Identity Treason: Race, Disability, Queerness, and the Ethics of (Post)Identity Practices

Abstract

Relying mainly on Michel Foucault’s conceptions of bodily politics, ethics, and bio‐political understandings of the self, this article provides a rethinking of Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey’s (1996) identity category ‘race traitor’. Here, race traitor is understood as a way in which to distance, subvert, and reimagine one’s whiteness in order to disrupt the power that whiteness maintains. By exploring identity transgressions or, more specifically, identity ‘treason’, race traitor is presented as a relation of power, an act of betrayal and/or emancipation, and a social relation in order to explore the usefulness that identity treason offers to anti‐oppressive work. As socio‐spatial conceptualisations of whiteness also complicate other forms of identity transgressions, the analysis then shifts to a construction of ‘traitor’ in relation to other identities, such as queer disability. The author concludes by arguing that notions of treason can be used to disrupt the ‘privileged versus oppressed’ binaries that predominate in identity discourses. Exposing the ways in which privileged identities are constructed (i.e. whiteness, able‐bodiedness, heterosexuality, etc.) elucidates how resistance to oppressive identity categories is possible.

Notes

¹ To clarify, the text that I am quoting throughout my paper is an edited collection also entitled Race Traitor, which Ignatiev and Garvey created based on the success of their journal – work from the journal itself is not being used.

² For the purposes of clarity and consistency, I am not using the term ‘race traitor’ as it has been applied to people of colour who are deemed to be politicising or representing interests that are ‘too white’.

³ For the purposes of brevity, I have not included a comprehensive history of ‘crip theory’. For a more detailed discussion of crip theory please see McRuer (2006), Sandahl (2003) and Davis (1999).