“DIS” AS RESISTANCE

This four-session mini-course examined how the violent structures of colonialism operated not only through external forces of control but, more profoundly, through subjects who accept, normalize, and reproduce them. In the Americas, the colonial project’s most insidious legacy lay in the internalized racism, sexism, and classism that many colonized people experienced as an “inner punisher.” By identifying and deconstructing these forms of internal colonialism and stigma, participants reimagined their relationship to oppression through radical fictions. Through writing, drawing, performance, 3D motion capture, and critical discussion, the course explored speculative narratives of liberation. Engaging with concepts such as Dis/identification (Muñoz), Dis/orientation (Ahmed), and Dis/location (Anzaldúa), as well as Black and Indigenous Futurist practices, participants unsettled normative structures of identity and belonging. The process combined art, critical theory, and mental health approaches to transform personal experiences and situated knowledge into creative fictions that reimagined relationships to self, others, and environment. The course culminated with participants sharing their own future-oriented stories.

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References: ​

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Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. 2006.

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Ana Louise Keating. Now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner work, public acts. 2002.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.