Disidentification

Radcliffe’s (2016) argument in Dilemmas of Difference that categories used in Ecuadorian development projects such as “indigenes women” are rooted in colonial legacies and ideas reminded me of an essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, written in 1981 by Audre Lorde, American black feminist writer. Referring to (American) conventional white feminists as the master, to their academic/activist circle that she criticizes for not recognizing differences among women as the master’s house and to their hegemonic feminist discourses as “the master’s tools,” Lorde (1981) argues that it is almost impossible to “dismantle” the hegemonic white feminism as long as we fight against it within its framework applying their ideas and epistemology. Although she is primarily concerned with issues in American (white) feminist academic circle in this essay, if she is right that master’s tools “may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (p99), I think that we cannot transform the subaltern realities of whoever any development projects are aimed at unless we reject the development discourses and categories that are rooted in colonial legacies as well.

At the same time, this discussion also reminded me of the concept of “disidentification” introduced by Munoz (1999) in Disidentification as a way for us to negotiate oppressing hegemonic systems. While academic/activist conversations on gender and sexuality as well as race and ethnicity have been conventionally based on strategies of “identification” through which the oppressed opt to assimilate within dominant ideology and/or “counter-identification” through which they try to completely break it down, according to him, disidentification is a political practice to highjack essentialized (or naturalized) identity discourses/categories by interpreting and performing them in ways their “authors” do not mean. In doing so, we can de-essentialize/denaturalize those discourses and categories. Disidentification is not about merging with dominant ideology, neither is it aimed to completely abandon it or make it non- existent; rather, it is both as he states that “disidentification is a strategy that works and against dominant ideology” (p11). Munoz (1999, p31) claims that

Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. 

We have learned that categories and discourses of people in the South that development discourses rely on have problematically colonial origins. As Lorde (1981) would argue, it won’t probably challenge against the structure to uncritically adopt them. However, we have probably noticed that it is often difficult to completely reject hegemonic categories. Then, Munoz’s (1999) concept of disidentification may be useful as a strategic approach in development as well as it does not aim to reject those categories. Rather than adopting or rejecting colonial discourses, we might be able to create a new reality by disidentification, by “re-writing” definitions of them by applying or performing them in different ways from hegemonic ways.

What do you think?