Performing Disidentifications: Girls “In Trouble” Experiment with Digital Narratives to Remake Self-Representations

Abstract

This article uses queer performance theorist José Muñoz’s metaphor of disidentification to interpret digital narratives produced by adolescent girls in the juvenile arbitration program. Muñoz views public artistic performances of marginalized subjects as a liminal strategy. While they cannot embody the normative (“good” middle class, White, heterosexual subject) image, their rebellious (“bad” subject) enactments can lead to further stigmatization. A third, liminal strategy of disidentification allows them to use dominant representations and narratives by shifting, altering, and subverting their logic and ultimately remaking their stigmatized social positions. For the girls in juvenile arbitration who carry an institutional label of law offenders and who are required to conceal their faces to avoid public recognition, working with a digital camera opened up an ambiguous, liminal space of visibility. Through their video and animation performances of disidentification in which they acted as disguised actors and doll animators to produce autobiographic fictions, the girls were able to enter public discourses that stigmatize and label them, and remake and reframe their own representations and subject positions.