Reading Munoz’s writing made me feel ambivalent. On the one hand, Zamora’s exploitation of the public sphere as a platform to promote his ideas about identity is quite marvellous. On the other, I kept thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer’s “culture industry,” and the way Zamora practically submitted to capitalist values and his identity absorbed in them. Zamora, in standing against the dominant culture, ended up nourishing it. Once culture embraces counterpublic ideas – they are no longer counter public.
This idea was supplemented by the fact that I personally loathe reality shows. I find it hard to accept it as a worthy platform for promoting important issues, exactly for the same reason I discussed earlier. Namely, that this type of genre works as a black hole, sucking everything that comes in touch with it and degrading it to its own level. This is a most simple and obvious way in which the culture industry works.
But then I come again to my first point – although I am not familiar with this specific show and Zamora’s figure, srill it sounds he achieved something amazing. Maybe what I’ve said earlier is wrong – Zamora did not try to resist capitalistic values and culture, he wanted them to encompass his identity as well. This is not an attempt to undermine the power structures externally, but an attempt to adjust the power structures internally – not building them anew but merely expanding their scope a bit so they will include him as well. In order to achieve this objective, a popular genre can be a perfect platform.