Book Review: Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (original) (raw)

For over a decade leading cultural studies scholars, such as Richard^ ohnson,John Fiske, and Angela McRobbie, have urged greater critical attention to the study of lived culture, to those private, typically casual social contexts where, in the form of personal histories and memories, the "discursive selfproduction of subjects" originate and self identities take shape. 1 The ciallenge here is not to abandon theoretically sophisticated textual studies of cultural forms and artifacts I hat have dominated the field but rather to reinvigorate that theory and research by reconnecting public brms and artifacts ethnographically to their circulation in private, often provisional contexts of rect ption and meaning making, in McRobbie's terms, to study "how people see themselves [...] as actr 'e agents whose sense of self is projected on to and expressed in an expansive range of cultural practi :es, including texts, images and commodities" (58). The ultimate goal of "identity ethnographies," th ;n, is the formation of a more rigorous way of thinking about identity-in-culture, the development of a grounded, situational approach to cultural studies that dissolves entrenched binary oppositions "betwe en texts and lived experiences, between media and reality, between culture and society" and "takes x its starting-point the relational interactive quality of everyday life" (59).