How to Disappear: Disidentification and biomythography as tools for queering and querying oppressive identity politics

In this paper I endeavor to chart the trajectory through my Practice as Research process into, and later development of, what eventually became a performance and literary work entitled Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations. The paper details in the first part, Modes of Disidentification, the practices of three black, interdisciplinary artists: Todd Gray, Sethembile Msezane and Athi-Patra Ruga operating at different intersections of black identity and how their practices exemplify different possibilities for disidentification in creative practice. Using the framework of queer cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz' Disidentifications (1984) as a theoretical base, I endeavor to explore the different techniques that these artists use in response, retaliation and, possibly, congruence to the politics of representation . In order to elucidate and experiment with these techniques I employ a Practice as 1 Research methodology that I unpack in the second half of the paper, Biomythography, critical fabulation and disidentification in Practice. In Biomythography, critical fabulation and disidentification in practice I engage the performance works I created during my masters in Theatre and Performance, namely Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations and icarus descent and illustrate how the theory of disidentification can be performed utilizing the techniques of biomythography (Lorde, 1982) and critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008) that gesture towards a complication of rigid identity theory. Underpinning this research is the desire to explore artistic techniques that complicate rigid, categorical identity theory and practices in the hope that these techniques can serve towards alternatives to and liberation from the social, categorical identity model inherited in Southern Africa through the colonial systems of identity based categorization.

Grantor

Department of Drama

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Maroga, Kopano Tiyana

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Pather, Jayendran

• Theatre and Performance

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/32827

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/32827