Secular blasphemy: Utter(ed) transgressions against names and fathers in the postmodern era

Unnaming the axiomatic constructs of a named identity-that which is thought to be fitting within a given regime of definition-becomes then an act of secular blasphemy, a performance of decanonizing translation that discursively relocates and reinscribes communicated meaning from power, prefix, and prefigurement to perpetual movement. Departing from Homi Bhabha's description of blasphemy as a transgressive act, this article blasphemes the certainty of definition in research writing, illuminating the performance of blasphemy as a source of new social names and the migration of norms and meaning. This article is the third in a trilogy of research forays exploring the intersection of autoethnography, critical race theory, and performance studies. This new research, written to follow up Rolling (2004a, 2004b), is a continuation of the author's effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing.