Introduction

Performing Disidentifications

Marga's Bed
There is a certain lure to the spectacle of one queer standing onstage alone, with or
without props,. bent on the project of opening up a world of queer language, lyricism, perceptions, dreams, visions, aesthetics, and politics. Solo performance speaks
to the reality of being queer at this particular moment. More than two decades into a
devastating pandemic, with hate crimes and legislation aimed at queers and people of
color institutionalized as state protocols, the act of performing and theatricalizing
queerness in public takes on ever multiplying significance.
I feel this lure, this draw, when I encounter Marga Gomez's performances.
Marga Gomez Is Pretty, Witty, and Gay, a 1992 performance by the Cuban and Puerto
Rican-American artist, is a meditation on the contemporary reality of being .queer in
North America. Go'mez's show is staged on a set that is meant to look like her bedroom. Much of her monologue is delivered from her bed. The space of a queer bedroom is thus brought into the public purview of dominant culture. Despite the
Bowers v. Hardwick U.S. Supreme Court decision, which has efficiently dissolved the
right to privacy of all gays and lesbians, in essence opening all our bedrooms to the
state, Gomez willfully and defiantly performs her pretty, witty, and gay self in public.
Her performance permits the spectator, often a queer who has been locked out of
the halls of representation or rendered a static caricature there, to imagine a world
where queer lives; politics, and possibilities are representable in their complexity.
The importance of such public and semipublic enactments of the hybrid self cannot
be undervalued in relation to the formation of counterpublics that contest the hegemonic supremacy of the majoritarian public sphere. Spectacles such as those that
Gomez presents offer the minoritarian subject a space to situate itself in history and
thus seize social agency.
I

,I
II
III
Ii:

III
[I

II

I.

.OJ

MargQ Gomez '.Sourtesy, o] M~rga Gomez,

INTRODUCTION

I want to briefly consider a powerful moment in her performances that demonstrates disidentification with mainstream representations of lesbians in the media.
From the perch of her bed, Gomez reminisces about her first interaction with lesbians irr the.public sphere at the age 6f eleven:'Marga hears a voice rhat.summons her
down to the living room. Marga, who 'at this age has already developed what she calls
"homosexual hearing," catches the voice of David Susskind explaining that he will be
interviewing "lady homosexuals" on this episode of his show Open End. Gomez re, counts her televisual seduction:
[I] sat next to my mother on the sofa. r made sure to put mat homophobic ex'pression on my face. $0 my mother 'wouldn't think'I was mesmerized by i:he
lady homosexuals and riveted,tb every word that' fell from their lips. They' Were
very depressed, very gloomy. You don't get that blue unless you've broken up .
with Martina. There were three of them. All disguised in raincoats, dark glasses, ,
wigs.It was the wigs that made me want to be one.
I

'.

She then channels the lesbian' panelists:

Mr. Susskind, I want to thankyou for having the courag~,~opresent Cheren'e
and Millie arid: me on' your program. Cherene and Millie and me, those 'aren't
our real names. She's not Cherene, she's not Milli'e, and I'm not me.'Those are
just our, you know, synonyms. We must cloak ourselves'in a veil of secrecy or
risk losing our employment as truck drivers.
Gomez luxuriates in the seemingly homophobic image of the truck-driving closeted
diesel dykes. In this parodic rendering ofpre-Stonewall stereotypes of lesbi:.ls,.she
performs her disidentificatory desire for this <?ncetoxic representation. Th~. p.hqbi~
object, through a call1:PYover-the-top perfbr,mance, is reconfigured as sexy and glamorous, and not as the pathetic and abject spectacle that it appears to be in the dominant eyes of heteronormative culture. Gomez's public performance of memory is a
powerful disidentification with the history of lesbian stereotyping in the public
sphere. The images of these lesbian ste~eotypes are rendered in all their abjection, yet
Gomez rehabilitates these images, calling attention to the, mysterious erotic that
interpellated,
her
as.a lesbian. ~omez's.mother
was
apparently oblivious to this inter.
\
r'
,
pellation, as a later moment in the performance text makes patent. Gomez's voice
deepens as she goes jnto bulldagger mode again, mimicking the lesbian who is
known as "me and not me":
I ~

"

"

,"

Mr. Susskind. When you are 'in the life, such as we, it's better to live in
Greenwich Village or not live at all!At this time we want to say "hello" to a new
friend who is .watching this at .hqme wi~h .her mom on WN.E)W-TV in
Massapequa, Long Island. Marga Gomez? Marga Gomez, welcome to the club,
cara mia.
Despite the fact that the lesbian flicks her tongue at Marga on the screen, her mother, trapped in the realm of deep denial, does not get it. Of course, it is probably a

INTRODUCTION

good. thing-that she did not get it. The-fast that Marga was able to hear, the.lesbian's
call while her mother tuned out, that she was capable of recognizing the cara being
discussed as her own face, contributed, in no small par:t, to her survival as a lesbian,
Disidentification' is meant to be.'descriptive of-the survival strategies the minority
subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that con",
rinuously elides or punishes the ,existence pf,suDjects who do not conform to the
phantasm of normative citizenship. In, this instance, Margas disidentification with
these damaged stereotypes recycled them as powerful, and, seductive' sites of selfcreation. It was, after all, the wigs that made her want to be one.
.
I posses~my ()wn.?azYc,II].emo~ies
of $'usskind~s"show,andothers like :it. I re~ember
being equally mesmerized by other talk-show deviants who would ilPpear long after I
was supposed to be-asleep in my South Florida h0m~;,Those shows were" as Gomez
. described them, smoky and seedy-spectacles. After all,'this was-during my own childhood in the 1970s, before the flood of freaks -that now appear on Oprah and her
countless clones. I remember, for instance, seeing an amazingly queeny Truman
Capote describe the work of fellow writer Jack Kerou~~ as not wri~ing but, instead,
typing. I (~ti1certain that my pre-out" consciousness was completely teriifi~d by the
swishy spectacle of Capote's performance. But I also remember feeling ~ deep pleasure
in hearing Capote make language, in "getting" the fantastic bitchiness of his quip. Like
Gomez, I can locate that experience of suburban spectatorship as having a disidentificatory impact on me. Capote's performance was' as exhilarating as it was terrifying .
. This memory was' powerfully reactivated for me when I first saw Ma~ga Gomez Is
Pretty, Witty, and Gdy. Her: performance, one that elicited disidentificatory spectatorship, transported me to a different place an'd time. I-Ier performance did the work of
prying open mc:'\moryfor me' and elucidating one important episode of self-formation.
In writing this Introduction, I went back to check my sources to determine exactly' when and on which show Capote first made this statement. I was surprised to
discover, while flipping through 'a Capote biography, that whilethe writer diu indeed
makethis cutting remark on the David Susskind Show, that remark aired during a
1959 episode' dedicated to 'the Beats in which established writers' Capote, Norman
Mailer, and Dorothy Parker were evaluating the worth of the then younger generation of writers. Oapotes quip was in response to Mailer's assertiori'that Kerouac .;,j;'as
the best writer of his generation. The original broadcast, which was the same year as
the Cuban Revolution, aired eight years before my own birth and six yeal's before my
parents emigrated to Mi~i. I mention all of this not to set the record straight but to
gesture to the revisionary aspects' of my own disidentificatory memory of Capote's
performance. 'Perhaps I read about Capote's comment, or I may have seen a rerun of
that broadcast twelve or thirteen years later. But I do know this: my memory and
subjectivity reformatted that memory, letting it work within my own internal narratives of subject formation. Gomez's performance helped and even instructed this re"llr

.1,

'I

It,

".

5'

INTROD'UCTION

remembering, enabling me to somehow understand the power and shame of queerness. Now, looking through the dark glass of adulthood, I am beginning to understand why I needed that broadcast and memo.ry of that performance, which I mayor
may not have actually seen? to be part of my self
The theoretical conceptualizations and figurations that flesh out this book are indebted to the' theoretical/practical work of Gomez's performance. For me there would
be no 'theory; no Disidentifications, without the cultural work of people' such as
Gomez. Such performances constitute the political aha ~ohceptua1 center of this study.
I want to note that, for me, the making-of theory only-transpires after the artists' performance of counterpublicity is realized fo.r.my.own disidentificatory eyes.
; -Ir is also important to, note at the beginning of this book mat disidenrificarion is
not always an.adequate strategy of resistance or survival for all minority subject's. At
times, resistance needs to be pronounced and direct, on other occasions, .queers of
colorand other minority subjects need to follow a 'conformist' path, if they .hope to
survive a hostile public .sphere. But for some, disidentification -is a survival strategy
that works within and outside the dominant publictsphere simultaneously: The remainder of this Introduction will elaborate disidentificarion through a survey:of dif).
ferent .theoretical paradigms.
')
I

Dissing.ldentity
The fiction of identity is one that is accessed with.relative ease by.most majoritarian
subjects. Minoritarian subjects need to interface with different. subcultural fields to
activate their own senses of self. This is-not to say that majoritarian.subjects have no
recourse to disidentification or that their own formation as subjects is not structured
through multiple and sometimes conflicting 'sites"of identification. WithinJate capitalism, all subject citizens are formed by what Nestor Garda Candini has called
"hybrid transformations generated by the .horizontal coexistence of a number of
symbolic systems."! Yet, til.e story .ofidentity formation, predicated on "hybrid transformations". that this text is interested-ira telling concerns .subjects whose identities
are formed in response to" the cultural logics of hereronormativiry, white supremacy,
and misogyny-cultural
logics that J will suggest work to undergird state power.
The disidentificatory performances that are documented and discussed here circulate in subcultural circuits .and strive to envision and activate, new .social relations.
These new social relations would bg the 'blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic
spheres:
This study is informed by the belief thai the use-value of any narrative of identity that reduces:subjectivity to either a social constructivist model or what has been
called an essentialist undetstanding of the self is especially exhausted. Clearly, neither
story is complete, but the way.in which these understandings of the self have come to
be aligned with each other as counternarratives is now a standard protocol of theory-

INTRODUC:::TIGN

making. processes. that am no longer

Connolly

argues that

of much" use. Political theorist

'>1

William

E.,

"

[tJo treat' identity as a sit~ at ;hicn entrenched dispositions ~ncouI1t~r sociall;

constituted definitions is not to insist rhat .any such definition 'will fit every .. '
" human being equally well or badly. Some possibilities of social definition
more suitable for certain bodies and, certain individuals, particularly after each
had branded into. it .as, "second nature" a ~tra.t\lm of dispositions, ..proclivities,
'and preliminary self-u,nde.rst.~ndings. 2
_,
'
'
.
,

are

Connolly

understands

identity' as a site' of struggle where fixed dispositions

against socially constituted

definitions.

;rhi~ account of identity 'offers us a, reprieve

from the-now stale essentialism versus anti essentialism -debates that surround
of self-formation.!

The political

theorist's formulations

understand

duced at the point of contact between essential understandings

tions} and socially'constructed

identity. disposition

of''(imjpossibiliry

am'considering

subjects who must

that 'dominant

culture generates.

in this book must negotiate between a.fixed

and the socially encoded roles' that, are available for such subjects.

The essentialized
.)

as pco:-

narratives 'of self; The chapters that make up this study

the conditions

The cultural performers'!

identity

stories

of self (fixed disposi-

attempt to chart, the ways-in whith .identity is enacted by minority

work with/resist

dash

understanding

of identity

(i.e., men are like this, Latinas are like

.that, queers are that way) by its very nature must reduce identities to Iowesr-coriimondenominator

terms'. There is an.essential

blackness, for example, in various strains of

black nationalist, thinking. and it-is decidedlyheterosexual.s

of identity are ofteti'formatted.by

J understand the

of collision

of j1>'erspectivesthat some critics and theorists .have. un-

as essentialist and constFuGtivist. This collision is, precisely the moment

negotiation

when hybrid, racially predicated,

at representation.

anddeviantly

In doing so, a representational

cclored.comeirito
loudly.and

Following Connolly's lead,

often.sif not always, work) of making identity as a process that takes

place at, the: point.

derstood

scripts

phobic energies. around 'race, sexuality, gender, and

various other iderreificatory distinctions.

labor (and ,it 'is

Socially-encoded

p'etception

contract is broken; the-queer and the

and the social order receives a jolt that, may reverberate

widely; or in less dramatic, yet locally indispensable,

The version-of

identity politics that this book participates

ways.
in imagines a recon-

of r(![efltity formation -that.Ioeates the 'en-acting of self at' precisely

structed narrative

the point where the discourses-of essentialism. and constructivism

identities use
.

of

gendered identities -arrive

short-circuit,

Such

and'are the fruits of a.practice of disidentificatory reception and perf Of'identities-in-difference is-a highly: effective term-for ..categorizing the
I

mance. The 'term

identities

that populace these pages. ;rhis .terrn is, one of the many figurations

that I

borrow from Third. World feminists and radical 'Women, of color, especially Chicana
theorists.who

have greatly contributed

tity. ,'Gloria Anzaldua

groundbreaking

to-discourses

that expand and radicalize iden-

and Gherrie Moraga, in their individual writings

anthology

and in. their

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by R~dical WOmen of

INTRODUCTION

Color, have pushed forward the idea of a radical feminist of color identity that
shrewdly reconfigures
emanated

identity for a progressive political agenda. The thread that first

from those writers is intensified

and made cogent for an academic

course by Chela Sandoval in her theory of differential

consciousness. All of these writ-

ers' ideas about identity are taken up by Norma Alarcon in her influential
one particular
Sandoval,

essay, Alarcon

synthesizes

dis-

the work

of Anzaldua,

articles. In

Moraga,

and

along with the other theories of difference put forward by Audre Lorde
(who employs the term difftrance),

and Jacques Derrida

in an attempt

to describe

and decipher identity-in-difference:

By working through the "identity-in-difference" paradox, many radical women
theorists have implicitly worked in the interstice/interface of (existentialist)
"identity politics" and "postmodernism" without a clear cut modernist agenda.
Neither Audre Lorde nor Chela Sandoval's notion of difference/differential consciousness subsumes a Derridean theorization-though
resonances cannot be
denied and must be explored-so
much as represents a process of "determined
negation," a nay-saying of the variety of the "not yet, that's not it." The drive
behind that "not yet/that's not it" position in Sandoval's work is termed "differential consciousness," in Lorde's work, "difference," and in Derrida's work, dif
ftrance. Yet each invokes dissimilarly located circuits of signification codified by
the site of emergence, which nevertheless does not obviate their agreement on
the "not yet," which points towards a future.>
Alarcon's linking of these convergent yet dissimilar models is made possible by the fact
that these different paradigms attempt to catalog "sites of emergence." The disidentificatory identity performances

I catalog in these pages are all emerg~nt identities-in-

difference. These identities-in-difference

the dominant

emerge from a failed interpellation

within

public sphere. Their emergence is predicated on their ability to disiden-

tify with the mass public and instead, through this disidentification,
function of a ....
counterpublic

sphere. Although

jects" or the less jargony "people of color/queers

contribute

I use terms such as "minoritarian

to the
sub-

of color" to describe the different cul-

ture workers who appear in these pages, I do want to state that all of these formations
of identity are "identities-in-difference."
The strict psychoanalytic
this point. Jean Laplanche

account

and Jean-Bertrand

following way: "[A] psychological

property

or. attribute

of identification

is important

Pontalis define "identification"

of the other and is transformed,

wholly or partially, after the

and specified .."6 Can a self or a personality

proper identifications?
what Sigmund

in the

process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect,

model the other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications

ality is constituted

to rehearse at

A disidentifying

that the person-

be crafted without

subject is unable to fully identify or to form

Freud called that "just-as-if"

relationship.

gaging, what stops identification

from happening

tions implicit in an identificatory

site.

In the examples I am en-

is always the ideological

restric-

rNTRODUCTION

The processes of crafting and performing the:self that I examine here are ~ot best
explained by recourse to linear accounts of identification. As critics who work' on and
with identity politics well know, identification is not about simple mimesis, but, as
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us in the introduction to The .Epistemology of the
Closet, "always includes multiple processes of identifying with. It also involves identification as against; but even did it not" the relations implicit in identifying with are,
as psychoanalysis suggests~in themselves quite sufficiently fraught with intensities <of
incorporation, diminishment, inflation, threat, .loss,reparation, and disav<zwal.';7.
.Identification, then, as Sedgwick explains, is never a simple project. Identifying with an
object, person, lifestyle, hist9ry, 'political ideology, religious orientation, and so on,
means also simultaneously a~~ partially. counteridenrifying, as well as only partially
identifying, with different aspects of the social and .psychic world.
Although the various processes ofidentification are fraught, those subjects-who
are hailed by more than one minority identity component have an especially arduous time of it. Subjects who are outside the purview of dominant public spheres
encounter
Minority identifications are often ne. obstacles in enacting identifications.
'
glectful 6r antagonistic to ot~er minoritarian positionalities. This is as true of different theoretical paradigms as it is of everyday ideologies. The next section delineates
the biases and turf-war thinking that .make an identity construct such as "queer of
color" difficult to inhabit:
.,

Race'Myopias/Queer

Blind Spots: Disidentifying with "Theory

Disidentificdtions is meant to offer a lens

1/

elucida~e minoritarian politics that is not

,
. monocausal orrnonothematic, one that is calibrated to discern a multiplicity of interlocking identity components and the ways in 'which they affect the social. Cultural
studies of race,'tlass, 'gender, and sexuality are highly segregated. The optic that I wish
to fashion Is meant to be, to borrow' a phrase from critical legal theorist Kimberle
William Crenshaw, intersectional/: Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality is meant to
account for convergerices of black and feminist critical issues within a paradigm that
factors in both of these components and replaces what'she has referred to as monocausal paradigms that can only consider blackness at the expense of feminism or vi~e
~'
'.
versa. These monocausal protocols are established through the reproduction of normative accounts of woman that always imply a white feminist subject and equally
normativizing accounts of blackness that assume maleness.
These normativizing protocols keep subjects from accessing identities. We see
these .ideological barriers 'to multiple identifications in a foundational cultural studies
text-such 'as Frantz Fanon's Black Skins, White Masks, the great twentieth-century treatise on the colonized mind, Ih a footnote, Fanon wrote what is- for any contemporary
antihomophobic reader an inflammatory utterance: "Let me observe at once that I
had no opportunity to establish the overt presence of homosexuality in Martinique.
This must be viewed as the absence of the Oedipus complex in the Antilles. The
!

to
,I

INTRODUCTION

schema of homosexuality

is well enough known."? In.his chapter on colonial identity,

Fanon dismisses the possibility of a homosexual

tion. This move is not uncommon;
dismissal of queerness.

Think,

component

in such an identic forma-

it is basically understood

for a moment,

as an "it's a white thing"

of the queer revolutionary

from the

Antilles, perhaps a young woman who has already been burned in Fanon's text by his
writing

on the colonized 'woman.

What

process can keep an identification

Fanon, his politics, his work possible for this woman?

with

In such a.case, a disidentifica-

tion with Fanon might be one of the only ways in which she is capable of reformatting the powerful theorist for her own project, one that might be as queer and feminist as it is anticolonial.

Disidentification

offers a Fanon, for that q~eer and lesbian

reader, who would not be sanitized; instead, his homophobia

be interrogated

while his anticolonial

diated identification.

This maneuver

resists an unproductive

bad dog criticism and instead

leads to an identification
.
mediate, a dis identification
The phenomenon
Marlon
video

miso.gyny would

~urntoward

yet me-

good dog/

that is both
mediated and im~.

that enables politics.

of "the- queer

reverse by the norrnativity

and

discourse was engaged as a:stillvaluable

is a white thing" fantasy is strangely reflected in

of whiteness in mainstream

Riggs made this argument

Tongue; Untied (1989),where

North American

gay culture.

with critical fierceness in his groundbreaking

he discussed being "lost in a-sea of vanilla once he

came out and moved to San Francisco. A segment in the video begins a slow close-up
on a high-school yearbook image of a blond white boy' Th~ image is. accompanied
a voice-over narration

by

that discusses ~his boy, this first love, as both a blessing and, fi-

nally, a curse. The narrative

then shifts to scenes of what seems to be a euphoric

Castro district in San Francisco where semiclad white bodies flood the streets of the
famous gay neighborhood.

Riggs's voice-over

performance

offer~ a testimony

functions as shrewd analysis of the force of whiteness in queer culture:

In California I learned the touch and. taste of snow. Cruising white boys, I
played out adolescent dreams deferred. -Patterns of black upon white upon black
upon white mesmerized me: I focused hard, concentrated deep. Maybe froin
time to time a brother glanced my way. I never noticed. I was immersed in
vanilla. I savored the single Haver, one deliberately not my own. I avoided the
question "Why?" Pretended not- to notice the absence of black images in this
new gay life, in bookstores, posrer-shops, film festivals, my o:",n fantasies. I tried
not to notice the few images of blacks that w~re most popular: joke, fetish, cartoon caricature, or disco diva adored from a distance. Something in 'Oz, in me,
was amiss, but I tried not to notice. 1 was intent on the search for love, affirmation, my reflection in eyes. of blue, gray, green. Searching, I found something I
didn't expect, something decades of determined assimilation could not blind me
to: in this great gay mecca I was an invisible man; srill, I had no shadow, .no substance. No history, no place. No reflection. I was alien, unseen, and seen, unwanted. Here, as in Hepzibah, I was a nigga, still. I quit-the
Castro was no
longer my home, my mecca (never was, in fact), and I went in search of something better.
.

that

10

INTRODUCTION

Marlon Riggs in

Tong,ues,Untied.

Courtesy of Frcmeline.

This anecdotalreading

of queer cLJ1t~~e'swhiteness is acritique

strata of queer culture.

Tongues'Unti~~ has been grosslymisread

,&

tion" of white, people and the

!I'

",

, ,

~\

apologist defense of the mainstream

'.

