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Jodie Taylor - Playing It Queer
Jodie Taylor - Playing It Queer
P
opular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and
a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative
c apacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make
and make sense of identity and allows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arous-
ing the political imagination. With an activist voice that is impassioned yet adherent
to scholarly rigour, Playing it Queer provides an original and compelling ethnographic
account of the relationship between popular music, queer self-fashioning and (sub)cul-
tural world-making.
This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant litera-
tures on queer identity and political debates as well as popular music, identity and (sub)
cultural style. Contextualised within a detailed history of queer sensibilities and crea-
tive practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club
J o d i e Tay l o r
cultures, the authors rich empirical studies of local performers and translocal scenes
intimately capture the meaning and value of popular musics and (sub)cultural style in
everyday queer lives.
Playing it
Taylors revised conception of music scenes and thought-provoking case studies pro-
vide new insights into the ways music contributes to the production and maintenance
of queer social relations. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary book is an essential
Queer
read for scholars interested in popular music and queerness. Sheila Whiteley, Profes-
sor Emeritus and author of Women and Popular Music
Jodie Taylor makes us sit up and pay attention to the wild experimentations in cul- P o p u l a r M u s i c,
ture, subculture and community that can be heard in queer clubs and music venues Ident i t y and
Taylors intricate and detailed ethnography makes an important contribution to recent
Q u e e r Wo r l d - m a k i n g
Playing it Queer
scholarship on queer music cultures. Claiming that music-making conjures new possi-
bilities for politics and pleasure, Taylor lets us believe in queer rhythm and hear the beat
of an exciting elsewhere. Tune in or miss out! Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer
Art of Failure
Peter Lang
queer culture, popular music and ethnography and is currently co-editing three anthol-
ogies on erotic cultures, festivalisation and mainstream music.
www.peterlang.com
ISBN 978-3-0343-0553-2
J o d i e T a y l o r
P
opular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and
a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative
c apacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make
and make sense of identity and allows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arous-
ing the political imagination. With an activist voice that is impassioned yet adherent
to scholarly rigour, Playing it Queer provides an original and compelling ethnographic
account of the relationship between popular music, queer self-fashioning and (sub)cul-
tural world-making.
This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant litera-
tures on queer identity and political debates as well as popular music, identity and (sub)
cultural style. Contextualised within a detailed history of queer sensibilities and crea-
tive practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club
J o d i e Tay l o r
cultures, the authors rich empirical studies of local performers and translocal scenes
intimately capture the meaning and value of popular musics and (sub)cultural style in
everyday queer lives.
Playing it
Taylors revised conception of music scenes and thought-provoking case studies pro-
vide new insights into the ways music contributes to the production and maintenance
of queer social relations. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary book is an essential
Queer
read for scholars interested in popular music and queerness. Sheila Whiteley, Profes-
sor Emeritus and author of Women and Popular Music
Jodie Taylor makes us sit up and pay attention to the wild experimentations in cul- P o p u l a r M u s i c,
ture, subculture and community that can be heard in queer clubs and music venues Ident i t y and
Taylors intricate and detailed ethnography makes an important contribution to recent
Q u e e r Wo r l d - m a k i n g
Playing it Queer
scholarship on queer music cultures. Claiming that music-making conjures new possi-
bilities for politics and pleasure, Taylor lets us believe in queer rhythm and hear the beat
of an exciting elsewhere. Tune in or miss out! Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer
Art of Failure
Peter Lang
queer culture, popular music and ethnography and is currently co-editing three anthol-
ogies on erotic cultures, festivalisation and mainstream music.
www.peterlang.com
ISBN
Play ing i t Queer
J O D I E T A Y L O R
Playing it
Queer Po p u la r Mu s i c,
Id e n t i t y a n d
Q u e e r Wo r l d - m a k in g
PETER LANG
Bern s Berlin s Bruxelles s Frank fur t am Main s New York s Ox ford s Wien
Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
bibliograe ; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet
at http://dnb.d-nb.de .
Taylor, Jodie
Playing it queer: popular music, identity and queer world-making / Jodie Taylor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978 - 3 - 0343 - 0553 - 2
1. Popular musicSocial aspects. 2. Gender identity in music. I. Title.
ML3918.P67J64 2012
781.64086'64dc23
2012019984
ISBN (pb.) 978 - 3 - 0343 - 0553 - 2 ISBN (eBook) 978 - 3 - 0351- 0420 - 2
Printed in Switzerland
To my families: Colleen and Barry, Kate and Simon
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: QUEER
IDENTITIES, THEORIES AND POLITICS ..................................................... 13
CHAPTER 2: MUSIC AND IDENTITY
SELVES, SEXUALITIES AND SCENES........................................................ 41
CHAPTER 3: CAMP
A QUEER SENSIBILITY ............................................................................ 67
CHAPTER 4: DOING DRAG, (UN)DOING GENDER
GENDER SUBVERSION AND MUSICAL PERFORMANCE ........................... 83
CHAPTER 5: QUEER PUNK
IDENTITY THROUGH A DISTORTION PEDAL .......................................... 117
CHAPTER 6: WOMYN, GRRRLS AND SISTAS
QUEER AGENDAS IN FEMINIST MUSIC-MAKING ................................... 149
CHAPTER 7: MAKING A SCENE
LOCALITY, STYLISTIC DISTINCTION AND UTOPIAN IMAGINATIONS .... 175
CHAPTER 8: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ................................................. 215
Harrison and Huib Schippers for the valuable criticism they provided
during my PhD candidature. I thank my dear friend and mentor Anna
Haebich for giving me my first research job and for being a shining
example of how to do scholarship from the heart. I also thank my won-
derful Griffith colleagues and friends, especially the bewitching Narelle
McCoy and the urbane Ian Woodward. Without the support of the
Griffith Centre for Cultural Research, this book would not have been
possible. I am tremendously grateful to Andy Bennett, whose practical
and theoretical guidance has been critical to this work. I really cant
thank you enough for the opportunities you have given me as a postdoc-
toral scholar.
I recognise the ongoing encouragement and inspiration I have re-
ceived from Sheila Whiteley: you are a treasure! I am also very grateful
to Jack Halberstam for her willingness to support my work. As a long-
time admirer of both Sheila and Jacks scholarship, it is truly an honour
to know they appreciate mine. While writing this book I was fortunate to
speak about parts of it at a number of conferences and invited seminars. I
thank Erik Hannerz and Ulrika Dahl for their Swedish hospitality, and I
thank my IASPM colleagues for many years of questioning and feed-
back. I also want to thank my editors at Peter Lang, Katrin Forrer and
Trudie Joras, for making this a trouble-free process. I give special thanks
to my colleague Alison Huber for her astute reading of draft chapters of
this book and to Sue Jarvis for her meticulous editing.
Finally, some of the ideas in this book have been revised from pre-
vious publications. I would like to thank those who gave permission for
these ideas to be expanded upon and reprinted in this book. An earlier
version of my autoethnographic introduction was originally published in
B. Bartleet and C. Ellis, eds., Music Autoethnography: Making Autoeth-
nography Sing/Making Music Personal (Australian Academic Press,
2009), 245260. Extracts from Chapter 2 originally were published in
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26(1) (2012), 143
156. Extracts from Chapter 5 previously appeared in L. Mackinlay, B.
Bartleet and K. Barney, eds, Musical Islands: Exploring Connections
Between Music, Place and Research (Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2009), 221241. Extracts from Chapter 7 originally were published in
The Scenes Perspective and the Australian Context, special issue of
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22(5), (2008), 651
665.
