Becoming Visible

Corporeal politics, spaces of appearance and the Miss America protest

Abstract

Disidentification has been identified by a number of democratic theorists as an important component in challenging existing inegalitarian structures and hierarchically ordered identities. Most, however, treat disidentification as discursive or linguistic. As an account that seeks to understand how the invisible might become visible, however, overlooking the body is problematic. Drawing on discussions of the subject-in-process and the idea of identity as both enfleshed and performatively constituted, this article seeks to enrich Rancière’s particular discussion of disidentification by focusing attention on the role of embodied practices within it. It does so by exploring, through an analysis of the Miss America protest of 1968, the role of corporeality both in constituting spaces of appearance and in articulating democratic demands for visibility.