? (p. 5)
o But for some, disidentification is a survival strategy that works within and outside the
dominant public sphere simultaneously

What does disidentification do? (p. 1)

- 1. Centers the queer or color as spectator

- 2. Imagines queer worlds and lives as complex
- 3. Creates counterpublics which contest hegemony, create space for minoritarian subjects to
situate self in history, and creates agency

Why is public performance important to disidentification? (p. 1)

- Public = a site of violence, therefore performance of disidentification is a strategy for survival in

public sphere and create queer counterpublics.

Margas Closet (p. 3)

- What does Marga disidentify with?

- Why is her performance disidentification? Or, how does Morgas performance disidentify?

Identity debate

- Why is identity a site of struggle? How so specifically in relation to healthcare?

o Why are disidentifying subjects unable to fully identify? (p. 7)
- Essentialism there are essential identities (p.6)
- Constructivism identity is socially constructed (p. 6)
- Munoz explains that identity is made somewhere in between:
o I understand the labor (and it is often, if not always, work) of making identity as a
process that takes place at the point of collicion of perspectives that some critics and
theorists have understood as essentialism and constructivism . . . the version of identity
politics that this book participates in imagines a reconstructed narrative of identity
formations that locates the enacting of self at precisely the point where the discourses
of essentialism and constructivism short-circuit. (p. 6)
- Identities in different, disidentities, emerge from a failed interpellation within the dominant
public sphere (p. 7)
- Identities are not memisis, but negotiated (p. 8)