INTRODUCTION
Life is a cabaret, sang Liza Minnelli in her role as the mediocre but
aspirational Kit Kat Club performer Sally Bowles a character written
into existence by gay novelist Christopher Isherwood. Sometimes song,
dance, comedy, drama, costume or literature can provide more suitable
ways to proclaim to your onlookers (and to yourself) who you are in a
moment or, perhaps more importantly, who you want to be. In my youth,
lifes cabaret was so apparent to me, it was the beguiling worlds created
in those musical moments that were most appealing and most accommo-
dating, and perhaps this is why I loved to sing, dance and dress up so
much. If queerness is, as I believe and as Jos Esteban Muoz so beau-
tifully writes, the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on
potentiality or concrete possibility for another world (2009, p. 1), then it
is through music that I have staged my rejection and imagined such
otherworldly possibilities. In the spirit of a queer and feminist approach
to the critical ethnography and queer cultural research that I do herein, I
begin this book with a story about myself. Self-indulgent? Perhaps. But I
like to think of it as an upfront declaration of my epistemological and
political baggage. So here goes:
As a teenager growing up in the mid-1990s, identifying as a femme,
bisexual, feminist goth was not so great a problem for me personally; I
actually drew a lot of strength from these identities. They made me feel
distinguishable and independent; they seemed to me a perfect set of traits
for someone who romanticised notions of becoming a performer, a
scholar and a political anarchist. Identifying as all these things did, how-
ever, raise a lot of suspicion and grief among friends at my all-girls high
school and among the three twenty-something-year-old-boys with whom
I played in a band. The problem most of my friends seemed to have with
me was not whether I was gay or straight; it was my inability to choose.
This choice was complicated not least by my sexual desires but also by
the rigid gender stereotypes that (I thought) went hand in hand with de-
claring a particular sexual identity. I didnt look or act like a lesbian: I
didnt know you could be a velvet skirt-, fishnet tights- and makeup-
wearing lesbian who ate meat and wanted to sing in the theatre. More-
2 Introduction
over, I didnt act like the straight girls I knew: I didnt want to get mar-
ried or have children; I didnt like any boys my own age; I chose to have
hairy armpits and sleep with girls. Rather than spending Saturday after-
noons shopping for clothes, I scoured secondhand bookstores for as
much feminist literature as I could find, and I wrote songs about suffra-
gettes and played in a hard-rock band with sweaty men one of them
being my serious boyfriend.
Eventually, the social pressure to fix my sexual identity and my
inability to do so isolated me from the rest of my peers. I felt that the
only way I could relate to people on my own terms was through music. It
was in music, and only in music, that I could perform all the roles
necessary to satisfy me. In music I could compose, perform and listen; I
could play multiple instruments; I could perform and appreciate various
styles. It was only as a musician and music lover that I was allowed to be
fluid: to interpret and reinterpret, to create and recreate. As a weekday
student of classical voice and a weekend singer in a hard-rock band, I
found the freedom in music to explore my sexual desires. I was the diva
one moment and a rock star the next. As an opera and musical theatre
enthusiast, I discovered that the diva was often an object of desire just
as I longed to be. Her femininity was robust and disciplined. It was
captured in her costumes, in the roles that were written for her, in the
curves of her body and in her voice, which gave a powerful blast and
refused containment. In my eyes, her voice was the key to her sexual
prowess, and thus she became a personal icon: she was a disciplined
woman in control of her voice, a woman who regulated her own pleasure
(often through her voice). In contrast, the masculinity encapsulated in
playing the rock star afforded me the public expression of aggressive
sexuality and a toppy femme-ininity. It made me feel like the object of
female desire while also excusing my gaze upon other women. The rock
star was a fugitive of definition and self-control. In this role, it became
perfectly acceptable to flaunt my sexuality, to adorn my body in pier-
cings and S/M-style couture, and to speak and act in whatever manner
pleased me.
While many people still found it unusual that I possessed an equally
intense passion for the genres of opera, musical theatre, industrial rock
and metal, it seemed that expressing conflicting tastes in music did not
attract nearly as much scrutiny as expressing conflicting sexual desires.
This is because, unlike the supposedly natural and thus normal expres-
Introduction 3
Methodology
the centre of the cultural phenomenon making access to, and selection
of, research participants easier and better informed; quicker establish-
ment of rapport and trust between researcher and participants; and more
open and readily accessible lines of communication between researchers
and informants due to the researchers continuing contact with the field.
However, insider research also has limitations, as one can never presume
that, as an insider, one necessarily offers an absolute or correct way of
seeing and/or reading ones culture. The deconstructive logics of post-
modernism and poststructuralism have for decades now warned against
privileging knowledge that is constructed within dichotomous rubrics such
as insider/outsider. Moreover, scholars have long warned that as a re-
searcher, and indeed as a cultural participant, one can never assume to-
tality in a position as either an insider or as an outsider, given that the
boundaries of such positions are always permeable (Merton, 1972; Oak-
ley, 1981; Song & Parker, 1995). Some have cautioned against privileging
this position, noting that as an insider one does not automatically escape
the problem of knowledge distortion, as insider views will always be
multiple and contestable, generating their own epistemological problems
due to subject/object relationality (Bennett, 2003; Hodkinson, 2005; Spra-
gue, 2005; Wolcott, 1999). There is no monolithic insider view, argues
Harry Wolcott, every view is a way of seeing, not the way of seeing
(1999, p. 137, emphasis in original).
While I duly acknowledge these concerns and agree that I have been
afforded certain benefits in undertaking this work given my insider sta-
tus, there is another matter of methodological significance that I wish to
discuss before proceeding. In Halberstams work on queer subcultural
lives, she argues that where alliances exist between minority academic
fields and minority cultural production, queer academics can and
some should participate in the ongoing project of recording and inter-
preting queer culture and circulating a sense of its multiplicity and so-
phistication (2005, p. 159), intentionally blurring the presumed boun-
daries between expert or archivist and the object of study. In fact, queer
cultures routinely problematise straightforward distinctions in terms of
who is documenting or theorising and who is producing culture (Dahl,
2010; Halberstam, 1998, 2005; Kennedy & Davis, 1993; Taylor, 2011;
Volcano & Dahl, 2008) a kind of queer phenomenon in and of itself
that is symptomatic of this project. In Ulrika Dahls work on queer
femme-inist ethnography, she states that there is always something aca-
8 Introduction
demically queer about the desire to be with and write about ones own,
even if it is not a territorialized, localized or even always visibly recog-
nizable stable community (2010, p. 144). The something queer or as-
kew here is that any notion of objectivity is blatantly transgressed in
this action, which by its very nature makes scholarship appear more vul-
nerable to emotional contamination. As Dahl goes on to argue, despite
decades of feminist epistemological discussions, anxieties around issues
of objectivity still loom within the academy. This work, then, is queer
not only in terms of the objects and subjects at the centre of its study, but
also in its way of approach, which brings to bear the allied and sympa-
thetic relationship between those subjects, objects and myself.
Queer is a slippery term. In the history of all that is and has ever been
queer, it would seem that queer is and has always been at odds with
normal and supposedly natural behaviour. Even the etymology of queer
poetically evokes the ambiguity queerness has come to signify in modern
times. Queer, as the Oxford English Dictionary says, is of doubtful ori-
gin (Queer, 1989). According to pre-eminent queer theorist Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993), queer originates from the Indo-European
root twerkw (across), which also relates to the German quer (transverse),
the Latin torquere (to twist) and the English athwart. The literal English
definition of the word itself implies odd or perverse behaviour or abnor-
mal conditions. Yet there is a record of the Scottish queir, from 1508,
which describes strange, peculiar or eccentric characteristics. The early
English word crew, meaning crooked or not straight, bears further simi-
larity to queer as we understand it today, and provides another etymo-
logical link to the contemporary meaning of queer. In essence, queer
bespeaks a displeasing oddity, perversity and twistedness.