:4

gay community's

racism as a standard maneuver

tlle vast'majority

is undercut
,.

,I,

'I'

, '.

by "~ef~

of gay and lesbian studies and' queer .theory in print

shows the 'same "1bsepce of colored. images a~' d~es 'the powerful
.,;

'

by embattled white gay ~en ~hen tfieir ~ccou~t of v1ctimizati~n

erence to racial privilege.'?
' ,
.' ,
'
of

as being a "vilifies-

"".

S/M community in general. Consider John Champagne's

~.,

Asurvey

that io'uches'v;rious

\,

I',

performance
+

in
,

Tongues, Untied. ,Most of-the c<?rn~rstones .of queer theory that are taught, cited, and
canonized

in- gay and lesbian studies classrooms,

publications,

and conferences

are

decidedly directed toward analyzing white lesbians and 'gay men. The lack ofinclusion is most certainly-not

the main problem withthe'treatment

of race. Asoft multi-

cultural

inclusion 'of .race and ethnicity d~es not, ,on its Jwn, lead to a progressive

identity

discourse. Yvonne, Yarbro-Bejarano

lack of attention

has made the valuable point that "[tjhe

te race in,Bie work of leading lesbian theorists reaffirms the belief

that it is possibleto

talk-about

sexualitywithout

talking about race, which in turn

reaflirms the belief that it is necessaiJt to talk about race and sexuality only when discussing peopleof
theorists,

color and'their

~~,xt:ll When race .is discussed by most whit~ queer

it is usually a contained .,~e~ding of an artist of color that does not factor

questions of race into the entirety of their project. Once again taking up my analogy

INTRODUCTION

II

with Riggs's monologue, I want to argue that if the Castro was Oz for some gay men
who joined a great queer western migration, the field of scholarship that is emerging
today as gay and lesbian studies is also another realm that is over the rainbow. The
field of queer theory, like the Castro that Riggs portrays, is-and I write from experience-a place where a scholar of color can easily be lost in an immersion of vanilla
while her or his critical faculties can be frozen by an avalanche of snow. The powerful
queer feminist theorist/activists that are most often cited-Lorde, Barbara Smith,
Anzaldua, and Moraga, among others-are barely ever critically engaged and instead
are, like the disco divas that Riggs mentions, merely adored from a distance. The fact
that the vast majority of publications and conferences that fill out the discipline of
queer theory continue to treat race as an addendum, if at all, indicates that there is
something amiss in this Oz, too.
The Pecheuxion Paradigm
The theory of disidentification thad am offering is meant to contribute to an understanding of the ways in which queers of color identify with ethnos or queerness despite the phobic charges in both fields. The French linguist Michel Pecheux extrapolated a theory of disidentification from Marxist theorist Louis Althusser's influential
theory of subject formatio,n and interpellation. Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses" was among the first articulations of the role of ideology in theorizing subject formation. For Althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm in which subjects are called into being or "hailed," a process he calls interpellation. Ideology is the
imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. The location of ideology is always within an apparatus and its practice or practices, such as the
state apparatus.l?
Pecheux built on this theory by describing the three modes in which a subject
is constructed by ideological practices. In this schema, the first mode is understood
as "identification," where a "Good Subject" chooses the path of identification with
discursive and ideological forms. "Bad Subjects" resist and attempt to reject the images and identificatory sites offered by dominant ideology and proceed to rebel, to
"counceridentify" and turn against this .symbolic system. The danger that Pecheux
sees in such an operation would be the counterdetermination that such a system installs, a structure that validates the dominant ideology by reinforcing its dominance
through the controlled symmetry of "counterdeterrnination." Disidentification is the
third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate
within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that
works on and against dominant ideology." Instead of buckling under the pressures of
dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this "working on and against" is
a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact

12

INT&OOUCTION

permanent stlu5'tl.miLchange while at-the samerime valuing the.dmportarice '0'local

or everyday struggles of resistance,
.' ,
judith Butler gestures 'toward the us~s' of disidentification when discussing the
failure of.idend~cati(>n. She par.r;ies':~ith Slay'oj~izek, wh~ understands disidentification as a.breaking dowrr.of political !"Ci>ssibilitjr,
,elafictionalization to the point of political immobilization.t+i She.counters Zizek b~asking the following question: of.his
forrnulatioas.: "What are the' possibilities of Pdlitkizi~g.tdisidentifica'tion,
this' experi-.
ence.of misresognitionj this-uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one,..does
and does not belong?" Buder )anSwers:.'"it may be d;'ali'the affirmatioe' 'of 'chat slippage, that rhefailure of\.identifi~ati'oh, is Hself the point 'of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference.T': Both Butler's' and Pecheuxs .accounts of disid~ntification put forWard an understanding 'of identification as never
being as. seamless or unilateral as the Freudian account would suggest.v Both theorists 'construct the subject ~s inside ideology. Their models' permit one to ~xami'n~
theories-of a subject who 'is neither. the "Good Subject," who has an easy or-magical
identification" with. dominant: culture, or the (Bad Subject," who -imagines herself
outside of ideology, Instead.zhey' paveithe way, to an understanding of a "disidentifieatorysubject'vwho
tactically ana 'simultaneously works orr; with, and against' a cultural form.
.
I

"

',.,

.,'

,"

As .a.practice, disideatiflcadon does not dispel those, ideological contradictory

elements;' rather, like a' melancholic subject holding on .to a lost object; a disidentifying subject works: to hold, on tol this objeot and invest it with new life. Sedgwick, in'
her work
the affect" shame, and its role-in-queer performativiry, has explained:

on

,Th'~ fdtms taken by sha~e:'11.1:d'

Hot 'Clistidct"~toxic"parts of a' group or individual
identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual, in the
'process in which id.entity, is' fortned:l;r'hey are available for the work! of. meta:..
morphosis, Jefrc:w!ing"efigula#d.!1~tr!Zm.qgur.a,tion;,
affective ane! symbolic 10ad. ing ~nhd,<Aefort'Pa,tipni,but,fl;navail~b,~e'f~r'~ffecti~g the work of purgation a,nd
deontological closure.!7
,1
~

t,'

~',\

.J.

;.

J,

.. ,

To disidentify..is t~ -read.onescHf.,and one~s'own.life narFative in: a moment, object, m

subject tihatds not culturally; coded t6 "connect'~ with the disidentifying subjec~. It
not to pick'and,c;:h0ose :what,one takes out of an identification, It--is,not tQi willfu:lly
evacuate the politiieally; d~b.i'OI!~'or shameful components within an iden~ificat0ry
locus. Rather, it ;iSi the reW0rking'0f;thQse energies .that.do not di'ae, the, "haTmful", or,
contradictory compon<;lnts oflanyjdentity, It is, an' 'acceptance of the' necessary interjection that has o;(wurred. in such. situations}
Disidentificatibns is, to S0me"degree, 'an argume'nt with psychoanalytic 'orthod0xies within cultural studj~s.;It does not represent a wholesale rejection of, psychoanalysis, ':Indeed, 'one~s own rel'ationship~l with psychoanalysis 'can he. 'disidemificatory,
Rather than reject psychoanalytic accounts of identification, the 'fiext section engages

is

;>

INTRODUCTION

work on identification

and desire being done in the psychoanalytic

13

wing of queer

theory.

Identification beyond and with Psychoanalysis

The homophobic

and, racist vicissitudes

of psychoanalysis's

version of identification

have been explored by various critics. Diana Fuss, for instance, has shown the ways in

a.false dichotomy between desire and identification.

which Freud constructed

is the way in which "proper"

object choices are made and identification

used to explicate the pathological

investment

is a term

that people make with bad object

choic~.1.8 Fuss proposes a new theory of identification

standing of subjectivity

Desire

based on avampiric

under-

formation:

Vampirism works more like ari inverted form of idenrification-c-idenrification

pulled inside out-where
the subject, in the act of interiorizing the other, si. multaneously reproduces externally in the other. Vampirism is both otherincorporating and, self-reproducing; it delimits a more ambiguous space where
desire and identification appear less opposed than coterminous, where the desire
to be the other (identification) draws its very sustenance from the desire to have
the other."
'
The incorporation

of the other in this account is in stark opposition

sion, in. which identification

toward (compulsory)

is distributed

heterosexuality.

insists on desire's coterminous

Fuss's groundbreaking

along stages, all. teleologically

Fuss's revisionary

relationship

to Freud's ver-

approach

calibrated

to. psychoanalysis

With identification,

work on identification

has been'met

with great skepti-

cism by Teresa de Laurens, who discounts this theory on the grounds that it will further blur the lines between specifically lesbian sexuality and subjectivity
takes on female sexuality.and
takes the tack of substituting

subjecrivity.i?

analysis. For de Lauretis, lesbian.desire

structure of identification

De Laurens's approach,

desire for identification

and feminist

also revisionary,

in the narrative

of psycho-

is not predicated. by or implicated

within any

(much less cross-identifications).

Her approach

to desire is

to expand it and let it cover and replace what she sees as a far too ambiguous
of identification.

the same revisionary

impulse as de Lauretis but who are not as concerned

dering the lines of proper, reciprocaldesire

identifications.

notion

On this point, I side with Fuss and other queer theorists who share

A substantial

against what she views

section of chapter

I, "Famous

Andy," is concerned with the power of cross-identifications

with or-

as oblique

ana. Dandy

cross-

like B. 'n'

between two artists, Jean-

Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, who do not ma{ch along the lines of race, sexuality, class, or generation.

