Hey All! Sorry I am late I ended up closing the store last night and didnt have a chance to post. For my thoughts to the Munoz readings I decided to do a couple of bullet points on questions, thoughts and notes that I had on the reading instead of a summary. I also took a couple of photos of my initial reaction to Munoz's thoughts on identity and disidentification. Munoz Notes.doc
~"solo performance speaks to the reality of being queer at this particular moment"~
When acting out a queer performance, what about the bedroom makes it more alluring? more of a spectacle? more open to critique?
Bowers v Hardwick: A Supreme Court decision made in 1986 that criminalized oral and anal sex between consenting homosexual adults in private. This decision was overturned in 2003 by Lawrence v Texas.
In wanting to become a "truck driving closeted diesel dyke" she reclaims the lesbian stereotype and embraces it thus turning it into something "powerful and seductive".
"public performance of memory"-Everyday lives and experiences are what break the stereotype, even if that means reconstituting it.
What is Disidentification? (Munoz claims it is a survival strategy utilized by those of minority identity to navigate a sphere in which a phobic majority punishes those who do not conform to their politics)
What is identity and why do we cling to it?
If disidentification enables politics, what about identity is political?
How is identity the same/different from stereotypes?
I think that identity is different than stereotypes in the sense that what I would call my identity is the individual private and public idea of who I am in regards to the rest of society. There has to be others to compare and differ from to identify yourself. Some people think that identity is how tall you, are your coloring, the sound of your voice. I think that it is those things but also who you are friends with, what your personality is like, etc. Stereotype is a word that in my opinion has only one connection with the word identity. In this context I can see the connection Munoz is trying to make. He is saying that stereotyping can be a point of identifying or disidentifying with a particular group of people and that is how identity is created and established. This makes sense but maybe identity is more than deciding what you are not. I think that it incorporates what you are as well as what you are not within groups of society as well as stereotypes. What do you all think "stereotype" and "identity" have to do with one another?
Thanks for the pictures of your notes. Here's a blog entry that I did about this first chapter for the queering theory class last year.
Campusgirl23: I completely agree with you in where you stand in the differences between identity and stereotypes. I was just trying to link the connection between the "encoded roles" that Munoz touches on and if those were relatable to stereotypes. I think that our outward identity is usually depicted or picked apart to, as Munoz calls it, the "lowest denominator" which turns into stereotypes. But this identity is not one that we would use to identify ourselves but rather the identity that others give us. To disidentify then would be to go against (or reclaim) that outward identity and turn it inward?
@ RadioEdit: I really liked the questions that you brought up concerning identity and stereotypes. I definitely feel like there is a slight difference between the two, and although an individual may feel that their identity is distinct from the rest of society, that individual is still categorized under a certain race, gender, or class. I also feel that even though a lot of us may not identify ourselves to stereotypes, these stereotypes had to have derived from somewhere or based on some sort of "truth".