Queer was not used colloquially to describe sexual behaviour until
the end of the nineteenth century. Initially, men who distinctly identified
themselves as part of a homosexual subculture vis--vis the dominant
norms of heterosexuality used queer as a self-descriptor (Chauncey,
1994). However, it soon became a pejorative term of reference to homo-
sexuals and gender deviants, and this meaning endured for much of the
twentieth century. The reappropriation of queer as a positive epithet for
gender and sexual non-normativities began again in the 1990s, with the
1
emergence of activist groups such as Queer Nation. In recent times,
1 Queer Nation was formed in New York in 1990 in the wake of escalating violence
towards queers and the heterosexist prejudices of mainstream society. Queer Nation
was a decentralised militant organisation that favoured large-scale direct public
actions and protests, which were often staged in public commercial spaces.
14 CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics
queer has come to be used in two quite distinct ways. First, and most
commonly, it is a catch-all term for communities of lesbian, gay, bisex-
ual and transgender (LGBT) folk. This particular use of queer is rather
problematic. As Nikki Sullivan argues, using queer as an umbrella term
does little if anything to deconstruct the humanist understanding of the
subject. It fails to acknowledge differences of gender, race, ethnicity,
class and age, for example, positioning sexuality as a unified and uni-
fying factor (2003, p. 44). The second use of queer, which informs this
study, is as a term of resistance imbued with anti-assimilationist and de-
constructionist rhetoric that aggressively opposes hegemonic identifica-
tory and behavioural norms, including liberal lesbian and gay identity
politics.
When used in this second sense, queer is destabilising, liminal, un-
fixed and contingent, and quite possibly above all else, it is highly con-
tested. Within the academy, it is often argued that queer refers to nothing
specific, but is defined precisely by what it is not, acquiring meaning
only from its oppositional relation to the norm (Halperin, 1995, p. 62).
Since the purpose of queer is to oppose norms through disturbing defini-
tions and legitimisations, queer perpetually refuses to be defined or le-
gitimised, and attempting to do so would be a decidedly un-queer thing
to do (Sullivan, 2003, p. 43). Queer is not a single theory, argument or
positivity, for it has neither a fundamental logic, nor a consistent set of
characteristics (Jagose, 1996, p. 96). Queerness is sustained through its
perpetual challenge to normalising mandates, thus it can never define
an identity; it can only ever disturb one (Edelman, 2004, p. 17). Yet I
know many people including myself who identify as queer in an
effort to keep ourselves, our desires and our positionalities mobile. To
complicate the matter further, queer whatever that might be, or not be
can function in a number or ways: as a noun (naming some-
thing/someone), an adjective (describing something/someone), a verb
(queering something or someone) or an adverb (to do something
queerly). Queer can be a political or ethical approach, an aesthetic
2 For more complete accounts, see the following key texts: The History of Sexuality
(Foucault, 1979), Sex, Politics, and Society (Weeks, 1981); Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities (DEmilio, 1983) and Epistemologies of the Closet (Sedgwick, 1990).
3 Poststructuralism interrogates the constitution of subjects through symbolic structures,
arguing that an autonomous subject does not exist prior to the structures that we use in
order to understand it for example, binary opposition is the relationship between
mutually exclusive terms such as mind/body, man/woman, masculine/feminine,
heterosexual/homosexual, rational/emotional, public/private or natural/unnatural. This
system of language and knowledge suggests that we come to understand each term
only in relation to its opposite. Moreover, these symbolic structures perpetuate
unequal power relationships between the primary terms such as mind, man and
masculinity, and the secondary terms such as body, woman and femininity.
16 CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics
The act of sex has no history says David Halperin: It is a natural fact,
grounded in the functioning of the body, and, as such, it lies outside of
history and culture (1993, p. 416). While sex as an activity much like
eating or sleeping may have no history, sexuality is historical. In a land-
mark text entitled The History of Sexuality (1979), French historian and
poststructuralist philosopher Michael Foucault traces the emergence of
sexuality in Western societies. According to Foucault, prior to the mid-
nineteenth century, a sex act was not understood as an expression of a per-
sons psyche and did not characterise an innate identity. Instead, sex acts
were either considered to be natural and thus moral and legal or un-
natural and thus sinful and criminal. Sinful sex acts were those that
denied the reproductive destiny of fluids omitted during ejaculation.
Therefore, any sex act that was not in the interest of procreation, such as
anal sex, oral sex, masturbation, sex with non-humans or sex involving the
use of contraception or the withdrawal method, was an abomination, but
4
an abominable act that potentially anyone was capable of committing.
According to Foucault, during the latter part of the nineteenth century,
sex became a growing concern for a number of social institutions. Sex was
suddenly a topic of discussion, and the medical profession in particular
became preoccupied with the nature and treatment of sexual activity. Psy-
chiatrists identified, named and thus discursively constructed a plethora of
new sexualities at this time zoophiles, auto-monosexualists, mixo-
scopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inversts and dys-
pareunist women and among these was the homosexual. The first sig-
4 Christianity was paramount in purporting the sinfulness of such sexual acts because
the Christian church believed that the male sperm was the seed of human life, and
to ejaculate without the intention of procreation was wasting the seed and therefore
wasting a potential human life.
CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics 17
The nineteenth century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and
a childhood in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with
an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into
his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in
him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely ac-
tive principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that
always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than
as a singular nature. (Foucault, 1979, p. 43)
5 Stirner originally published The Ego and His Own in 1844, from which Brand drew
upon the theory of self-ownership.
20 CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics
6 Polymorphous perversity suggests that sexual desire can be directed towards any
object, and sexuality can be satisfied in many ways that lie outside of socially
normative sexual behaviours. According to Freud, it is a condition of childhood,
and is considered to be abnormal in adults.
CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics 21
tures, defying categorisation and thus suggesting that there are homosex-
ual behaviours but not innate homosexuals. McIntosh explains that this
role refers not only to a cultural conception or a set of ideas but also to
a complex set of institutional arrangements which depend on and re-
inforce these ideas (1968, p. 189). By labelling and persecuting homo-
sexuals, society created for them an identity and a way to identify each
7
other, forcing homosexuals into the closet, and ultimately giving rise
to homosexual cultures.
For much of the twentieth century, the homosexual adult generally
was depicted as a sick and loathsome character stigmatised by his or her
illness and condemned to an ignominious existence. While some did
not believe that homosexuality could or should be cured, a variety of
therapies and treatments continued to plague the lives of people who
exhibited signs of homosexuality. These included subjecting people to
emotional abuse and physical tortures ranging from drug therapies to
electric shock treatment, lobotomies and the surgical removal of repro-
ductive organs (DEmilio, 1983). In was not until 1973 that the Ameri-
can Psychiatric Association agreed to remove the classification of
disease from the condition of homosexuality. In response to such tor-
ture and persecution, in the time following the Second World War, civil
rights groups emerged across Britain, Europe, the United States and
Australia calling for the humane treatment of homosexuals.
While many of the earlier efforts to advance the rights and the treatment
of homosexuals had occurred in Europe particularly Germany the
war years and the rise of Nazism extinguished a lot of these advance-
ments. Beginning again around the 1950s, a number of civil rights
groups which can be referred to collectively as the Homophile Move-
ment reignited these efforts. Organisations such as the US-based
groups One Inc., The Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, the
7 In very simple terms, the closet is a metaphorical space that indicates secrecy
regarding ones non-normative sexual desires. Being in the closet suggests that
feelings or activities relating to non-normative sexual desire are undisclosed, while
coming out or being out of the closet suggests that one publicly acknowledges
these feelings, actions and desires.
22 CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics
8 Feminist theorist Gayle Rubin (1975) coined the phrase sex/gender system to
delineate the separation of gender from sex. In effect, Rubin suggests that women
and men are taught how to behave in masculine or feminine ways; moreover, they
are taught that they are only allowed to act according to their biology.
24 CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics
Queer Theory
The term queer theory was coined by Teresa de Lauretis (1991). She
initially used it to examine the implicit differences that are less apparent
when we speak of lesbian and gay. For de Lauretis, Queer Theory
conveys a double emphasis on the conceptual and speculative work in-
volved in discourse production, and on the necessary critical work of
deconstructing our own discourses and their constructed silences (p. iv).
