Experimentations of identity deconstruction through art

What is it about?

The body of this paper focuses on four scenes in the film to inspect quaring possibilities. By using Sigmund Freud’s notion of “mourning,” the author interprets the scene of Langston’s funeral as an alienation from the Black American poet Langston Hughes, so that the mourning at the funeral becomes a more universal reflection on the Otherness of identity minorities. In the next section, the author employs the Lacanian notion of “mirror stage” to read a highly symbolic dream-within-dream scene as the protagonist’s endeavor of self-recognition through the desiring gazes of a mirrored imago. This is followed by another gazing scene, in which return gazes from the Black queer subjects reverse the power relationship at the intersection of race, sextual orientation, and class. The last scene discussed in the paper shows another effective approach of quare, that is, laughter. The Bakhtinian carnival laughter functions to question, criticize, and further deconstruct any potentiality and attempt of identity fixity.

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Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Borrowing the specific notion of “quare,” a word coincidentally existing in Irish colloquialism and Black American dialect, the paper explores the agency of disidentification which is local and down-to-the-earth. Quare, as an approach and a surviving strategy, is alternative to queer studies, which has been dominated by the Anglo-American scholarship; quare is not just intersectional but also indicating an unsettling capacity to disidentify. Beyond the prescriptive orders of law and politics, art becomes an effective agent where this attempt of quaring identity is possible. This attempt is thus a surviving strategy, then and now, of identity subalterns.

Perspectives