Domain Name Com's Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Cultural Studies of the Americas, V. 2)

Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Cultural Studies of the Americas, V. 2)

Domain Name Com's - : Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Cultural Studies of the Americas, V. 2)

- love this book and its author!
For those of us who have been starving since finishing Mercer's 'Welcome to the Jungle' or Fusco's 'English Is Broken Here', this is an excellent book to add to your reading list. Through complex theory and deep analysis, Munoz effectively articulates what many of us know but have difficulty proving to others: lesbian and gay artists of color are producing some of the nation's and the world's most revolutionary and counterhegemonic work. I am especially impressed that he examines work by Black, Latino, and Asian gays. This is a much-needed book for anyone who would like to see people of color come together in coalition. You will be impressed with Munoz's creation. This is not Hemphill's 'Brother to Brother' or Moraga's 'This Bridge Called My Back.' Some readers will be put off by the semiotic language Munoz uses. However, for those who can get through it, you will enjoy this book.

Rating:

- Unimpressive
Simply put, this contribution to performance studies lacks any theory of the audience. The book is eager to explicate the subversive meanings subtending the work of various artists, but the interpretations require something more than a completely essentialized and abstracted characterization of the audience as a homogeneous unit that can be assumed, without further analysis, to share whatever meanings the author ascribes to the works under consideration. I would have thought that, given the proliferation of interpretive traces available through zine culture, the internet, academic commentary, and other media, it would be virtually irresistible for a cultural critic like Munoz to exploit those centexts when deploying his theoretical tools. Yet it seems not to have occurred to him that there can be no complete, or even adequately informed, analsysis of performance without some effort to particularize and attend to the audience. Lacking such contextualization, the interpretations become nothing more than solitary meditations, floating free of any moorings.

Rating:

- Hack Job
The critique of John Champagne's Ethics of Marginality in the introduction of this book is just plain shoddy and careerist. Munoz states that Champagne accuses Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied of vilifying white people; in fact, Champagne's critique says the film vilifies gay, white, s/m culture. Munoz accuses Champagne of ignorance of Essex Hemphill's poetry--poetry Champagne himself discusses in the very same chapter in which he analyzes Tongues Untied. Apparently, Munoz is so interested in making a name for himself that he doesn't bother to read carefully the sources he cites. Perhaps Champagne's critique of the figure of the privileged marginal just hits too close to home for NYU's Munoz.

Rating:

- Certain to Become a Seminal Influence
This is a crucial book. It was written by a gay Cuban man who teaches in New York City though he grew up on the suburban lawns that grow on the drained swamp lands of South Florida. The book is all about how artists of color build subjectivities from the suffocating madness of neo-coloniality. We pick up the pieces of a system opposed to us, and we restage it, we push it into having new meanings, and in so doing we disarm, just a little bit, the weight of the world upon us. Muñoz's writings have always been full of beautiful stories. Vaginal Creme Davis, the half-African-American-half-Mexican drag performer who fronts a punk band where she pretends to be a white supremacist militia member because she thinks their look is "really hot". Or Muñoz himself, signing along as a teenager to the racist lyrics of an old X song because he needed their implicit critique of the suffocating conformity of Hialeah's cultural and sexual conservatism.

What Muñoz elegantly lays out for us is a strategy for intervening in the public sphere that resists both the deadly paralysis of identification (assimilation with the status quo), or an imagined counter-identification which inevitably only succeeds in reifying the very bifurcating dialectic it seeks to overthrow. What interests Muñoz is what he calls "disidentification", a third way which I can best describe as such: Caliban's strategy of learning the master's language so he may curse him with it, but staged for the Millennium, so that we learn to curse (or desire) with irreverence, humor, rhythm, and while wearing stilettos. Practice theory without this book at your own peril. It is certain to become a seminal influence.

Rating:

- Ground-breaking Scholarship in Queer Studies
Jose Munoz has written a book which breaks new ground in queer studies. His analysis of queer, colored cultural productions is incisive and unapologetic. A much needed addition to a field which pays lip service but has yet to alter its strong hold on whiteness.

page 1 of 1

Domain Name Registration


	Register Domain Name
	Private Domain Registration
	Domain Name Auction
	Bulk Register Domains
	Transfer Domain Name
	Bulk Transfer Domains
	Manage Domain Names
	Email Accounts

Website Creator


	Website Creator Build Your Own Website
	Website Templates
	Mobile Website Templates

Website Hosting Plans


	Hosting Plans
	Dedicated Server
	Virtual Dedicated Server
	My Server - Account Login

Secure Server Certificates


	Introduction
	Technical Documents
	Purchase Secure Server SSL Certificate

Software


	MS Office Student
	QuickBooksPro 2008
	Digital Photo Editing How To Create a Foto Album
	HTML WebPage Editors
	Top Firewalls
	Networking Software
	Internet Security
	Local Area Networks
	Security & Firewalls
	Software Downloads
	Internet Utilities
	Children's Software
	Programming

Electronics


	MP3 Players
	Camera & Photo
	Office Electronics
	Computers & Ad-On's
	Handhelds & PDA
	GPS & Navigation
	Home Automations & Security
	Compare Prices on Electronics
	Ink & Toner Finder
	Monitors & Projectors
	Internet Webcams
	Blu Ray Disc Drive

Contact Information


	Office Locations
	Customer Feedback

Domain Names Electronics Software
Manage \| Register \| Email Login

Home \| Domain Name Registration \| Software \| Electronics \| Web Certificates \| About Us \| Contact Us \| Help