Grounded in the deconstructive and denaturalising logics of poststruc-
turalism, queer theory takes up the critique, as set out by Jean-Franois
Lyotard (1984) and others, of truth, knowledge, objectivity and authen-
ticity, and argues that there is no universal human subject especially not
one that can be understood as stable and unified. Instead, as we have seen
in Foucaults (1979) work on sexuality, queer theory proposes that identi-
ties are generated by discourses, regimes of disciplinary knowledge, and
as such they are contingent, grounded in historically and culturally specific
concepts. As Joshua Gamson suggests, queer studies is largely a decon-
structive enterprise, taking apart the view of a self defined by something at
its core, be it sexual desire, race, gender, nation or class (2000, p. 348).
While queer theory has made a significant contribution to contemporary
CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics 27
9
discourse on race and class, this book is concerned predominantly with
issues of gender and sexual identity, yet it is careful not to completely
ignore other facets of identity.
Queer is not a monolithic category in itself: queerness manifests in
many different ways, and may be done and/or read differently according
to an almost endless combination of feelings, experiences, contexts and
contestations. According to Moe Meyer, queer indicates an onto-
logical challenge to dominant labelling philosophies, especially the
medicalisation of the subject implied by the word homosexual, as well
as a challenge to the discrete gender categories embedded in the divided
phrase gay and lesbian (1994, pp. 12). While queer theory does not
dismiss the lived reality of being male, female, heterosexual, lesbian or
gay, it rejects the didactic power relationships that structure these cate-
gories, and encourages an analysis that embeds the self in institutional
and cultural practices (Seidman, 1993, p. 137) rather than a preoccupa-
tion with identity politics and the assertion of a natural or coherent
lesbian or gay perspective. In the remainder of this chapter, I will unpack
queer thinking in relation to the way discursive systems of power/
knowledge construct identities and review central arguments within
queer theory concerning heteronormativity, performativity, identity and
emergent homonormativities.
Power, as Foucault (1979) explains it, is the name that one attributes to
a complex strategical situation within a particular society (p. 93), which
organises, institutionalises, moralises and makes lawful certain ways of
living and desiring. Networks of knowledge and power dictate the be-
haviours, values, identities and desires deemed normal, acceptable and
advantageous; thus it is within a matrix of power that normativities are
constructed. Yet normativity cannot be challenged effectively by simply
opposing it; power cannot be so easily argued in terms of a majority vis-
9 For further information on queer theory, race and class, see Muozs Dissidentifi-
cations (1999), Sulllivans chapter, Queer Race, in her Critical Introduction to
Queer Theory (2003); Ian Barnards Queer Race (2004); and Max Kirschs Queer
Theory and Social Change (2000).
28 CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics
-vis minority logic in other words, who does or does not have power,
and who should or should not have access to power. Gay and lesbian
liberationists attempted to fight repressive knowledge/power systems
by opposing what they believed were the false truths of dominant soci-
ety, arguing for a different set of truths in place of the dominant logic.
However, as Foucault argues, power is not a duality, something held by
a ruling class or an opposition between who is ruling and who is ruled.
Where there is power, Foucault maintains, there is resistance, and yet,
or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority
in relation to power. Rather, power and resistance are not in opposition
but are entangled, and within this system there is always a multiplicity
of points of resistance (p. 95).
Both power and resistance circulate through knowledge, and it is in
discourse that power and knowledge are joined together (p. 100). In
the same way that the hierarchy of power/powerless is a false construct,
so too is it dangerous to consider discourses in terms of what is accept-
able and what is excluded. Instead, Foucault insists that there is a
multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various
strategies (p. 100). Discourse transmits and produces power; it re-
inforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, render it fragile and make
is possible to thwart it (p. 101). Thus to claim unitary minority status in
the face of an oppressive power structure is to ignore the other dis-
courses or power operations that are circulating within the supposedly
cohesive minority itself.
Through the medicalisation of homosexual behaviour, introducing
homosexuality into public consciousness, hegemonic institutions (law and
medicine) inevitably gave rise to discourses on homosexuals as a distinct
group of people. However, it also made it possible for this distinct group
of people to speak for themselves. Foucault argues that attempts to de-
mand legitimisation or naturalisation by this group using the same
institutional discourses are problematic because, while it might be in op-
position to oppression, it is still a form of opposition that exists within the
same oppressive strategy. What is needed instead is strategic change:
We must not expect the discourses on sex to tell us, above all, what strategy they de-
rive from, or what moral division they accompany, or what ideology dominant or
dominated they represent; rather we must question them on the two levels of their
tactical productivity and their strategical integration. (Foucault, 1979, p. 102)
CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics 29
(Gamson, cited in Gamson & Moon, 2004, p. 50). Fixed categories as-
sign power to the majority by organising society into central and
marginal groups. Those who construct the ideal centre of mainstream
Western society what Audre Lorde (1990) calls a mythical norm
can aptly be described as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Chris-
tian and financially secure (p. 282). And those who reside in the
margins are scrutinised for their deviation from the social, moral and
political codes purported by the centre. Queer theory seeks to expose the
false truths that have constructed boundaries of centrality and margi-
nality, and have normalised the centre by revealing the performative
nature of gender and sexuality and the fluidity of identity. As Shane
Phelan proposes, by challenging the boundary lines as well as the con-
tent of the territories they mark, queer work calls each of us to attend to
the uncertainties and incompletion in our identity (1997, p. 3). In con-
clusion, queer theory does not call for a secure space within the margins
for the articulation of deviant gender or sexuality; instead, it seeks to
disrupt or trouble all boundaries and identities as part of a large-scale
egalitarian project.
Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally constructed, are performative in the sense that
the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufac-
tured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the
gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the
various acts which constitute its reality words, acts and gestures, articulated and en-
acted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion
discursively maintained for the purpose of the regulation of sexuality within the obliga-
tory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. (1990, p. 136, emphasis in original)
CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics 31
Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis: the tacit collective
agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fic-
tions is obscured by the credibility of those productions and the punishments that
attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction compels our belief in its ne-
cessity and naturalness. The historical possibilities materialized through various
corporeal styles are nothing other than those punitively regulated cultural fictions
alternately embodied and deflected under duress. (Butler, 1990, p. 140)
If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the pos-
tulation of a normative sexuality that is before, outside, or beyond power is a
cultural impossibility The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-hetero-
sexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called
heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather,
as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of the original reveals the original to
be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original. (Butler,
1990, pp. 3031, emphasis in original)
then it is not axiomatic that gender refers only to the two categories designated in
the binary men/women distinction. (2005, p. 101)
In no sense can it be concluded that the part of gender that is performed is therefore the
truth of gender; performance as bounded act is distinguished from performativity
insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and
exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the per-
formers will or choice; further, what is performed works to conceal, if not to
disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of per-
formativity to performance would be a mistake. (Butler, 1993, p. 234)
some have argued, implicitly unknowable, what does it mean to call one-
self queer?
Many of the people I interviewed as part of this project employ the
term queer as a way to describe themselves, while others choose to mix
up terminology, switching between queer, lesbian and/or gay (among
others). Therefore, when I talk about queers in a collective sense I am
not naming and describing a cohesive group of people. The usefulness of
queer is that it marks a flexible space of expression and signification,
and those who occupy this space will not necessarily understand them-
selves to be queer in the same way that others who also occupy this
space. As Sedgwick points out, queer can be understood as:
[T]he open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses
and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyones gender, of
anyones sexuality arent made (or cant be made) to signify monolithically
Anyones use of the word queer about themselves means differently from their
use of it about someone else gay and lesbian still present themselves (how-
ever delusively) as objective, empirical categories governed by empirical rules of
evidence Queer seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a per-
sons undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and
filiation. (1993, pp. 89)
a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institu-
tions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a semi-
mobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticised gay culture anchored in
domesticity and consumption (p. 50).
