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DISIDENTIFICATIONS: QUEERS OF COLOR AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POLITICS. By José Esteban Muñoz. Cultural Studies of the Americas, Volume 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999; pp. be + 227. $19.95.
As is becoming increasingly clear in performance theory and cultural studies, the racialized body and racial politics enable and justify difference. While the notion of difference and its relation to the racialized body requires the inscription of the minority subject, the location of agency is paramount. José Muftoz's book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics reclaims agency as a way to authorize the specificities of race, ethnicity, desire, and the queer body. For Muñoz, the act of writing becomes a "disidentificatory" venture of the self, "whose relation to the social is not over determined by universalizing rhetoric of selfhood" (20). While examining the process of identification/ disidentification in performance art, film, pop art, visual culture, porn, ethnography, mass media and literature, among other things, Muñoz insists on a dialectics that describes the relations between theory and practice. He seeks a theory that will help him trace the genealogy of marginal sites and locate an alternative space for queers of color.
Muftoz's ideological premises are drawn heavily from psychoanalysis and early theories of revisionary identification used in film theory, and gay and lesbian studies. To "disidentify" in Muftoz's terms is a political act that not only resists dominant ideology but also embodies "a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture" (31). Although disidentification is not necessarily a new theory, in Muftoz's frame of reference the queer-racialized body alters the grounds of...