Abstract

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary analysis of activists in contemporary Montreal whose bodies are marked by the intersections of sexuality, race, ethnicity, colonization, gender, and class. I apply José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, as read through Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of “whatever being,” to life story interviews collected from eight activists as well as to my own life narrative in order to interrogate and explore our construction of singular spaces—disidentificatory spaces—for ourselves. Within these spaces, we discover meaningful ways to belong without subjecting ourselves to the discursive demands of identification or non-identification. By focusing my study on three institutional aspects of our lives—family, citizenship, and activism—I show how our histories provide us with citations that disrupt the dominant narratives that aim to structure our lives in increasingly invasive, oppressive, and violent ways. In this respect, Montreal is an intriguing site for such disruptions to take place: a multicultural city in the North/West built on colonized land wherein sexual rights and freedoms commingle with language and nationalist politics to become a constant source of tension among its denizens. Thus, I argue that an expression of affect and emotion produced within a disidentifactory space is vital for minoritized subjects to negotiate this messiness, for disidentification itself is a messy process. I conclude by demonstrating that engaging with this messy process is necessary to the production of new forms of sociality, laying the path to a hopeful future that Muñoz calls “queer utopia.