38 CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics
A ravenous gay mainstream seeks control of the very ways we represent our
own identities. The radical potential of queer identity lies in remaining outside in
challenging and seeking to dismantle the sickening culture that surrounds us. (Bern-
stein Sycamore, 2004, p. 5, emphasis in original)
Writing queer social theory and textual analysis, and partaking in direct
political action are useful ways to challenge assumptions, dismantle
cultural norms and instigate radical transgression. However, perform-
ance and certainly music-related performances also generates radical
contestations to normalisation and enables the transformative politics of
queer possibilities. In his study of Latina performance, Muoz (1999)
argues that minoritarian performance labors to make worlds more
than simply views or perspectives; [queer performances] are oppositional
ideologies that function as critiques of oppressive regimes of truth that
subjugate minoritarian people (p. 195). Queer world-making perform-
ances are disidentificatory in that they not only seek to dismantle
majoritarian cultures; rather, argues Muoz, they also use majoritarian
culture as raw material to make a new world (p. 196). By using per-
formance as a performative strategy to tear down and then queerly
rebuild the world, Muoz suggests that these disidentificatory perform-
ances generate ideological transformation and map space for the
emergence of oppositional counter-publics. This is an important idea to
which I return in detail in the next chapter.
In summary, queer as it is employed herein signifies a twisting,
lampooning and dismantling of hegemonic culture. Resistant to both
heteronormativity and neoliberal liberal sexual politics, queer executes
its critique of normalising logics from the social and cultural margins. Of
course, what counts as, or can be read as, queer identity, action or object
is dependent not only on history and culture, but also on personal experi-
ence, and as such queerness is always mutable, contentious and quite
often contradictory. The potentiality of the queer project is signified by
its intensely personal, partial and perverse qualities, where identities
CHAPTER 1: Queer Identities, Theories and Politics 39
holds promise for an account of music as a self-practice that cuts across yet engages
symbolic systems, and instigates ethical questions of individual conduct vis--vis
discipline and desire within or against in-place social and symbolic structures
(2006, p. 12).
can stand for, symbolize and offer the immediate experience of collective identity.
Other cultural forms painting, literature, design can articulate and show off
shared values and pride, but only music can make you feel them. (1987, p. 140, em-
phasis in original)
It is the premise of this book that gender and sexual identities also col-
lectively articulate subjectivities in and through music. Moreover,
musics ability to locate the individual in the social has the potential to
provide marginalised people such as queers with a means of transgress-
ing the public/private dichotomy that has long operated as a means of
sexual repression. Music is used extensively in queer identity work to
contest gender and sexual norms, and as I demonstrate in Chapters 4, 5
and 6, this particular function of music is especially important to queers
because it accommodates emotional, physical and sexual expressions
that may be unavailable to them in other expressive forms or in other
aspects of daily life.
Music can be queer. It can speak of that which is beyond the normal and
signify that which is often invisible. In her introduction to Feminine
Endings, Susan McClary asserts that music is very often concerned
with the arousing and channelling of desire, with mapping patterns
though the medium of sound that resemble those of sexuality (1991,
p. 8). In other words, music allows us to explore and circulate emotions
and pleasures, to immerse ourselves in the ecstatic, to let go, to speed up,
to slow down, to be overcome and to climax. Moreover, music may be
considered particularly accommodating to queer expressions of gender
and sexuality because of its theatrical and fanciful qualities, its mystery
and miasma (Koestenbaum, 2001, pp. 189190). Reaffirming this no-
tion in his comparison between music and films accommodation of
queerness, Boze Hadleigh points out that popular music forms indulge
all manner of gestures, get-ups, accessories, poses and public an-
nouncements. Sex and reputations are a lot more fluid on the musical
46 CHAPTER 2: Music and Identity Selves, Sexualities and Scenes
We must strive, in the face of the here and nows totalizing rendering of reality, to
think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of
this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream
and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately
new worlds Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queer-
ness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, fre-
quently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the
ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness.
(2009, p. 1, emphasis in original)
Deicke, 2007). The majority of this work argues that the CCCS notion of
subculture both exaggerated the differences between and underscored the
internal homogeneity of those who fell within its groupings, thus pre-
senting an overly simplistic duality between authentic subcultural pro-
duction and mainstream media and commerce. Grounded in structuralist
and oppositional logics of us versus them and minority versus ma-
jority, such an uncritical acceptance of subculturalists as authentic,
outside of and Other to a relatively untheorised and monolithic main-
stream fails to acknowledge that subcultural spheres are not hermeneuti-
cally sealed from one another.
In a postmodern landscape characterised by cultural fragmentation
and the proliferation of consumable products in late capitalism such as
music, fashion or film, our contemporary understanding of a coherent
individual subject with discrete ties to culture is unravelling. As argued
in Chapter 1, the stable subject has now been replaced by a subject
whose identity is understood to be fluid, or at least less fixed and reflex-
ively derived from a multiplicity of sources ad sites whose boundaries
are mutable and permeable (Jameson, 1992). Predicated on the know-
ledge that collective identification rooted in traditional social categories
such as class, race, ethnicity and gender has shifted towards a freedom to
choose ones identity and lifestyle, which may be derived from all
manner of consumer goods, images and texts, the internal coherency of
and boundaries between subcultures is decaying.
While the meaning of stylistic commodities lay at the heart of sub-
cultural theory, a number of scholars have raised concerns regarding the
limited attention that the CCCS approach paid to popular music (e.g. see
Bennett, 2000; Brown, 2003; Redhead, 1990). In his study of pop art and
glitter rock, Van M. Cagle points to this noting that while the CCCS
theorists view music as integral to the homology of the subculture, very
little is said about how and why the music plays a significant role in the
identity-making process of the subculture (1995, p. 39). Instead, what
we more commonly find in CCCS work is a fixation on visual display at
the expense of musical meaning. As Dave Laing (1985) demonstrates in
his critique of Hebdiges (1991) analysis of punk, given the limited at-
tention Hebdige gave to music, it thus seemed to be a less important part
of the stylistic ensemble called punk (1985, p. x), the most signifi-
cant part being the visual display or look of punk. Furthermore,
Laings study is of significance because it demonstrates that musical
54 CHAPTER 2: Music and Identity Selves, Sexualities and Scenes
scenes (Smith, 2009) have demonstrated, these days it is far less com-
mon for people to resist the music and subcultural investments of their
youth completely. Increasingly, early adult and middle-aged subjects are
finding ways to incorporate traditionally youthful activities into their
ageing lifestyles, and to locate their sense of self in music either through
continuing musical and stylistic investments carried over from their
youth or through new investments that they make in the years beyond
their youth. As both Halberstam (2005) and I (see Taylor, J., 2010, 2012)
have previously argued, queer subcultures, which exist largely outside
traditional kinship notions of family and community, are hotbeds of
post-adolescent music and style-making activity. Indeed, the people I
interviewed in this study represent a diverse range of ages, from late
teens to late forties, and thus fall outside the definition of youth.
