One of the ways to make use of existing identity forms is to highlight the gap between identities promoted by the dominant culture and the lived “experience” of social relations that is not summoned by these terms. This is the ‘excess’ that is often ‘experienced’ as an inchoate affect of not belonging, of not fitting in or not feeling at home within the terms that are offered for identity. The process of disidentification can zero in on the affective component of this misrecognition and invite consideration of the ways it is named and routed into emotions (of shame, denial, resentment, etc.) that can naturalize the existing categories. Disidentification invites the renarration of this affective excess in relation to capitalism’s systemic production of unmet need. At the same time it works on forms of misrecognition, disidentification also makes visible the ways the dominant organizations of sexual desires and identities are real sites of affective investment, and through this critical awareness invites a process of unlearning. Unlearning these investments is always an incomplete, unfinished business, and recognizing this is an important lesson on the limits of one’s historical position. But this ongoing lesson in historical limits does not have to be dismissive or belittling; it can also fold the forms of affective identification we historically and critically inhabit into a more ambitious political project that claims the radical outside of unmet human needs as the starting point for a much needed anti-capitalist project

Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, pp. 230-31 (via feelingpolitical)

Wow. Great wording.