Perhaps it is in this project of learning to represent ourselves--how to speak to, rather than for or about others--that the possibility of a global culture resides.                                                                                                

Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture.

The above statement by Craig Owens reveals an intention in his critical process that is in keeping with my own.  

Identity is produced at the point of contact between an essential understanding of the self and socially constructed narratives of the self. *  Identities-in-difference--those who find their identity structure forming outside cultural norms--play out in continual formation and reformation.  

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*See Jose Estaban Munoz, Disidentifications, Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),   Referencing the 1992 performance by Marga Gomez, “Marga is Pretty, Witty and Gay,” Munoz says, “Her performance permits the spectator, often a queer who has been locked out of the halls of representation or rendered a static caricature there, to imagine a world where queer lives, politics and possibilities are representable in their complexity . . . Spectacles such as those that Gomez presents offer the minoritarian subject a space to situate itself in history and thus seize social agency.”