Another point of criticism levelled at subcultural theory that war-
rants attention relates to issues of gender and sexuality. Preoccupied with
the more spectacular of leisure pursuits and grand public displays of
stylised deviance visible at a street level, subcultural theory effectively
precluded certain forms of participation from mattering. Overlooking
those participants whose commitment was modulated, or whose alliances
were less public, compromised an understanding of the functions that
subcultural style assumes in more mundane and everyday ways such as
within domestic settings, or bedroom cultures (McRobbie & Garber,
1976). Since the leisure-time and cultural practices of young women of-
ten occurred in the home and thus less visible, girl-centred teeny bopper
culture was relegated to being interpreted as part of the passive main-
stream, and girls were disregarded as private consumers. According to
Angela McRobbie (1980), in the absence of empirical data to tell us how
style produces meaning in quotidian lives, we are left with an uncriti-
cally masculinist bias of what subcultural style means, a bias that reflects
both subcultural machismo and the selective tendencies of subcultural
researchers themselves. However, as Susan Driver (2007, p. 205) notes,
in attempting to respond to subcultural theorys sexist orientations,
feminist youth culture approaches have often reified gender parameters
in their attempts to promote female alternatives, structuring girls musi-
cal tastes in binary gender terms. Such an approach, Driver argues,
leaves little room to consider girls who defy heterosexual expectations
and feminine norms, excluding those girls who take up masculinity as a
site of identification. Remarkably, among the numerous criticisms of
56 CHAPTER 2: Music and Identity Selves, Sexualities and Scenes
the CCCS approach to subcultures, there has been little concern about its
failure to account for the styles of sexually deviant subcultures.
Queer subcultures illustrate vividly the limits of subcultural theo-
ries that omit consideration of sexuality and sexual styles, argues
Halberstam (2005, p. 161). Queer subcultural members routinely prob-
lematise straightforward distinctions in relation to established socio-eco-
nomic and cultural indicators such as sexual identity, gender, age,
locality, race, ethnicity and class. They share a tenuous relationship with
the mass media and because they espouse a form of sexual desire that is
still so abject to the norm, they are far less likely to be absorbed into the
mainstream intact, but rather are poached for their style like pop cul-
tures appropriation of camp while the significant political work that
occurs at the site of style is discarded. This is not to say that queer sub-
cultures are beyond media influence or do not interact with it in
interesting ways. Queer cultural forms such as drag, for example, regu-
larly poach aspects of commercial culture pop star identities, songs,
dance moves, style and put them to use in ways that do not neatly oc-
cupy either a space within subcultural semiotic rebellion or the
commodified cultural mainstream, for they can often operate within both
simultaneously. Further demonstrating the invalidity of a CCCS ap-
proach in relation to theorising sexual minority cultures, Halberstam
goes on to argue that:
Queer subcultures cannot be placed in relation to a parent culture, and they tend to
form in relation to place as much as in relation to a genre of cultural expression,
and ultimately, they oppose not only the hegemony of dominant culture but also the
mainstreaming of lesbian and gay culture. (2005, p. 161)
Scenes
communities that, while situated within the local, interact and connect
with groups of kindred spirits many miles away (Peterson & Bennett,
2004, pp. 89) who exhibit parallel expressions of musical taste, cultural
identity and style. Like translocal scene participants, those in virtual
scenes are widely separated geographically, but unlike them, virtual
scenes participants around the world come together in a single scene-
making conversation via the Internet (Peterson & Bennett, 2004, p. 10).
This could include online chat-room groups and fanzines that share
common stylistic sensibilities, and trade music and images online (e.g.
see Lee & Peterson, 2004). By Peterson and Bennetts definition, virtual
scenes are controlled primarily by fans rather than cultural producers.
However, in the advent of collaborative audio and video performance
software that allows people to generate and perform audio and video
over the internet in real time, it would be remiss to presume that virtual
scenes are exclusively discussion based. These three ways of interpreting
scenes are not discrete, but necessarily overlap, as one type of scene will
inform another, which in turn will inform another across the categories
of style and spatial contexts.
this, they draw on the queer and political histories of a wide range of
cultural forms and styles, thus connecting them to and locating them
within existing scenes and forms of culture-making that are neither dis-
cretely local nor discretely style-based. Rather, their scenic connections
hinge more radically on their identification as queer and on their desire
to affect queer social critique by musically and stylistically traversing
conceptual boundaries around gender and sexual norms both hetero
and homo age, race and class-based norms and, in some instances, the
stylistic norms that have come to signify mainstream lesbian and gay
culture. Ultimately, their experiences of gender and sexual Otherness
imbue their cultural production with personal, social and political
meaning in multiple and unique ways that defy spatial limitations and
stylistic coherence.
To account for the interplay among the global communities of taste
on which queers draw, contribute to and redefine, as well as their
weighty political histories and local vernaculars of style, the approach to
queer scenes that I advocate here is grounded in translocality. However,
the notion of a translocal scene needs some adjustment to account for
queerness. As we will see in the localised case studies of queer musi-
cians and performers presented at the end of Chapters 4, 5 and 6, these
people who are all from the same local scene draw on an excessive
array of styles, sensibilities and aesthetics that collectively contribute to
an understanding of a queer scene as musically and stylistically promis-
cuous. In an article entitled Queer Aesthetics, Daniel Williford (2009)
examines queer aesthetics in visual arts conjuring the notion of a pro-
miscuous image, where queerness is something that embodies excessive
aesthetic enunciations. He writes: the political force of queer aesthetics
lies not in a specific announcement but in an effort that keeps ambiguity
at play in relation to social subjectivity (p. 7). Queerness, he goes on to
argue, reminds us that aesthetic ambiguity is possible; that queer politics
see the ordering logics of normativity as a sign that there is always the
possibility of reordering meaning and that meaning is always in excess:
excess is the language of queer logic (p. 13). Style such as that asso-
ciated with being a bear, a leatherman, a queen, a dandy, a twink, a butch
62 CHAPTER 2: Music and Identity Selves, Sexualities and Scenes
1
or a femme, for example is a way for queer individuals to distinguish
themselves, to signal their sexual desires and criminal intimacies
(Berlant & Warner, 1998, p. 558), and to locate themselves within queer
communities of desire and social resistance. The signification of queer
desires through style has a long history, one that surpasses any of the
post-war subcultural formations, and as Williford would have it, queer
culture-makers see the possibilities of reinterpreting and reordering the
meaning of style in endless ways. Just as there are multiple ways of be-
ing queer and signifying ones sexual desire or gender identity through
cultural symbols, the stylistic modalities of queer scenes are also multi-
ple. For the cultural histories and meanings of a range of styles that can
all be called queer are radically different in character. Queer scenes,
then, are not typified by stylistic continuity or substance; rather, their
distinctiveness is evidenced by their stylistic excess.
At the beginning of this chapter, I pointed to DeNoras (2000) ideas
on music as a resource for utopian imaginations and a means for creating
alternative worlds and institutions, and I would argue that a lack of
scenic coherence and stylistic excess bespeaks alternative worlds that are
queerly imagined: amorphous, ambiguous and adaptable. Because heter-
onormativity dictates public culture, the sites of queer world-making are
often marginal, ephemeral and subterranean, constructed in the counter-
public sphere through embodied social practices such as music, dancing
and performance. The covert transmission of queerness and the nebulous
points of entry that make queer worlds ephemeral and difficult to recog-
nise have everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace
has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack
(Muoz, 1996, p. 6). The queer world is not made clear for us; rather, we
come to feel it, find it and know it as selves that have already been
shaped by other aspects of culture, style and taste, and we bring these
with us into our queer worlds. The routes that we take to find queerness
are often varied and unconventional, requiring us to traverse the cultural
spaces that might otherwise contain us if we were not, as queers, seeking
to inhabit a queer world.
In the next section of this book, I chart the emergence of a select range
of queer sensibilities, styles and musical cultures by first outlining the
translocal histories of these styles and then examining the ways in which
they are taken up in the everyday local context of Brisbane, Australia.
This study is by no means an exhaustive endeavour, and it is not in-
tended to be one. The purpose of the case studies in Chapters 4, 5 and 6
is to provide rich insights into musical modalities of queer gender and
sexual self-making; to provide a snapshot of the kinds of activities that
64 CHAPTER 2: Music and Identity Selves, Sexualities and Scenes
Coda
Arthur Clinton and Frederick Park (also known as Fanny Park) make
reference to camp as an embodied style or manner of conduct. In a not-
able letter to Clinton, Park writes: My campish undertakings are not at
present meeting with the success they deserve. Whatever I do seems to
get me into hot water somewhere (cited in Bartlett, 1988, p. 168). These
examples suggest that camp was used colloquially during the late Vic-
torian and Edwardian eras, referring predominantly to the mannerisms
and gestures of wanton individuals.
