"Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship....The fiction of identity is one that is accessed with relative ease by most majoritarian subjects. Minoritarian subjects need to interface with different subcultural fields to activate their own senses of self. This is not to say that majoritarian subjects have no recourse to disidentification or that their own formation as subjects is not structured through multiple and sometime conflicting sites of identification. Within late capitalism, all subject citizens are formed by what Nestor Garcia Canclini has called "hybrid transformations generated by the horizontal coexistence of a number of symbolic systems." Yet, the story of identity formations predicated on "hybrid transformation" that this text is interested in telling concerns subjects whose identities are formed in response to the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny - cultural logics that work to undergird state power. The disidentificatory performances that are documented and discussed here circulate in subcultural circuits and strive to envision and activate new social relations. These new social relations would be the blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic spheres.

The political theorist's formulations understand identity as produced at the point of contact between essential understandings of self (fixed dispositions) and socially constructed narratives of self. The chapters that make up this study attempt to chart the ways in which identity is enacted by minority subjects who must work with/resist the conditions of (im)possibility that dominant culture generates. The essentialized understanding of identity by its very nature must reduce identities to lowest common denominator terms. Socially encoded scripts of identity are often formatted by phobic energies around race, sexuality, gender and various other identificatory distinctions. I understand the labor of making identity as a process that takes place at the point of collision of perspectives that some critics and theorists have understood as essentialist and constructivist. This collision is precisely the moment of negotiation when hybrid, racially predicated and deviantly gendered identities arrive at representation...."