Disidentifications

There is more to identity than identifying with ones culture or standing solidly against it. Jos Esteban Muoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culturenot by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muoz calls this process disidentification, and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. By examining the process of identification in the work of filmmakers, performance artists, ethnographers, Cuban choteo, forms of gay male mass culture (such as pornography), museums, art photography, camp and drag, and television, Muoz persistently points to the intersecting and short-circuiting of identities and desires that result from misalignments with the cultural and ideological mainstream in contemporary urban America.Muoz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of colorin Carmelita Tropicanas Camp/Choteo style politics, Marga Gomezs performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Daviss Terrorist Drag, Isaac Juliens critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiats disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torress performances of disidentity, and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, a person with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial environment of the MTV serialThe Real World.