Camp was introduced into literary discourse almost a century later
in 1954, when Christopher Isherwood published his novel The World in
the Evening. For the first time in a literary context, this text attempts to
provide a loose explanation of camps schematic workings in a conver-
sation between two of the novels characters, Charles (a homosexual)
and Stephen. Charles explains to Stephen:
You cant camp about something you dont take seriously. Youre not making fun
of it; youre making fun out of it. Youre expressing whats basically serious to you
in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is largely camp about reli-
gion. The Ballet is camp about love Mozarts definitely a camp. Beethoven, on
the other hand, isnt. (1973, p. 125)
1 Isherwood expressed a somewhat similar idea in 1938 when he published his first
novel, Lions and Shadows (1963). Although he did not specifically define camp in
this instance, camp motifs can be traced in the cleverly disguised discussions of
homosexuality in this text.
70 CHAPTER 3: Camp A Queer Sensibility
2 The term dandy originated in late eighteenth century Britain, and was used to
describe a man who placed particular importance upon aestheticism, fashion,
linguistic refinement and the pursuit of leisure. Such a person was seen as
attempting to emulate aristocratic refinement while usually being of middle-class
background. A notable example of dandyism is expressed in the work and persona
of Irish literary figure Oscar Wilde (18541900).
CHAPTER 3: Camp A Queer Sensibility 71
(1982, p. 291). Richard Dyer and Jack Babuscio strongly disagree with
this. Dyer takes a more assertive approach than Sontag to the role gay
male identity has played in establishing camp, arguing:
It is just about the only style, language and culture that is distinctively and unam-
biguously gay male. In a world drenched in straightness all the images and the
words of society express and confirm the rightness of heterosexuality. Camp is the
one thing that expresses and confirms being a gay man. (Dyer, 1999, p. 110)
Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form
of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) con-
sists in going against the grain of ones sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is
something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something mas-
culine. (p. 297)
Like Isherwood did previously in his distinctions between high and low
camp, Sontag similarly deduces two forms of camp: nave (or pure)
camp and deliberate (or wholly conscious) camp. While these categories
do not replace or correspond directly with Isherwoods distinctions, they
are considerably intertwined, suggesting the activity of producing camp
is evident both in the performance of camp and in the perception of it.
According to Sontag, the essential element [of nave camp] is serious-
ness, a seriousness that fails which has the proper mixture of the
exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the nave (1982, p. 283).
Nave camp is the perception of failed seriousness, which Sontag sug-
gests can be found in opera, in particular Bellinis operas. Moreover,
nave camp necessitates a parodic or perverse perception of something or
someone that emphasises an artificiality passing as natural, in which case
the perception debunks the intended seriousness of the object or subject.
Deliberate camp is produced by a self-conscious act or performance
of self-parody that intentionally reveals a failed seriousness through ar-
tifice. In the absence of a concise definition of deliberate camp by
Sontag herself, I refer to Fabio Cletos explanation of Sontags notes in
which he suggests:
As to deliberate camp, the focus is not in the perverted decoding, but in the very
act of performance, intentionally, as paradoxically so, producing a failure of seri-
ousness, acknowledging its essence in the unnatural, in the inessential and the
contingent, and privileging form and style over message or content in self-
(re)presentation. (1999, p. 24, emphasis in original)
This kind of parody reveals a greater sense of the range of life and its possibilities,
and awareness of the grotesque, of carnival, and of anger, sensuality, and sexuality.
Camp, as parody, has an ability to expose what the powers-that-be would like to keep
neatly hidden and out of sight. Instead of acquiescing in the ideology of a disposable
culture that wants to flush away its social problems, Camp can insist on a determined
recycling of political agendas as well as aesthetic diversity. (1994, p. 199)
3 Although popular Australian musician Kylie Minogue does not identify as either
gay or queer, her music and image have been appropriated by the mainstream gay
community throughout Australia and Europe, and she is widely acknowledged as a
popular gay icon.
CHAPTER 3: Camp A Queer Sensibility 77
and sexual identities especially those that are often hidden away from
public view or considered poor taste.
During the early 1980s, camp began to emerge as a political strategy
4
of queer parody employed by queer activist groups such as ACT UP,
5 6
Queer Nation, OutRage and the Radical Faeries. These and other per-
formance-based protest groups have used camp as a signifying practice
in the constitution of publicly visible queer identities and as a theatri-
calised form of guerrilla activism (Meyer, 1994; Tatchell, 1999). For
example, members of ACT UP have famously staged numerous public
die-ins at which people congregate and perform a fake death in protest
at the lack of appropriate health care for people living with HIV and
AIDS. In 1990, OutRage staged a public kiss-in, which saw a large
group of queer people displaying affection in Londons Piccadilly Circus
in protest at the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which stated that homosexu-
ality must remain a private matter under British law. This act blatantly
disrupted any lingering notion of camp as an artefact of the closet by
challenging the distinction between public and private space, while also
providing a valuable commentary on puritan morality. In another in-
stance, during 1992 OutRage protested the ban of homosexuals in the
armed forces by draping a pink feather boa over a military statue and
posting the slogan For Queens and Country underneath the memorial to
Admiral Mountbatten. In these instances, camp is employed as a sign of
a repressed alterity, which is transformed through parody, theatricality
and carnivalesque spectacle into an empowering queer critique of domi-
nant morality and social exclusion.
4 ACT UP (or the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed in New York
during 1987 and later spread to other US, European and Australian cities. ACT
UPs aim is to raise awareness of the AIDS crisis and demand effective and
affordable drug treatment. It does this through a variety of methods including
political negotiation and non-violent dramatic acts of civil disobedience (see
Bateman, 2005).
5 Founded in Britain in 1990, OutRage is a civil disobedience group dedicated to
artistic forms of social protest (see Tatchell, 1999).
6 The Radical Faeries emerged in the United States during the late 1970s in
opposition to the assimilatory agendas of gay liberationists. Informed by neo-pagan
ritual, Marxism and gender fluidity, they are now a widespread counter-culture of
queer men who often live in fringe communities (see Bonck, 2007).
78 CHAPTER 3: Camp A Queer Sensibility
Camp has strong links with a notion of performance which asserts its truth whilst
simultaneously contradicting it, undercutting it, calling it into question, a performance
which works to articulate the performers ambivalent relation to cultural and eco-
nomic power. (1996, p. 105)
thing that has received very little attention in comparison to camp in visual
and written cultures (2009, p. 189).
In Susan Fasts (2006) discussion of Queens performance at Live
Aid in 1985, she goes beyond the more obvious associations of camp
with Freddie Mercurys image and stage persona in search of camp aes-
thetics operating in the music. Offering Queens infamous mock operatic
hit Bohemian Rhapsody by way of example, Fast draws on Dyers
assertion that camp is a way of prising the form of something away
from its context, of revelling in the style while dismissing the content as
trivial (1999, p. 113). Here, Fast identifies Queens use of operatic
musical conventions in Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) for example, its
verbosity, phraseology and bombastic chorus in terms of camp: Some
of the defining elements of opera are present, but they work as surface,
as de-contextualized artifice. She argues that this is in opposition to
musical cachet (2006, p. 146). Similarly, Kay Dickinson (2001) speaks
of campness in music as the skewed appropriation of form or style. Of-
fering an insightful intertextual reading of Chers voice and the use of
the vocoder as a camp strategy in the recording of the song Believe
(1998), Dickinson demonstrates how camp can be about appropriation
and a usage of popular culture which might not accord with the mascu-
linist status quo, despite any notion of original intent or authorship
(2001, p. 345, emphasis in original).