This strategy: of reading the-two artists together and in reac-

tion 'to each other is informed

separatism

by a politics of coalition antithetical

that I see as a foundational

agenda suggested here does not uniformly

wary of separatism

to the politics of

premise of de Laurens's project. The political

reject separatism

either; more nearly, it is

because it is not always a feasible option for subjects who are not

14

INTRODUCTION

empowered by white privilege or class status. People of color, queers of color, white
queers, and other minorities occasionally and understandably long for separatist enclaves outside of the dominant culture. Such enclaves, however, are often politically
disadvantageous when one stops to consider the ways in which the social script depends on minority factionalism and isolationism to maintain the status of the dominant order.
Disidentification works like the remaking of identification that Fuss advocates.
Counteridentification, the attempt at dissolving or abolishing entrenched cultural
formations, corresponds to de Lauretis's substitution of desire for identification. In
Identification Papers, her book on Freud, psychoanalysis, and identification, Fuss succinctly historicizes the long-standing confusion between the terms desire and identification. She puts pressure on the distinction between wanting the other and wanting to
be the other. Fuss marks the distinction between these terms as "precarious" at best.21
Valentin, a documentary subject in Augie Robles's groundbreaking short documentary Cholo Joto (1993), comes to recognize an early communal identification
with Che Guevara as being, on both a subjective and a communal level, about desiring EI Che. Robles's video interviews three young Chicano men in their early twenties. The documentary subjects expound on the quotidian dimensions of queer
Chicano life in el barrio and the white gay ghetto. Cholo Joto's final sequence features
a performance by Valentin. Valentin, hair slicked back and lips reddened with a dark
lipstick, turns in a captivating performance for the video camera. He sits in a chair
throughout his monologue, yet the wit and charm of his performed persona defy the
conventions of "talking head"; which is to sayjhat he is not so much the talking head
as he is a performer in collaboration with the video artist. After reflecting on the
"tiredness" of Chicano nationalism's sexism and homophobia, he tells an early childhood story that disidentifies with the script of Chicano nationalism. .
And I grew up in Logan Heights. We had murals, Chicano park was tremendous. Now that I'm not there I know what it is. But at the time you would walk
through and see these huge murals. There was a mural of Che Guevara, that is
still there, with the quote "A true rebel is guided by deep feelings of love." I remember reading that as a little kid and thinking, what the fuck does that mean?
Then I realized, yeah, that's right. That I'm not going to fight out of anger but
because I love myself and I love my ,community.
For Valentin, this remembering serves as a striking reinvention of Che Guevara.
By working through his queer child's curiosity from the positionality of a gay
Chicano man, Valentin unearths a powerful yet elusive queer kernel in revolutionary/
liberationist identity. Guevara, as both cultural icon and revolutionary thinker, had
a significant influence on the early Chicano movement, as he did on all Third
World movements. In this video performance, Guevara stands in for all that was
promising and utopian about the Chicano movement. He also represents the entrenched misogyny and homophobia of masculinist liberation ideologies. Valentin's

INTRODUCTION

15

locution, his performance of memory, reads that queer valence that has always subliminally charged such early nationalist thought. His performance does not simply
undermine nationalism but instead hopes to rearticulate such discourses within
terms that are politically progressive.
Indeed, Valentin knows something that Fuss and other queer and feminist commentators on Freud know: that the story we are often fed, our prescribed "public"
scripts of identification and our private and motivating desires, are not exactly indistinguishable but blurred. The point, then, is not to drop either desire or identification from the equation. Rather, it is to understand the sometimes interlocking and
coterminous, separate and mutually exclusive nature of both psychic structures.
Ideology for de Lauretis seems to be an ~erword to desire, In' this book, I will
be teasing out the ways' in which desire and identification can be tempered and
rewritten (not dismissed or banished) through ideology. Queers are nC?talways "r=rerly" interpellated by the. dominant publie sphere's heterosexist mandates 'because desire for a bad object offsets that process of reactionary ideological indoctrination. In a
somewhat analogous fashion, queer desires, perhaps desires thatnegate self, desire for
a white beauty ideal, are reconstituted by an ideological component th~t tells us that
such modalities of desire and desiring are too self-compromising. We thus disidentify with the white ideal. We desire it but desire it with a difference. The negotiations between desire, identification, and ideology are a part of the important work of
disidentificarion.
Disidentificotion's Work
My thinking about the power and poignancy of crisscrossed identificatory and desiring circuits is as indebted to the work of writers such as[ames Baldwin as it is to psychoanalytic theorists such as Fuss or de Lauretis. For instance, Baldwin's The Devil
Finds Work, a book-length essay, discusses young Baldwin's suffering under a father's
physical a'iid verbal abuse and how he found "a refuge in a .powerful identification
with a white starlet at a Saturday afternoon matinee screening. Baldwin writes:
, So here, now, was Bette Davis, on 'the Saturday afternoon, in close-up, over a
champagne glass, 'pop-eyes popping, I was astounded. I had caught ply father
not in a lie, but in an infirmity. For here, before me, after all, was-a movie star:
white: and if she was white and a movie star, she was rich: and she was ugly....
Out of bewilderment, out of loyalty to mymother, probably, and also because I
sensed something menacing and unhealthy (for me, certainly) in the face on the
screen, I gave Davis's skin the dead white greenish cast of something crawling
from under a rock, but I was held, just the same, by the tense-intelligence of the
forehead, the disaster of the lips: arrd when she moved, she moved just like a
ni&ger.22
.
.
The cross-identification that Baldwin vividly describes here is echoed in other wistful
narratives of childhood described later in this Introduction. What is suggestive about

Valentin 'in Augie Robles's Cholo Joto. Courtesy of Augie Robles.

18

INTRODUCTION

Baldwin's account is the way in which Davis signifies something both liberatory and
horrible; A black and queer belle-lettres queen such.as Baldwin finds something useful in the image; a certain survival strategy is made possible via this visual disidentifi:-'
cation with Bette Davis and her freakish beauty. Although The Devil Finds 'WOrkgoes
on to discuss Baldwin's' powerful identifications with Hollywood's small group of
black actors, this mediated and vexed identification with Davis is one of the most
compelling examples of the pro~ess and effects that I discuss here asdis~dentification.
The example of Baldwin's relationship with Davis is a disidentificarion insofar as
the African-American writer transforms the raw material of identification (the linear
match.' that leads toward 'interpellation) while simultaneously positioning himself
within and outside the image of the movie star. For Baldwin, disidentification is
more than simply an interpretative turn o~ a psychic maneuver, it is, most crucially, a
survival strategy.
If the terms identification 3J,ldcounteridentification are replaced with their rough
corollaries assimilation and anti-assimilation, a position such as disidentifkation is
open to the charge that it is merely an apolitical sidestepping, trying to avoid the trap
of assimilating or adhering to different separatist or nationalist ideologies. The debate
can be historicized as the early twentieth-century debate in African-American letters: the famous clashes between Booker T. Washington and W E. B. Du Bois.
Washington, a writer, national race leader, and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute,
proposed a program for black selfhood that by today's post-civil-rights standards and
polemics would be s~en as assimilationist. Washington proposed that blacks must
prove their equality by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and achieving success in the arenas of economic development and education before they were allotted
civil rights. Du Bois was the founder of the Niagara Movement, a civil-rights protest
organization that arose in response to '\)Vashington'sconciliatory posture accommodating and justifying white racism. Du Bois's separatist politics advocated voluntary
black segregation" during the Depressioh to consolidate black-community power
bases, and eventually led to his loss of influence in the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored, People (NAACP), an organization he helped found in
1910. Washingt~n's and Du Bois's careers came to embody assimilation and antiassimilation positions. In Chicano letters, Richard Rodriguez's autobiography, Hunger
of Memory (1982), came to represent an assirrrilationist position silnilar to the one
proposed in Washington's Up from Slavery (1901). Some of the first interventions
in contemporary Chic:mo cultural studie~ and literary theory were critiques of
Rodriguez's anti bilingualism tract.23
Disidentification is not an apolitical middle ground between the positions espoused by intellectuals such as Washington and Du Bois. Its political agenda is clearly indebted to antiassimilationist thought. It departs from the antiassimilationist
rhetoric for reasons that are both strategic and methodological. MicheI'Foucault exI

INTRODUCTION

19

plains the paradox of power's working in relation to discourse in The History of

Sexuality, volume 1:
[1]t is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. And for this
very reason, we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments
whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we
must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and
excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one;
but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various
strategies.... Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised
up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an
'effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance
and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces
power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and
makes it possible to thwart it.24
The Foucauldian theory of the polyvalence of discourse informs the theory of disidentification being put forth here inasmuch as disidentification is a strategy that resists a conception. of power as being a fixed discourse. Disidentification negotiates
strategies of resistance within the flux of discourse and power. It understands that
counterdiscourses, like discourse, can always fluctuate for different ideological ends
and a politicized agent must have the ability to adapt and shift as quickly as power
does within discourse.
Listening to Disidentification

The Devil Finds ~rk received considerable praise and helped revitalize what was, at
the time, Baldwin's somewhat faltering career. It was released right before the author
commenced what he called his "second life" as an educator. David Leeming's biography cites an interview with Baldwin in which he discusses what he imagines to be the
link between The Devil Finds ~rk and the text that followed it, Baldwin's final and
longest novel, Just Above My Head
He toid Mary Blume that the book "dem~ded a certain confession of myself,"
a confession of his loneliness as a celebrity left behind by assassinated comrades,
a confession of compassion and hope even as he was being criticized for being
passe, a confession of his fascination with the American fantasy, epitomized by
Hollywood, even as he condemned it. It was "a rehearsal for something I'll deal
with later." That something, Just Above My Head, would be the major work of
his later years.25
For Baldwin, nonfiction, or, more nearly, autobiography, is a rehearsal for fiction.
Stepping back from the autobiographer's statement, we might also come to understand the writer's disidentificarory practice to extend to the ideological and structural
grids that we come to understand as genre. Baldwin's fiction did not indulge the project of camouflaging an authorial surrogate. Instead,' he produced a fiction that

20

INTRODUCTION

abounded

Just Above My Head includes the central character of

-with stand-ins.

Arthur, who is representative

of a familiar thematic in the author's work, the trope of

the blues boy who is a blues man in process. Arthur is a black gay man whose intense
relationship

with his brother David clearly mirrors the author's close tie with his own

brother, David Baldwin. But there is also a, Jimmy in the novel, who is also a black
gay man, and. represents
who, like Baldwin,

a yo\}nger version of the author. Jimmy has a sister, Julia,

was a renowned

child' preacher,

famous

throughout

the black

church commun~!y of Harlem.

With this posited, we begin to glimpse an understanding
ogy of the self" This self is a disidentificatory
overdetermined

by universalizing

into being through

rhetorics

of fiction as "a technol-

self whose relation to the social is not

of selfhood. The "real, self" who comes

fiction is not the self who produces

fiction, but is instead p~o-

duced by fiction. Binaries finally begin to falter and fiction becomes the real; which is
to say that the truth effect of ideological
disidentification-with
becomes a contested
Let me attempt

the notion

Baldwin's

it 'does not stop here: fiction then

field of self-production.
to ill~strate this point by substituting

far with the word song. Furthermore;'

fiction/song

grids is broken down through

of fiction-Land

the word fiction used thus

I want to -draw a connecting

line between

and ideology in a similar fashioh'. With this notion of the song in place,

I want to consider an elegant passage near the end of

point, the novel has been narrated

by Hall, Arthur's

Just Above My Head Up

to this

brother. The narrative

breaks

down after Arthur passes away on the floor of a London

ment, the narrative voice and authorityare

pub. ~At this pressured mo-

passed on to Jimmy; Arthur's

The baton is passed from Hatl to Jimmy through a moment

that simultaneously

marks Arthur's

of performative

passing and Hall's reluctance

last lover.
writing

to give up com-

mand over the fiction of Arthur, his brother:

Ah. 'What.lS qe doing on the Boor in a basement of the historicalcity? That city
built on tlie principle that he would have the grace to live, and, certainly, to die
somewhere outside the gates?
Perhaps I must do now what I most feared to do: surrender my brother to
jimmy; give Jimmy's piano the ultimate solo: which must also now, be taken as
the bridg'e.26
, ,
Jimmy, who is certainly another

manifestation

of the ghost of Jimmy 'Baldwin,

given his solo. It is a queer .lover's solitary and mournful

is

song. The queer solo is a

lament that does not collapse into nostalgia but instead takes flight:
The song doe~ not beloqg to the, singer. The singer is found .by the song. Ain't
no singer, anywhere, ever made up a song-that
is not possible. He hears something. I really believe, at the, bottom of my balls, baby, that something hears
him, something says, come here! and jumps on him just how you jump on a
piano or a sax or a violin or a drum and you make it sing the song you hear: and
you love it, and you take care of it, better than you take care of yourself can you

INTRODUCTION

21

dig it? but you don't have no mercy on it. You can't. You can't have mercy!
That sound you hear, that pound you try to pitch with the utmost precisionand did you hear me? Wowl-is the sound of millions and millions and, who
knows, now, listening, where life is, where is dearhr-?
The singer is the subject who stands inside-and, in the most important ways, outside-of fiction, ideology, "the real." He is not its author and never has been. He
hears a call and we remember not only the "hey, you" of Althusser's ideology cop but
also the little white girl in Fanon who cries out "Look, a Negro." But something also
hears this singer who is not the author of the song. He is heard by something that is a
shared impulse, a drive toward justice, retribution, emancipation-which
permits
him to disidentify with the song. He works on the song with fierce intensity and the
utmost precision. This utmost precision is needed to rework that song, that story, that
fiction, that mastering plot. It is needed to make a self-to disidentify despite the
ear-splitting hostility that the song first proposed for the singer. Another vibe is cultivated. Thus, we hear and sing disidenrification, The relations between the two are so
interlaced and crisscrossed-reception and performance, interpretation and praxisthat it seems foolish to straighten out this knot.
Baldwin believed that Just Above My Head was his greatest novel" but he also experienced it as a failure. In a letter to his brother David, he wrote: "I wanted it to be
a great song, instead it's just a lyric."28It was ultimately a lyric that mattered. It was a
necessary fiction, one like the poetry that was not a luxury for Audre Lorde. It was
a lyric that dreamed, strove, and agitated to disorder the real and wedge open a space
in the social where the necessary fictions of blackness and queerness could ascend to
something that was and was not fiction, but was, nonetheless, utterly heard.

Marginal Eyes: The Radical Feminist of Color Underpinnings of Disidentification

When histories of the hermeneutic called queer theory are recounted; one text is left
out of most origin narratives. Many would agree that 'Foucault's discourse analysis or
Roland Barthes's stylized semiology are important foundational texts for the queer
theory project. Monique Wittig's materialist readings of the straight mind are invoked in some genealogies. Many writers have traced a line to queer theory from
both Anglo-American feminism and the French feminism that dominated feminist
discourse in the 1980s. But other theory projects have enabled many scholars to
imagine queer critique today. This book is influenced, to various degrees, by all of
those theoretical forerunners, yet it is important to mark a text and a tradition of feminist scholarship that most influence and organize my thinking. I am thinking of
work that, like Foucault's and Barthes's projects, help us unpack the ruses and signs
of normativity; I am calling on a body of theory that, like Wittig's critiques, indexes
class as well as the materialist dimensions of the straight mind; I am invoking a mode
of scholarship that also emerged from the larger body of feminist discourse. Cherrle
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua's 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings

22

INTRODUCTION

by Radical WOmen of Color is teo often ignored or underplayed in genealogies of

queer theory.29 Bridge represented a crucial break, in gender studies discourse in
which any naive positioning of gender as the primary and singular node of difference
within feminist theory and politics was irrevocably challenged. Today, feminists who
insist en a unified feminist subject net organized around race, class, and sexuality de
so.at their own.risk, or, mere succinctly, de so.in opposition to work such as Bridge.
The contributors to that volume set,out to. disrupt the stand~rdized protocols of gender studies and activism; and, although the advancements of white feminists in inte- "
grating multiple sites of difference in their analytic approaches have net, in many
cases, been significant, the anthology has proved invaluable to many feminists, lesbians, and gay male writers of color.
.'
This Bridge Called My Back serves as a valuable example of disidentification as a
political strategy. Alarcon, a contributor to that volume, suggested in a later' article
that This Bridge Called My Back served as a document that broke with previous feminist strategies of identification and counteridentification.P She carefully describes-the
ways in which the first wave of feminist discourse called for a collective identification
with the female subject. That female subject was never identified with any racial or
class identity and was essentially a desexualized being; thus, by default, she was the
middle-class straight white woman, Alarcon described the next stage of evolution for
pre- Bridge feminist discourse as a moment of counteridentification. She turns to
Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex and proposes that de Beauvoir "may even be
responsible for the creation of Anglo-American feminist theory's 'episreme': a highly
self-conscious ruling-class white Western female subject locked in a struggle to the
death with 'Man."'31 This endless struggle with "man" is indicative of a stagein feminist discourse in which counteridentification with men is the only way in which one
became a woman. Alarcon identifies the weakness of this strategy as its inability to.
speak to lesbians and women of color who. must negotiate multiple antagonisms
within the social, including antagonisms posed by white women. Queers of color experience the same problems in that as white norrnativity is as much a site of antagenism as is heteronormativiry, If queer discourse is to supersede, the limits of feminism, it must be able to calculate multiple antagonisms that index issues of class,
gender, and race, as well .assexualicy.
. Alarcon argues that Br~dge has enabled the discourse of gender studies to move
beyond politics of identification and counteridentification, helping us arrive at a politics of disidentification, I agree with her on this point, and in this boek, begun almost seventeen years after the publication of This Bridge Called My Back, I will consider the critical, cultural, and political legacy ef This Bridge Called My Back.
Although this book tours a cultural legacy that I understand as post-Bridge, I
want briefly to.consider 'a text that I think of as a beautiful addendum to. that project.
The video work of Osa Hidalgo has always dared to.visualize the politics of disidentification that This Bridge Called My Back so. bravely outlined. Hidci,lgo'smost recent

INTRODUCTION

tape infuses humor into the' fierce politicallegacy

suallens

injects the work-with

of that classic anthology.

a defiant political imagination

tivist manifesto to the expansive space of political.humor

Osa Hidalgo's 1996 video
and utopian
to positions

Gonzalez,

of color, like the women

and satire.

in which Chicanas,

Native women,

and

the Bridge, have ascended

who populated

of power. The video tells the story of Dr. Hidalgo

a fictional Chicana

Her sen-

that moves us from ac-

Marginal Eyes or Mujerfa Fa.1J-t 1 pre$ents a farcical

fantasy of a remade.California

other women

23

dela Riva Morena

archaeologist 'who discovers the matrilinial

origins to

Western culture in the form of small red clay figurines that she unearths during a dig.
The discovery serves to boost what
Hidalgo's

fantasy play, the Chicana

is an already remade
scientist

is celebrated

celebration 'includes a press 'conference attended

er Latina, and the governor of California,

state of. California.

In

by the" entire state. The

by the mayor of Los Angeles, anoth-

a dark-skinned

mestiza named Royal Eagle

Bear. (The governor is played by the director.) This emphasis on work has alienated
the protagonist's

lover-a

woman who has felt neglected during her partner's rise to

fame and prominence.

The video's firsc scene is found footage of an early educational

film that chroni-

cles the discovery of the Olmec civilization. The film stock is scratchy 8 mm and its
appearance 'rerninds the U.s.-based

ethnic subject of the national' primary education

project that. force-fed them Eurocentric

grainy images
Morena

history and culture.

of. the dig to a newarchaeological

Gonzalez.

Her entire team is composed

cuts back to the educational

The

video shifts from

quest led by Dr, Hidalgo dela Riva

of Latinas and Latinos. The video

footage, and o~e witnesses the discovery of tiny figurines

that connote the patriarchal origins of Western culture, This is followed by-a sequence
in which the Chicana

team discovers its own statuettes. These artifacts have breasts

and, within the video's camp logic, cast a picture of a utopian

The video offers a public and a private description
private world represented
attention

to the quotidian

is an intimate

past.

of the archaeologist's

dykes who must negotiate

and private subjects. The video's qnal scene con-

cludes with the two lovers finally finding time to make love and reconnect,
have sex in a candlelit room full of red roses while the educational
television set. The film represents the "real world" of masculinist
being dis identified with. In this -instance, disidentification
ing of a .dorninant

life. The

sphere of Latina love and passion that calls

pressures that besiege Chicana

the task ~f being public intellectuals

matriarchal

as they

film plays (!n the

archaeology ..that is

is a remaking and rewrit-

script. The characters can ignore this realm and symbolically

re-

create it through their sex act. This ~nal scene offers a powerful utopian proposition:
it is through
is made.

the transformative

sexuality that a queerworld

r-

The' public component

minoritarian

rowers of queer sex ~d

.helps one imagine a remade public sphere in which the

subject's eyes are' no longer marginal.

world has been rewritten through disidentificatory

In the fantasy ethnoscape,

the

desire. The new world of Hidalgo's

Marginal ~y'es. Courtesy of Osa ,Hidalgo.

INTRODUCTION

25

+ideo is a utopian possibility; it is here where we begin to glimpse the importance of

.:ropianism for the project of disidentification. Disidentificatory performances and
readings require an active kernel of utopian possibility. Although utopianism has become the bad object of much contemporary political thinking, .we.nonetheless need
:0 hold on to and even risk utopianism if we are to engage in the labor of making a
queerworld.
Hidalgo's project also remakes utopianism into something different. Her uropiznism is infused with humor and progressive camp sensibilities. In chapter 5, I discess the way in which Ela Troyano and Carmelita Tropicana disidentify with camp, a
predominanrly gay white male project, and recast it as a view to a fabulous and funky
~tina life-world. Hidalgo offers a camp utopianism thai rejects the utopianism of
somber prophecies of liberation and instead reimagines a radical future replete with
.aumor and desire.
Her utopianism looks into the past to critique the present and helps imagine the
rurure. The past that is represented in the video is the imagined past of Mesoamerican
antiquity; the present that the film critiques is the current climate of immigrant
scapegoating that targets Latinas and other women and men of color; and the future
:hat the film imagines is a queer world that is as brown as it is bent. Theodor Adorno
once commented that "utopia is essentially in the determined negation of that which
merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points, at the same
rime, to what should be."32Hidalgo's project points to the "should be" with elegance,
~umor, and political ferocity.
Hidalgo's project and.my own owe a tremendous debt to the writing of radical
women of color that emerged in the 1970s. It is in those essays, rants, poems, and
manifestos that we first glimpsed what a queer world might look like. The bridge to a
queer world is, among other things, paved by This Bridge Called My Back.
:>erforming Disidentilicctions

Throughout this book, I refer to disidentilication as a hermeneutic, a process of production, and a mode of performance. Disidentification can be understood as a way of
shuffling back and forth between reception and production. For the critic, disidentification is the hermeneutical performance of decoding mass, high, or any other cultural
.fieldfrom the perspective of a minority subject who is disempowered in such a representational hierarchy. Stuart Hall has proposed a theory of encoding/decoding that has
been highly influential in media and cultural studies. He postulates an understanding
of broadcast television as yielding an encoded meaning that is both denotative and
connotative of different ideological messages that reinforce the status quo of the majority culture. These codes are likely to seem natural to a member of a language community who has grown up in such a system. For Hall, there are three different options
on the.level of decoding. The first position for decoding is the dominant-hegemonic
position where a "viewer takes the connoted from, say, a television newscast, full and

