Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics by José Esteban Muñoz (review)

Jamaican and Cuban politics. In collecting the essays in this section without introducing them ro present a rationale for their selection, organization or content, Marable runs the risk of incoherence. When coming back to them after reading the following sections, it becomes clear that, though they are not thematically related to each other, they all address the central notion of those later essays — these are African American scholars engaging with activist, popular, political topics . But it is doubtful that these essays published here, or others like them published in Marable's journals, RaceandReason and Souk:A CriticalJournalofBlack Politics, CultureandSociety, will reach the non-intellectual African American U.S. citizen outside of academe. How this gap between the elite printed medium of African American academics and the primarily non-print or popular press world ofthe streets can be bridged by African American scholars may be the key in determining whether or not the scholars writing here can fulfill what they claim to be their mission — a union of the intellectual with the worker, the community activist, the people. Even though their rhetoriccalls for, even demands, such a link, Dispatches takes no initiative in style, medium or means ofpublication for bringing such a union into being. José Esteban Muñoz. Disidentifications: Queers ofColor andthe Performance ofPolitics. Cultural Studies ofthe Americas 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 227p. Curtis Wasson Yale University CarmelitaTropicana (the stage name/persona ofAlinaTroyano) has as her motto an idea that is central to José Esteban Muñoz's work Disidentifications: namely, that "your Kunst is your Waffen," your art is your weapon (137). Muñoz views, in the artistic practices/performances he catalogues, re- and mis-appropriations of the cultural objects, practices, and discourses that serve to oppress queers, people ofcolor, and queer people ofcolor. These appropriations function in order both to acknowledge the hold oppressive discourses have on marginal subjects and to challenge the hegemonic nature and totality of such discourses. Art used as a weapon can be seen in those performances that demonstrate the flawed and problematic nature ofoppressive discourses by recycling them as part of"strategies of iteration and reiteration" in "performative acts of conjuring that deform and reform the world" (196). 136 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 4- SPRING 2001 The practice ofdisidentification, then, imagines new worlds, but only on the basis ofthe old. Its strategies ofunderstanding and representing do not emanate from the oft-cited dictum to take what is good while discarding the bad. Rather, disidentificatory practices seek to recycle in a questioning vein what is oppressive, while maintaining the existence ofthat that which is being called into question by breathing new life into it (12). Since disidentificatory practices depend on the discourses they work within and challenge for their existence, disidentification as a term cannot be easily pinned down or defined a priori. Examples of disidentificatory reading/performing practices include the reception of Mapplethorpe's photography ofblack male nudes by gay men ofcolor; the video artist Richard Fung's intervention in gay male pornography, which succeeds in displacing the typical tropes and relationships of power of the genre; the drag queen/performance artistVaginal Creme Davis' creative inhabiting ofthe persona of a white supremacist, as well as her 'anti-gay' critique ofgay white male privilege ; EIa and AlinaTroyano's use ofcamp, choteo, burUt, chusmerta, and drag; Pedro Zamora's counterpublic performances on MTV of a queer of color living with HIV; and Felix Gonzalez-Torres' art, which traces absences instead of identities. Muñoz's analysis ofthese and other cultural texts is often highly suggestive and, especially in the chapters on Richard Fung, Vaginal Creme Davis, the Troyano sisters, and Pedro Zamora, generally quite convincing and clear. The breadth of knowledge, both of theoretical currents and of the performances he documents, and the commitment that Muñoz brings to his work is impressive and challenging . If there is a criticism to be levied against this work, however, it is that the analyses Muñoz offers the reader sometimes stray too farafield, and are often more suggestive than concrete. The introduction ofDisidentifications, for example, discusses far too many texts in a too-cursory fashion for one to get a clear sense of what disidentification...