ABSTRACT
“The White to Be Angry” first appeared in the journal social text in 1997, as part of the collection of essays within queer theory to grapple with the new problematics introduced by transgender issues. Munoz explicates his influential concept of “disidentification” through Davis’s productively off-kilter satirization of white supremacist terrorism, brilliant aesthetic reworking of black power militancy, postmodern glosses on gay drag performance, and unironic embrace of the aggressive urgency of urban punk subcultures. Dis-identification is a performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Dis-identification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. Davis’s biting social critique phantasmatically projects the age-old threat of miscegenation, something that white supremacist groups fear the most, onto the image of a white supremacist.