26

INTRODUCTION

straight and decodes its message in terms of the reference code in which it has been
encoded, we might say the viewer is operating within the dominant code."33The second vantage point from which to decode is the negotiated positionthat, to some degree, acknowledges the constructed nature of discourse but does not, within its interpretative project, challenge its authorization. As Hall puts it: "Negotiated codes
operate through what we might call particular or situated logics: and these logics are
sustained by their differential and unequal logics of power."34The third and final position that Hall touches on is the oppositional one. 'This mode of reading resists, demystifies, and deconstructs the universalizing ruse of the dominant culture. Meanings are unpacked in ari effort to dismantle dominant codes. As an approach to the
dominant culture, disidentification is analogous to the paradigm of oppositional reception that Hall constructs within his essay.
The mode -of cultural production that I am calling disidentification is indebted
to earlier theories of revisionary identification. These foundational theories emerged
from fields of film theory, gay and lesbian studies, and critical race theory. Although
these different fields do not often. branch into one another's boundaries" they have
often attempted to negotiate similar methodological and theoretical concerns. The
term "revisionary identification" is a loose construct that is intended to hold various
accounts of tactical identification together. "Revisionary" is meant to signal different
strategies of viewing, reading, and locating "self" within representational systems and
disparate life-worlds that aim to displace or occlude a minority subject. The string
that binds such different categories is a precariously thin one and it is important to
specify the influence 'of different critical traditions on my own formulations by surveying some of the contributions they make to this project.
' ,
.
\
Film theory has used a psychological apparatus to figure identification in the cinematic text. Although the story of disidentification is decidedly not aligned with the
orthodoxies of psychoanalysis in the same way that different branches of literary and
film theory are, it does share with the psychoanalytic project an impulse to discern
the ways in which subjectivity is formed in modern culture. .Christian Metz, a French
pioneer in psychoanalytic approaches to cinema, elaborated an influential theory of
cinematic identification in the early seventies.J> Drawing heavily from the Lacaniari
theory of the mirror stage, Metz outlines two different registers of filmic identification. Primary' cinematic identification is identification with the "look" of the technical apparatus (camera, projector). The spectator, like the child positioned in front ef
the mirror constructing an imaginary ideal of a unified body, imagines an illusionary
wholeness and. mastery. Secondary identification, for Metz,: is with a person who
might be a star, actor, or character. Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey' posed a substantial challenge to Metz's for~ul~ti~n by inquiring as to the gender coordinates of
the "bearer-of-the-lcok" and the object of the 100k.36 Mulvey described standardized
patterns of fascination in classical narrative cinema structure that placed the female
spectator in the' masochistic position of identifying with the female subject, who is

INTRODUCTION

either a scopophilic
other remaining

fetish in the narrative or a brutalized character on the screen. The

option

the male protagonist

in the dominant

27

for Mulvey's female spectator

is a cross-identification

with

who is, by the gender coding of the cinematic apparatus,

placed

position of control. Implicit in Mulvey's argument

ing of any identification

across gender as pathologically

Metz's theories, when considered

is an understand-

masochistic.

together, offer a convincing

Mulvey's and

model of spectatorship

and its working. Their models fall short insofar as they unduly valorize some very
limited circuits of identification.V
Mulvey; later refined her argument

by once again returning

to Freud and further

specifying the nature of female desire along the lines pioneered

by the founder

psychoanalysis.

Cinema,'

"Afterthoughts

on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative

by Duel in the Sun" argues that the; female spectator

that returns

a certain regression

her to the transsexed. site of 'her chilgblOod identification

young girl passes rhrough.P The identification

nology of transvestism,
of cross-gender

identification

that every

here is clearly encoded in the termi-

a brand of degayed39 transvestism

allow the possibility of reading a homosexual

dominant

undergoes

of

Inspired

that is positioned

spectator. Psychoanalytic

such as .Mulvey's never challenge

to dis-

theorizations

the norrnativity

of

gender constructions.

Miriam Hansen, in her impressive study of early Cinema and emergent practices
of spectatorship,
cillations

calls for a reworking

in spectatorship

between

of the Mulveyan paradigm to figure various osmasculine

and ferninine.s''

Rudolph Valentino and "scenarios" of identification,

In her chapter

on

Hansen writes:

If we can isolate an instance of "primary" identification at all-which is dubious

on theoretical grounds-Valentino's
films challenge the assumption of perceptual mastery implied in such a concept both on account of the star system and
because of the particular organization of the gaze. The star not only promotes a
dissociation of scopic and narrative registers; .but also complicates the imaginary
self-identity of the viewing subject with an exhibitionist and collective dimension .... The Valentino films undermine the notion of unified position of scopic mastery by foregrounding the reciprocity and ambivalence of the gaze as an
erotic medium, a gaze that fascinates precisely becauseit transcends the socially
imposed subject-object hierarchy of sexual difference.41
Hansen moves away from the monolithic
by Metz and then gendered
identification

as masculine

and stable spectator

by Mulvey. The gaze itself is the site of

in Hansen's study, and that gaze is never fixed but instead always vacil-

lating and potentially

transformative

Mulvey's theorizations

of the. female. spectator

finding her lost early masculine

in its possibilities.

identification

Hansen

of spectatorial

where the problem

identification

of identification

also moves beyond

as having the dismal options of either

or taking on a masochistic

tion. Hansen's work, along with that of other film theorists

notion

that was first posited

in more complicated

identifica-

in the 1980s, took the

and nuanced

was now figured in terms of instability,

directions
mobility,

2:8

IN'fRODUCTION

oscillation, and.mulriplicity+'

Disidentification

that cannot. tie conceptualized

cation.

Disidentification,

is, at ,its core, an ambivalent

description

strategy that is .ernployed by a minority

spectator

terns of identification.

is-a survival

of identification,

(the female spect.ator of the early

twentieth 'century in Hansen's study) to resist and confound

socially prescriptive-pat- ..

' .' ~

Scholars ofcolor.and
formative

-fixed mode of.identifi-

as. a restrictive or "masterfully"

like Hansen's

modality

gay and lesbian scholars also-brought

urgencies to questions

of spectatorship

important

and identification.

and trans-

Manthia

Dia-

wara, for. example, offered the historically relevant corrective to Mulvey's foundational theory:

,;

Lau;a Mulvey argues 'that the cHissicaHqoUyi;ood film 'is made for the pleasure
of the male-spectator, However; as=a black male spectator I wish to argue;, in:
,.addition, that the dominant cinema situates Black characters primarily-for the
pleasure, of White spectators (male or f~male): To illustrate this point, one may
note how Black male characters i~ cQrreIIJ:P?,rary Hogrw09d ,film;~are mad~.
less threatening to Whites either by Wnite domestication of Black customs and'
culture=-a/process
of deracination arid isolation-or
by the stories in which
Blacks are depicted playing By the rules of White society and losing.43
"

.?'

,,1'

Contributions

such
as Diawara's
made it. dear
'"1'

I',

,-

any narrative of identification

"

~.

that difference
has many
shades and
I"
,
I
I.'

"

.,J"""

.,'

and. sexuality, as well as gender, is incomplere.v'

,

'f

"

I",

,./

ident'ificati~ns
heroine~'

_.

':

)'1.,

.",

.',

~,.

Chris Straayer outlines the

,/

'"

the active play of elaborating

dn' the surface.'.~t'raayer's "hypothetical

new

lesbian

"tIle

lesbia~ !~eroine in ~lin must

as a viewer construction, short-circuiting

the vf;ry networks that for-

such a di,si&n.ti!i'cat6~Ylc~~~iruct:.

be conceivedof

.)

9f identification.

in queer spectatorship,

that' were not visibi~

is jtist

Queer film. theory has also made

./

crucial challenges ~o the understanding

reciprocity of identification

that does not account for the variables of race, ~las.~,

bid her ynqgy. She is ,c9nstru~tedlrqr:p. the, contradictions

tween text and-viewer..whoinsists

within

the text and be-

on assertive, even transgressive, identification

and

seeing.!l45 The ,'Prdcess Straaye1'narrates, of reading between .the dominant, text's lines,
t,

identifyi!lg' as the: cI:lssical ieX;t.while acti~ely Yesisting

its .enco'ded

directives t<?'watch

and identify a1; a h'etefos~xuaJ., can be undefs'to~d:~'s tile survival'tactid

Such a p~oce~s 'can be unde~stood'as

when navigating domin~nt

media.

tory in t4at it is notl~~otlt

assimilation

tial disavowal of.that

disid~ntificati6n,

that queers use

disidentific~-

into a heterosexuial matrix but instead a par~

'cultural. form that woi)ks ,to restructure it from 'within.tThe

in I .this 'instan,ce,

is the, consiructiqn

-of a, lesbian

heroine

that

changes the way hi which the objett )s inh'abited. by the subject."

My thinking

6n: disidentificaticm

has also been 'strongly informed

critical raGe ,theor;ists, 'wh0 have,lasked important

identification:for
scribed,the

of.

minorit:y:suhjeGts within dominant media. Michele Wallace has de-

processofidentification.as

that~ characterizes

by the work of

'qll;e'stions about the w:orkings

identification

one-that

for Hansen

is ~'constantly in motion./~46The

when considering

flux'

female 'sp~.c::tatorship

INTRODUCTION

and identification

is equally true of the African-American

cle. Wallace offers testimony

29

spectator in Wallace's arti-

to her own position as a spectator:

It was always said among Black-women that Joan Crawford was part Black, and
as I watch these films again today, looking at Rita Hayworth in Gilda or Lana
Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, I keep thinking "she is so beautiful,
she looks Black." Such <t statement makes no sense in current feminist film
criticism. Wha,t I am trying to suggest is that there was a way in which these
films were possessed by Black female viewers. The process may have been about
problematizing and expanding one's racial identity instead'oi abandoning it. It
seems important here to view specratorship as not-only potentially bisexual but
also multiracial and rnultiethnic. Even as "The taw- of the Father" may impose
its premature closure on the filmic "gaze" in the coordination of suture and
classical narrative, disparate factions in the audience, not equally well indoctrinated in the dominant discourse, may have their way, now and then, with
interpretation.t?
The wistful statement

that is central, to Wallace's experience of-identification,

so beautiful, she looks Black," is a poignant

disidentification.
historically

White supremacist

maligned

conceit of whiteness

aesthetics is rearranged

black beauty standards.

identification,
scribed identity

identity

component.

the Eurocentric

aligned '(hence, straight

vernaculars)

like the subjective experience

and problematizing

power of

and put in the service of

In this rumination,

and beauty as being naturally

"good hair" in some African-American

"she is

example of the transformative

is turned

hair is

on its head.

Dis-

Wallace describes, -is about expanding

and identification,

not abandoning

any socially pre-

Black female viewers are not merely passive subjects

who are possessed by the well-worn

paradigms of identification

rative produces, rather, they; are active participant

structurestale patterns within dominant

that the classical nar-

spectators who can mutate and re-

media.

