José Esteban Muñoz defines a strategy of "disidentification" prevalent among queer and colored youth and the cultural performers they often become. Disidentification is a way of resisting dominant cultures and ideologies without disavowing them entirely, or trying to escape their influences completely. To disidentify, according to Muñoz, is "to transform a cultural logic from within, ... to enact permanent social change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance." [i]
How do we disidentify? Muñoz recites the psychoanalytic account of identitification to explain how the disidentifying subject differentiates him/herself. The identifying subject "assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides."[ii] According to Muñoz, "what stops identification from happening is always the ideological restrictions implicit in an identificatory site."[iii] For queer and/or colored youth, these restrictions can manifest themselves in a number of ways in a variety of possible identifications with aspects of popular and dominant culture. As in all processes of identification, these disidentifying subjects face a number of possible identifications with the cultural objects they encounter. However, such cultural objects and the identificatory sites they provide may more radically contradict the experiences of queer/colored youth. Given their positions within a "matrix of domination,"[iv] queer/colored youth may be more likely to make one or several negotiations with a given cultural object in order to conceptualize it for their own use, and make use of it within their own worlds. "She's so beautiful, she looks Black" Muñoz cites Michele Wallace's article about African American spectatorship when she recalls watching white Hollywood actresses like Joan Crawford or Lana Turner and "thinking 'she is so beautiful, she looks Black.'" Wallace acknowledges that this statement "makes no sense in current feminist film criticism" but that, importantly, "there was a way in which these films were possessed by Black female viewers."[v] The power of this disidentification lies in Wallace's and other Black females' ability to re-imagine white beauty standards as "in the service of historically maligned black beauty standards."[vi] Black female viewers identify with these white actresses representing white beauty, "but with a difference."[vii] This self-negating desire for a white beauty ideal is "reconstituted" by ideology that says such desires are "too self-compromising."[viii] By making these "beautiful" women "look Black," they avoid passively accepting and internalizing implied assumptions about white versus black beauty and subvert patterns that popular media always reinforce. Practicing disidentification "does not dispel those ideological contradictory elements," rather, the subject "hold[s] onto this object and invests it with new life."[ix] This last statement is particularly important to the way in which (queer) Native studies (dis)identifies with certain queer of color theories. Native disidentity Muñoz's book is largely concerned with the disidentifications of queer "hybrid" subjects. Though Muñoz is quick to point out that terms like hybridity and queerness run the risk of eliding the very differences that disidentificatory practice points out, he uses "hybrid" to refer to cultural performers whose "queer lives are "fragmented into various identity bits...some of them complementary, some of them antagonistic."[x] Both queerness and hybridity, for Muñoz, are "spaces of productivity where identity's fragmentary nature is accepted and negotiated."[xi] Queer Native studies scholars like Andrea Smith take particular issue with conceptions like this, because they assume hybridity and queerness to be naturally aligned, and in doing so implicitly denigrate the role of the Indigenous subject in queer politics and theory. Placing settler colonialism in the past and viewing ourselves as post-colonial minority subjects may also allow us to think of Natives as historic people who populated a distant past, and only that. Some queer of color theories themselves include a way of positing Indian peoples as ancestors, the Indigenous roots of now better-cultivated hybrid identities. Smith states: "In queer of color critique, in particular, mestizaje and queerness often intersect to disappear indigeneity through the figure of the...hybrid queer subject."[xii] Settler colonial discourses use the figure of the Native as "an empty signifier" against which European civilization can be imposed and "remade," abandoning the "innocent savage" forever as the infant of European/American civilization.[xiii] |
In a similar way, queer of color theorists have used the same figure of the "primitive" or "innocent" Indian as "a premodern precursor to the more modern, sophisticated mestizo identity."[xiv] Indigenous subjects are pictured as unambiguous while the mestiza is celebrated for her inability or unwillingness to "hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries."[xv] This dichotomy clearly aligns mestizaje with queerness: the mestiza's mixing of boundaries seems almost to follow from her own mixed blood and heritage. The mestiza becomes an already queered subject, with the possibility of queer Indigeneity halted at the same time that the Indian person is relegated to "precursor" and primitive ancestor of the distinctly modern mestiza.
Disidentifying without 'dissing' your friends Many queer of color theories have the potential to provide an "identificatory site"[xvi] for queer Natives as the place where minority identifications intersect to contest and interrogate one another. However, these same queer of color theories run the risk of alienating queer Native people when they deploy an image of the naive and primitive Native to illustrate the figure of the matured, queered, unbounded, and thus improved mestiza. This alienation becomes the type "ideological restriction"[xvii] that can exclude queer Natives from identifying fully with the identificatory site that a queer of color approach provides for other queer and minority people. In doing so, theories of mestizaje can disappear the native subject's usefulness as a political identity or articulation. However, pointing out these nuances of queer theory serve as a queer Indigenous disidentification with theories of mestizaje. In keeping with Muñoz' definition of disidentification, Smith's attention to this particular tendency in mestizaje narratives does "not willfully evacuate the politically dubious or shameful components"[xviii] of them. That is, in disidentifying with the mestizaje narrative, Smith and others recognize it as a potential site of identification, but refuse to disregard its shortcomings for the queer and Indigenous subject. This refusal to comply with a mestizaje narrative that relies on an archaic image of indigeneity provides in Muñoz's words, the "necessary interjection"[xix]of queer Indigenous presence into the conversation that queer of color theories generate and maintain. In performing a disidentification such as this, Smith and other queer Native scholars and activists answer the call of their peers to remain in conversation with other queer and queer of color scholars and theorists. In fact, Smith's critique depends on the existence of writers like Muñoz and existing theories of mestizaje, but is capable of interrogating its weaknesses, especially in relation to a queer Indigenous framework and Native subjects. |