José Esteban Muñoz

“As I learned more of Smith's performances, I became partly disturbed by what could be described as the orientalizing and tropicalizing aspects of the work, which is to say the way he played with over-the-top images of "exotic" Third World ethnoscapes. These reservations were significantly diminished when I looked closely at the available documentation of Smith's work. His work with images of Latin spitfires and cheesy Hollywood renditions of Scheherazade deserved more careful consideration. I began to think that Smith had little to do with actual Third World cultures and instead worked through Hollywood's fantasies of the other. The underground genius utilized these fantasies of the other in a reflective fashion. The excess affect of Maria Montez and the gaudy fantasies of harem culture were utilized to destabilize the world of "pasty normals" and help us imagine another time and place. In Smith's cosmology, "exotic" was an antinormative option that resisted the
overdetermination of pastiness. Hollywood's fetishized fantasies of the other were
reenergized by Smith's performance. His performances of the "spitfire" and
Scheherazade were inflected with disidentificatory difference that helped toxic images expand and become much more than quaint racisms. Disidentification is the process
in which the artist reformulates the actual performativity of his glittering B movie
archive, which is to say that the images that Smith cited were imbued with a performativity that surpassed simple fetishization. Glitter transformed hackneyed orientalisms and tropical fantasies, making them rich antinormative treasure-troves of queer possibility.”
― José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics