Formats
Anthologies
105
Audio
310
Catalogues
411
Clothing
23
Editions
31
Ephemera
68
Literary
39
Monographs
179
Posters
298
Video
39
Zines
141

Shop > Artists' Books

Out of Stock
#13052

Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics

Writer
José Esteban Muñoz
Date
2017
Publisher
University of Minnesota Press
Format
Artists' Books
Size
17.6 × 25.2 × 1.2 cm
Length
248 pp
Genre
LGBTQ2S+, Theory
Description

There is more to identity than identifying with one’s culture or standing solidly against it. José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture—not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process “disidentification,” and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.

Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. By examining the process of identification in the work of filmmakers, performance artists, ethnographers, Cuban choteo, forms of gay male mass culture (such as pornography), museums, art photography, camp and drag, and television, Muñoz persistently points to the intersecting and short-circuiting of identities and desires that result from misalignments with the cultural and ideological mainstream in contemporary urban America.

Muñoz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of color—in Carmelita Tropicana’s “Camp/Choteo” style politics, Marga Gomez’s performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Davis’s “Terrorist Drag,” Isaac Julien’s critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s performances of “disidentity,” and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, a person with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial environment of the MTV serial The Real World.

Softcover, perfect-bound, b&w

  1. Disidentifications
 

Related Items

  1. Grace Lee Boggs: Living for Change
  2. NEWSPAPER
  3. AA Bronson’s House of Shame
  4. Arnaud Gerspacher: The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Artist as Ethologist
  5. Abigail Solomon-Godeau: Photograph at the Dock
  6. Return to the field
  7. Lines Breaking
  8. Not really being Anywhere except Everywhere
  9. Adaptive Actions: Madrid
  10. Making Art Global, Part 1

The Third Havana Biennial 1989
  11. Lars Ahlstrom and Hans Anders Molin: Airspace
  12. David Askevold and Christina Ritchie: Activating the Archive 4: Double Agent
  13. Colin Campbell and Bruce ed. Ferguson: Activating the Archive 2: Otherwise Worldly
  14. Greg Curnoe: Blue Book no. 8
  15. Emily Vey Duke: I’d Rather be Polymorphous Perverse