In the same way that Walla<;:e'swriting irrevocably changes the ways in which we
consume forties films, the work of novelist- and literary theorist Toni Morrison
a much-needed

reassessment

scribed "a great, ornamental,

the expurgated

of the' capon of American

prescribed

African-American

literature.

absence in American

presence

from the North

has de-

literature,"48 which is
American

Morrison proposes and executes strategies to reread the American

to resuscitate

Morrison

imaginary.

canon with an aim

the African presence that was eclipsed by the machinations

capist variant of white supremacist

thought

that is intent

on displacing

of an esnonwhite

presence., The act of locating African presence in canonical white literature

ample of disidentijication
(disidentification)

offers

is an ex-

emp!oye,d for a focused political process. The mobile tactic

refuses to follow the texts' grain insofar as these contours

suggest

that a reader play along with the game of African (or, for that matter, Asian, Latino,
Arab, Nauve American)

elision. Instead, the. disidentificatory

optic is turned to shad-

ows and fissures within the text, where racialized presences can be liberated from the
protective custody of the white literary imagination.

'

30

INTRODUCTION

One of queer theory's major.contributions to the critical discourse on identification is the important work-that has been done on cross-identification. Sedgwick, for
example, has contributed to this understanding of decidedly queer chains of connection by discussing the way in which lesbian writer. Willa Cather was able to, on the
one hand, disavow Oscar Wilde for his "grotesque" homosexuality while at the same
moment uniquely invest in and identify 'with her gay male fictional creations: "If
Cather, in this story, does something to cleanse her own sexual body of the carrion
stench of Wilde's victimization, it is thus (unexpectedly) by identifying with what
seems to be Paul's sexuality not in spite of but through its saving reabsorption in a
gender liminal (and a very specifically classed) artifice that represents at once a
particular subcultural and cultural self "49 This is only one example of many within
Sedgwick's oeuvre that narrates the nonlinear and nonnorrnative modes of identification with which queers predicate their self-fashioning. Judith Butler has amended
Sedgwick's reading of Cather's cross-identification by insisting that such ~_passage
across identity markers, a passage that she understands as being a "dangerous crossing," is not about being beyond gender and sexuality.50 Butler sounds a warning that
the crossing of identity may signal erasure of the "dangerous" or, to use Sedgwick's
word when discussing the retention of the shameful, "toxic." For Butler, the danger
exists in abandoning the lesbian or female in Cather when reading the homosexual
and the male. The cautionary point that Butler would like to make is meant to ward
off reductive fantasies of cross-identification that figure it as fully achieved or finally
reached at the expense ofthe points from which it emanates. Although Sedgwick's
theorizations about doss-identification and narrative crossing are never as final as
Butler suggests, the issues that Butler outlines should be heeded when the precarious
activity of cross-identification is discussed, The tensions that exist between crossidentification as it is theorized in Sedgwick's essay and Butler's response is one of the
important spaces in queer theory that has been, in my estimation, insufficiently addressed. The theory of disidentlfication that I am putting forward responds to the
call of that schism. Disidentification, as a mode of understanding the movements
and circulations of identificatory force, would always foreground that' lost object of
identification; it would establish new possibilities while at the same time echoing the
materially prescriptive cultural locus of any identification.
Operating within a very subjective register, Wayne Koestenbaum, in his moving
study of opera divas and gay male opera culture, discusses the ways in which gay
males can cross-identify with the cultural icon of the opera diva. Koestenbaum writes
about the identificatory pleasure he enjoys when reading the 'prose of an opera diva's
autobiographies:
I am affirmed' and "divined"-made porous, open, awake, glistening-by a
diva's sentences of self-defenseand self-creation.
I don't intend to prove any historical facts; instead I want to trac(';.connections between the iconography oe'diva" as it emerges in certain publicized lives,

INTRODUCTION

31

and a collective gay subcultural imagination-a source of hope, joke, and dish.
Gossip, hardly trivial, is as central to gay culture as it is to female cultures. From
skeins of hearsay, I weave an inner life, I build queerncrssfrom banal and uplifting stories of the conduct of famous and fiery wornen.>'
_.;.diva's strategies of self-creation and self-defense, through .the crisscrossed circuit=: of cross-identification, do the work of enacting self for the gay male opera
queen. The gay male subculture that Koestenbaum represents in his prose is by no
means the totality of queer culture, but for this particular variant of a gay male lifeworld, such identifications are the very stuff on which queer identity is founded,
Koestenbaum's memoir explains the ways in which o.pera divas were crucial identificarory loci in the public sphere before the Stonewall rebellion, which marked the advent of the co.ntempo.rary lesbian and gay rights movement. Koestenbaum suggests
"Ihatbefore a homosexual civil-rights movement, o.peraqueens were the sole pedagogical example of truly grand-scale queer behavior, The o.pera queen's code of conduct
was crucial to the closeted gay male before gay liberation. Again, such a practice of
;ransfiguring an identificatory site that was not meant to. accommodate male identities is to. a queer subject an important identiry-consolidating hub, an affirmative yet
re.mPo.raryutopia. Koestenbaurris disidentificarion with the o.pera diva does not erase
me fiery females that fuel his identity-making machinery; rather, it lovingly retains
their lost presence through imitation, repetition, ,and .admiration.
Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The
process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a culrural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message's universalizing and exehisionary ma~hinaticns and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further
man cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw rnarenal for representing a disempowered politics or positionaliry that has been rendered
unthinkable by the dominant culture.
Hybrid Lives/Migrant Souls
The cultural work I engage hereis hybridized insofar as it is cultivated from the dominant culture but meant to expose and critique its conventions, It is no coincidence
that the cultural workers who produce these texts all identify as subjects whose experience of identity is fractured and split. The type of fragmentation they share is somediing more than the general sense of postmodern fragmentation and decenteredness.P
Hybridity in this study, like the term disidentijication, is meant to have an indexical use
in that it captures, collects, and brings into. play various theories .of fragmentation in
relation to. minority identity practices. Identity markers such as queer (from the
German quer meaning "transverse") or mestizo (Spanish for "mixed") are terms that
defy notions of uniform identity or origins. Hybrid catches the fragmentary subject

32

INTRODUCTION

formation of people whose identities traverse different race, sexuality, and gender
id ent iiications.
.
'\
1
Queers of color is a term that begins to describe most of the cultural performers/
makers in every chapter of Disidentifications. These subjects' different identity components occupy adjacent spaces and are not comfortably situated in anyone discourse of minority subjectivity. These hybridized identificarory positions are always
in transit, shuttling between different identity vectors. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
has suggested that migrant urban public culture, by its very premise, hybridizes identity.53 A theory of migrancy can potentially help one better understand the negotiation of these fragmentary existences. The negotiations that lead to hybrid identity
formation are a traveling back and forth from different identity vectors.
Arturo Islas's second novel, Migrant Souls, provides an opportunity to consider
the idea of migrancy. The novel tells of two "~lack sheep" cousins in a large Chicano
family. The female cousin's divorce, disrespect for the church, and sexually emancipated attitude alienate her from the family. But it is the male cousin, Miguel Chico, who
is of especial interest in this project. Miguel, like the Richard Rodriguez of Hunger of
Memory, is the scholarship boy who gets out of the barrio because of his academic excellence. Unlike Rodriguez, Miguel is at least partially out about his homosexuality. 54
Miguel's trip home, from his out existence as an academic Chicano to the semicloseted
familial space of identity formation, exemplifies the kind of shuttling I describe. Of
course, this movement is not only a by-product of Miguel's status as queer son; all of
the family, in some way, experience migrancy. The text explains as much when it articulates the family ethos: "They were migrant, not immigrant, souls. They simply
and naturally went from ~ri'ebloody side of the river to the other and into a land that
just a few decades earlier had been Mexico. They became border Mexicans with
American citizenship."55 I want to identify a deconstructive kernel in these three sentencesby Islas. The idea of a border is scrutinized in this locution. The migrant status
can be characterized by its need to move back and forth, to occupy at least two spaces
at once. (This is doubly true for the queer Latino son.) The very nature of this migrant drive eventually wears down the coherency of borders. Can we perhaps think of
Miguel, a thinly camouflaged authorial surrogate, as a border Mexican with citizenship in a queer nation or a border queer national claiming citizenship in Aztlan?
Marga's Life
After this tour of different high-theory paradigms, I find myself in a position where I
need to reassert that part of my aim in this book is to push against reified understanding of theory. The cultural workers whom I focus on can be seen as making
theoretical points and contributions to the issues explored in ways that are just as
relevant and useful as the phalanx of institutionally sanctioned theorists that I
promiscuously invoke throughout these pages. To think of cultural workers such as
Carrnelita.Tropicana, Vaginal Creme Davis, Richard Fung, and the other artists who

INTRODUCTION

33

are considered. here as not only culture makers but also theory producers is not to
take an antitheory position. My chapter on Davis's terrorist drag employs Antonio
Gramsci's theory of organic intellectuals in an effort to emphasize the theory-making
power of performance. It should be understood as an attempt at opening up a term
whose meaning has become narrow and rigid. Counterpublic performances let us
imagine models of social relations. Such performance practices do not shy away from
the theoretical practice of cultural critique.
Consider, once again, the example of Marga Gomez's performance piece Marga
Gomez Is Pretty, Witty, and Gay. When the lesbian calls out to the young Marga, lasciviously flicking her tongue'at the girl, the story of interpellation is reirnagined with
a comical and critical difference. One possible working definition of queer that we
might consider is this: queers 'are people who have failed to turn around to the "Hey,
you there!" interpellating call of heteronormativity. A too literal reading of Althusser's
ideology cop fable suggests one primary moment of hailing. Such a reading would
also locate one primary source or mechanism that hails the subject. But the simple
fact is that we are continuously hailed by various ideological apparatuses that compose the state power apparatus. No one knows this better than queers who are constantly being hailed as "straight" by various institutions-including
the mainstream
media. The humor and cultural critique that reverberate through this moment in the
performance are rooted in Gomez's willful disidentification with this call; she critiques and undermines the call of hereronorrnativity by fabricating a remade and
queered televisual hailing. Through her disidentificatory comedic "shtick," she retells
the story of interpellation with a difference.
After Gomez explains how she was "hailed" into lesbianism by the talk-show
sapphists, she paces the stage and ruminates on her desire for the life-world these
women represented:
Mr. Susskind and the lady homosexuals chain-smoked through the entire program. I think it was relaxing for them. I don't think they could have done it
without the smokes. It was like they were in a gay bar just before last call. And
all the smoke curling up made the life seem more mysterious.
The life-that's what they called it back then when you were one of us. You
were in the life! It was short for the hard and painfollife. It sounded so dramatic.
I loved drama. I was in the drama club in high school. I wanted to be in the life,
too. But I was too young. So I did the next best thing. I asked my mother to
buy me Life cereal and Life magazine. For Christmas I got the game of Life.
Gomez paints a romantic and tragic picture of pre-Stonewall gay reality. She invests
this historical moment with allure and sexiness. The performer longs for this queer
and poignant model of a lesbian identity. This longing for the life should not be read
as a nostalgic wish for a lost world, but instead, as the performance goes on to indicate, as a redeployment of the past that is meant to offer a critique of the present.
After all the talk of smoking, she pulls out a cigarette and begins to puff on it.

