Culture, Theory & Critique, 2008, 49(2) , 149–163 Culture, Theory & Critique ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online © 2008 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14735780802426643 Identity Treason: Race, Disability, Queerness, and the Ethics of (Post)Identity Practices Victoria Kannen Taylor and Francis Ltd RCTC_A_342832.sgm 10.1080/14735780802426643 Culture, Theory & Critique 1473-5784 (print)/1473-5776 (online) Original Article 2008 Taylor & Francis 49 2 0000002008 VictoriaKannen vkannen@oise.utoronto.ca Abstract Relying mainly on Michel Foucault’s conceptions of bodily poli- tics, 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 specifi- cally, 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 iden- tity 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. So the account of myself that I give in discourse never fully expresses or carries this living self. My words are taken away as I give them, interrupted by the time of a discourse that is not the same as the time of my life. This ‘interruption’ contests the sense of the account’s being grounded in myself alone, since the indifferent structures that enable my living belong to a sociality that exceeds me. (Butler 2005: 36) Identity categories encourage recognition and yet they also obscure how this recognition comes to mean. To speak of identities within categorisations invariably leads to (mis)recognitions, as our understandings of ourselves are always partial and never in exteriority to how others understand us. Michel Foucault argues that our understandings of ourselves are fragile insofar as ‘[n]othing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men’ (1984 [1971]: 87–88). As social beings, we participate in these practices of recognition in order to fashion each other as thinkable subjects, somehow knowable to the self and the other. Foucault’s conveyances of the political technology of individuals