The process of organizing collective subjects for social change does indeed involve “movement” on many levels, and one of them undoubtedly entails forging forms of collective consciousness. This process is not merely cognitive and rational — though it is that, too; it also works on the affective investments people have in the identities they claim. One of the steps in forming collective agency entails ‘disidentification.’ Disidentification is a practice of working on existing ways of identifying that we embrace and live by. This “work” is a process of unlearning that opens up the identities we take for granted to the historical conditions that make them possible. It involves uprooting these identities not just from ways of thinking that invite us to construe them as natural but also from a history of suffering—the fertile ground for resentment to grow—and resituating how we know them in a different historical frame, a frame that allows us to see how this suffering is the product of a mode of production that out- laws a whole array of human needs. The disidentifying subject taps into the ways her outlawed needs, including her affective needs, are channeled by culture-ideology. She replaces the narrow resentment of identity politics with the potentially much more powerful and monstrous collective opposition of all of capitalism’s disenfranchised subjects

Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, p. 229 (via feelingpolitical)

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