34

INTRODUCTION

And as I moved the lonely game pieces around the board, I pretended I was
smoking Life cigarettes'and living the Life. By the time I was old enough, no one
called it the life anymore. It sounded too isolating arid politically incorrect. Now
they say the community. The community is made up of all of us who twenty-five
years ago would have been in the Life. And in the community there is no smoking.
She concludes the narrative by stamping out an imaginary cigarette. The performance, staged in many gay venues and for a crowd who might be called "the converted," does more than celebrate contemporary queer culture. Gomez's longing for a
pre-Stonewall version of queer reality is a look toward the past that critiques the present and helps us envision the future. Although it might seem counterintuitive, or
perhaps self-hating, to desire this mornenj/before the quest for lesbian and gay civil
rights, such an apprehension should be challenged. Margas look toward the mystery
and outlaw sensibility of the life is a critique of a sanitized and heteronormativized
community. In Gomez's comedy, we locate a disidentificatory desire, a de~ire for a
queer life-world that is smoky, mysterious, and ultimately conrestatory, More than
that, we see a desire to escape the claustrophobic confines of "community," a construct that often deploys rhetorics of norrnativity and normalization, for a life. The
life, or at least Gomez's disidentification with this concept, helps us imagine an expansive queer life-world, one in which the "pain and hardship" of queer existence
within a homophobic public sphere are not elided, one in which the "mysteries" of
our sexuality are not reigned in by sanitized understandings of lesbian and gay identity, and finally, one in which we are all allowed to be drama queens and smoke as
much as our hearts desire.

lntrodocrion: Performing Disidentifi~ations

1. Nestor Garda Canclini, "Cultural Reconversion," in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary
Latin American Culture, ed. George Yudice, Jean Franco, and-Juan Flores (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 32.

201

202

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
2. William E. ConnoUy, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca,

N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 163.

3. These debates are meticulously outlined in Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature

and Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 1989).

4. For an important

intervention on this front, see Essex Hemphill, "If Freud Had Been a

Neurotic Colored Woman: Reading Dr. Frances Cress Welsing," in Ceremonies (New York: Penguin,
1992), pp. 52-61.
5. Norma Alarc6n, "Conjugating Subjects in the Age of Multiculturalism," in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
19%), P: 129.
.
6. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: W W Norton, 19-;73),p. 206.
7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1990), P: 61.
8. Kimberle William Crenshaw, "Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live
Crew," in WOrdrThat WOund: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, ed. Mari
J. Matsuda er al. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 111-32.
9. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1%7), P: 180.
10. John Champagne, '''Anthropology-Unending

Search for What Is Utterly Precious': Race,

Class, and Tongues Untied," in The Ethics of Marginality: A New Approach to Gay Studies (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Champagne's text, in its frantic mission to attack important black
queer culture makers such as th~ late Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill, attempts to link Riggs's critique ofthe Castro'S white normativity as a critique of S/M and, furthermore, as being closely aligned
with antiporn movements. Champagne accuses Hemphill of having cried during a reading of his on the
exploitative dimensions oft.he late Robert Mapplethorpe's work's mythification of black men as exotic
kink. Champagne's reductive critical lens equates a critique of a major artist with the antiporn censorship of Andrea Dworkin and John Stoltenberg. In doing rhis, Champagne seems to betray his ignorance
of the body of Hemphill's cultural production,

which includes poetry and prose that the likes of

Dworkin and Stoltenberg would immediately-denounce

as porn. Champagne declines

to- engage

actual

antiporn movements and instead makes weak accusations that gay Mrican-American cultural workers
who engage white racism and the exclusion of bodies of color from many aspects of white gay culture
are actually antiporn activists. Hemphill's tears during his presentation are interpreted as a manipulative
act of bad faith. This accusation indicates the ways in which the critic is dulled to the history of subjugation that black bodies.have experienced under the influence of whites.
11. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, "Expanding the Categories of Race and Sexuality in Lesbian and
Gay Studies," in Professions

oJ Desire: Lesbian and

Gay Studies in Literature, ed. George E. Haggerty and

Bonnie Zimmerman (New York: MLA, 1995), pp. 128-29.

12. Louis Althusser, Lenin and fIarxism

and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York:

Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127-87.

13. Michel Pecheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982).
14. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter:' On the Discursive Limits

~'f"Sex" (Routledge:

New York,

1993), p. 219. Zizek's discussion of disidentification can be found in Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object
of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1991).
.
15. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 219.
16. One of Freud's accounts of identification can Defound in Group Psychologyand the Analysis of

the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: W W Norton, 1959). In this book Freud schernarizes three
types of identification: the first type is the original emotional tie with an object that is central to the the-

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

203

ory of the Oedipus complex; the second variant is identificarion with a substitute for a libidinal object;
and the third mode is a nonerotic identification with a subject who shares common characteristics and
investments.'The first route is clearly'the road to normative heterosexual idenrity formation. The second
notion of identification is the pathologized and regressive possibility that can account for the taking on
of various queer object choices. In this mode of identification, the object is not sucessfully transferred as
it is in the Oedipal identificarory circuit, but instead what I understarid as a queer introjection occurs
and circumvents such identifications. The final mode allows for identifications

that are same-sex and de-

cidedly nonerotic, thus permitting same-sex group identifications that are not "regressive" or pathological. Throughout Freud's writing, there is a curious interlacing of desire and identification. Identification
with a same-sex model is necessary for the process of desiring an opposite-sex object choice. Desire, for
Freud, is, then, a term that is reserved for normative heterosexuality, and homosexual emotional and
erotic connections are talked about in terms of identification. The theory of disidentification

proposed

here is offered, in parr, as a substitute to this Freudian model, even though its workings also depend on
certain forms of introjection, as described in Freud's second modality of identification. In what follows,
I make links between my understanding of disidenrification and the Freudian and post-Freudian understanding of melancholia. Melancholia is a process that also depends on introjection. In my analysis, this
introjection is described as the "holding on to" or incorporation of or by a lost object.
17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel." GLQ 1:1
(fall 1993): 13.
18. Diana Fuss, "Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look," Critical Inquiry 18:4 (summer 1992):
713-32.
19. Ibid., p. 730.
20. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practices of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 190.
21. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, '1995), P: 11.
22: James Baldwin, The Devil Finds WOrk (New York: Dial Press, 1976), p. 7. For an intriguing
discussion of Baldwin's complicated and queenly identification with Davis, see Jane Gaines, "On Being
Green" (unpublished manuscript presented at the MLA, December 1992).
23. For an important critique of Rodriguez's work and assimilationist

politics, see Ram6n

Saldivar's Chicano Narratives: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1990). See Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York:
Bantam Books, 1983).

24. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Random House, 1980), pp. 100-101.
25. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 333-34.
26. James Baldwin, Just Above My Head (New York: Dial Press, 1979), p. 550.
27. Ibid., p. 552.
28. Leeming, James Baldwin, p.332.
29. An especially troubling genealogy of queer theory is Annamarie Jagose's Queer Theory (New
York: New York University Press, 1996), a book that attempts to hisroricize queer discourse by narrating

its debt

to me homophile movement and lesbian feminism, and yet almost completely ignores queer
theory's debt to radical women and men of color.

30. Norma A1arc6n, "The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and AngloAmerican Feminism," in Gloria Anzaldua, Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienda Caras: Creative and
Critical Perspectivesby Feminists of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), pp. 356-69.
31. Ibid., p. 360.
32. Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, "Something's Missing: A Discussion between Ernst and

2~4

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing," in Episr Bloch, The Utopian Function

of Art: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988),
pp. 1-17. For more on the idea of queer utopianism, see my essay "Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian
Longings, Queer Memories," in Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism, ed.
Dangerous Bedfellows (Boston: South End Press, 1996), pp. 355-72.
33. Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy
Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Unwin Hyman, 19~0), p. 136.
34. Ibid., p. 137.
35. Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," trans. Ben Brewster, Screen (summer 1975): 14-76.
36. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16:1 (winter 1975): 6-18.
37. For a critique of the Metzian/Mulveyan paradigm, see Gaylyn Srudlar, "Masochism and the
Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema," in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985), pp. 602-21.
38. Laura Mulvey, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' Inspired by Duel in

the Sun," Framework 15:17 (1981): 29-38.

39. Degaying is a term I borrow from Cindy Patton, who uses it

in her The Invention of AIDS

(New York: Routledge, 1990) to discuss the ways in which government health-care agencies and some
HIV/AIDS service groups have worked to disassociate the AIDS epidemic from its connection to gay
culture.
40. Miriam Hansen, From Babel to Babylon: Spectatorship.in American Silent Film (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1991).
41. Ibid., p. 281.
42. For an excellent survey of these developments, see Judith Mayne, Cinema aj'Spectatorsbip
(New York: Routledge, 1993).

43. Manthia Diawara, "Black Specratorship," in Black American Cinema, ed. Mantilla Diawara
(New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 215. Bell hooks, in her essay "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female
Specratorship" in the same volume, challenges Mulvey's formulations from an uncompromising and
powerful black feminist position.
44. This is not to say that other variables such as age or ability do not register. They do not take
their place in the familiar litany I rehearse here because they do not significantly figure in the history of
critical writing on filmic identification that I am narrating.
45. Chris Straayer, "The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine," in Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual
Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 10.
46. Michele Wallace, "Race, Gender, and Psychoanalysis in Forties Film: Lost Boundaries, Home of
the Brave and The Quiet One," in Diawara, Black American Cinema, p. 257.
47. Ibid., p. 264; my emphasis.
48. Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Mro-American Presence in American
Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28:1 (winter 1989): 14. Morrison further delineates these ideas
in her srudy Playing in the Dark: Whites and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1992).
49. Eve Kosofsky -Sedgwick, "Across Gender, Across Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others," in

Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectivesin Literature and Culture, ed. Ronald R. Butters, John MClurn, and Michael Moon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 65.
50. Butler, Bodies That Matter, pp. 143-66.
51. Wayne Koestenbaum,

The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of D~

(New York: Vintage Books, 1993), pp. 84-85.

52. Craig Owens, one of posrmodernisrns

most astute theorists, summarizes postmodernisms

NOTES TO CHAPTER

205

identity crisis in his important essay on postrnodernism and otherness as follows: "Decenrered, allegori-

cal, schizophrenic ... however we choose to diagnose the symptoms, postrnodernism is usually treated,
by its protagonists and antagonists alike, as a crisis of cultural authority, specifically the authority vested
in Western Culture and its institutions" ("The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism,"
in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992], p. 166).
.
53. Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London:

Routledge, 1993), p. 252.

54. Rodriguez comes out in a somewhat oblique fashion in his second book, Days of Obligation:

An Argument with My Mexican Father (New York: Viking Press, 1992).

55. Arturo Islas, Migrant Souls (New York: Avon, 1990), p. 41.