In Jarman-Ivens (2009) work, she suggests that certain pieces of
music quite strongly resonate as camp. By way of example, Jarman-
Ivens points to musical theatre numbers such as Big Spender (1966),
lounge tunes such as Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps (1947), torch songs
such as You Dont Have To Say You Love Me (1966) and disco hits
such as Tragedy (1979). In search of the specifically musical qualities
of camp, Jarman-Ivens goes on to provide a reading of three musical
performances in which she locates a camp quality that is sonically dis-
cernible. These are via an overworked system of tension and release
(2009, p. 202) evident in the sharper attacks and long decays of a melo-
dramic performance of Tchaikovskys Piano Concerto No. 1 by
Liberace; in Liza Minnellis exaggerated vocal manipulations evident in
her performance of Auf wiedersehen mein Herr in Cabaret (1972);
and similarly, in a 1964 performance of Dont Rain On My Parade by
Judy Garland and daughter Minnelli. However, as Jarman-Ivens herself
suggests, the overtly campish contexts within which these texts exist
80 CHAPTER 3: Camp A Queer Sensibility
Liberace, Minnelli and Garland, all deeply entwined in queer music his-
tory necessarily impact upon our reading, and thus there are textual,
contextual and performance elements that must be taken into consider-
ation when identifying the thread of camp in the fabric of the music
(2009, p. 203). Her musicological analysis, although sophisticated in its
execution, emphasises that the music cannot be dislocated from its con-
textual and performance elements when attempting such a reading. Both
the extra-musical elements that lie outside the music, such as visual
style, as well as the para-musical elements, such as lyrics and perform-
ance gestures, necessarily need to be considered alongside those
elements that are strictly musical.
Also concerned with camp as hyperbolic vocal delivery and musical
performance in his book The British Pop Dandy (2009), Stan Hawkins
offers a few final points I would like to consider before moving on.
Upon analysing the vocal qualities and lyrical phraseology of famous
British male popular singers David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Steven Morris-
sey, Justin Hawkins, Robbie Williams, Neil Tennant, Paul Draper and
Jarvis Cocker, Hawkins finds that, at least in their recordings, all of these
performers express campness in their vocal delivery and production.
Through musical coding, a range of melodic articulations ornate, re-
bellious, frivolous or conversational and the technical qualities of their
recordings, these performers exude a camp sensibility that reveal[s] the
artists own notions of self-aestheticization (p. 150). In other words, the
ways in which they choose to express or can be read/heard as camp are
uniquely their own. While Hawkins doesnt raise this comparison, Dyer
too has said that we are not all camp all the same (1999, p. 112). If
camp is tied to form and stylisation in music, endorsing the performa-
tive self as a stylised act (Hawkins, 2009, p. 150), then it will
necessarily sound different depending on the kind of self to which a
performer is gesturing in their camp expression.
In this chapter, I have charted the emergence of camp and unpacked
key arguments that elucidate its functions and meanings. Contrary to the
assumption that camp is nothing but a frivolous and depoliticised pop
cultural sensibility, I have demonstrated how, in the context of queer
political praxis, camps parodic, exaggerated, allusive and provocative
characteristics work as an oppositional critique, and as a strategy for
undermining power and challenging notions of authenticity. In relation
to music and the case studies that will be presented in Chapters 4, 5
CHAPTER 3: Camp A Queer Sensibility 81
The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a
womans garment: for all those that do so are an abomination (Deuteronomy 22:5)
This biblical verse suggests that clothes are a powerful signifier of gen-
der and a marker of the sexed body, further demonstrating that
inappropriate gender dressing has disturbed social norms and moral
codes for millennia. In more recent times, similar codes of gender con-
duct remain true. In late modern Western society, we commonly see
infant boys and girls wearing blue and pink clothes respectively. While it
is accepted that females may dress in shirts, skirts, frocks or trousers,
males are only permitted to wear shirts and trousers. These conventions
of gendered dressing are not fixed; rather, they have changed over time
in accordance with social norms. For example, it only became acceptable
in the post-World War II era for women to wear trousers, and it was not
until the 1960s that womens trousers became a fashion item. Moreover,
in Western societies prior to World War I, the conventions for colour-
appropriate gender dressing were reversed, thus boys were dressed in
pink and girls in blue. According to literature at the time, pink was
thought to be a stronger and more decided colour while blue was con-
sidered delicate and dainty (cited in Garber, 1992, p. 1). Also, up
until the early twentieth century, small children of both sexes were
dressed in ornate frocks. It was not until boys became of age and entered
the masculine rite of passage known as breeching that they were first
permitted to wear short trousers, followed a little later by longer ones.
Considering these changing trends in sex-appropriate dressing, it is
surprising that in the twenty-first century this kind of inappropriate be-
haviour can still cause such moral outrage yet it does. This is because
the act of adorning ones body with clothing and accessories culturally
assigned to the opposite sex draws our attention to the inherently per-
formative qualities of gender. Moreover, cross-gender dressing is often
84 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that imitation is at the
heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary
imitation that presupposes a prior or original gender, but that hegemonic heterosex-
uality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations In this
sense, then, drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by
which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexualitys claim to
naturalness and originality. (1993, p. 125, emphasis in original)
Of course, there are those who contest Butlers argument. Some feminist
scholars claim that men in drag (drag queens) are making a mockery of
CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender 85
1 Berdache was not the traditional name for these people, but rather the French
colonial term used by anthropologists: it is now considered derogatory. The native
term for these people would most likely have varied between tribes.
CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender 87
2 It was not until 1660 that English theatre permitted women to act on stage, and until
such time a culture of skilled female impersonators flourished. During the rule of
the Puritan Commonwealth, however, it was decided that men acting as women was
morally offensive; thus women were granted the right to publicly perform on stage.
88 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
dressed as a young man and the other as a young woman. Sister act per-
formances relied upon quality vocal stylisation and intelligently
dramatised impersonation (Rodger, 2004b). The musicality of these
performances is an illustration of how music in the same way as cos-
tume and gesticulation can enhance the gender-bending effect.
Similarly, solo male impersonators with masculine vocal qualities who
dressed in male costumes and performed male repertoire were popular in
the traditions of variety and vaudeville. According to musicologist Gil-
lian Rodger (2004b), this well-paid style of performance was highly
favoured among male working-class audiences because their act mer-
cilessly parodied middle-class values, while glorying in the excess of
leisure alcohol, women and fine fashion (2004b, p. 265).
In the Queer Encyclopaedia of Music, Dance and Musical Theatre,
Rodger (2004b) who has written extensively on gender impersonation
in variety and vaudevillian traditions points to two other musically
embellished gender-troubling performances: the female multi-instru-
mentalist who defies gender norms by playing traditionally male
instruments such as trumpet or saxophone; and the role of the double-
voiced vocalist. According to Douglas Gilberts American Vaudeville:
Its Life and Times (1963), female multi-instrumentalists were not strictly
gender impersonators; however, they often appeared dressed as young
men when taking on traditionally male instrumental roles. As an exam-
ple of such a talent, Gilbert refers to the work of Lillie Western
(performing c. 1880s), who was known for her expertise on the concer-
tina, banjo and xylophone. The double-voiced vocalist is known to have
costumed half of her body in male attire and the other half in female at-
tire, turning the appropriately costumed side of the body to the audience
as necessary. Double-voiced vocalists skilfully switched between male
and female vocal ranges, portraying both in song and appearance two
genders at once. In some performances, however, the double-voiced en-
tertainer may have been made up to appear as one gender at a time,
changing costume between songs. It was acceptable for double-voiced
acts to be performed by either men or women, providing they had the
necessary vocal range and skills. Notable performers in this tradition
included American variety performer Miss Dora Dawron (performing c.
1870s) and British music hall performer Bert Errol (performing c. 1900
1930s), both acclaimed for their ability to sing proficiently in either so-
90 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
Drag, as it is situated within gay culture, diverges somewhat from its origins
within the theatrical traditions of gender impersonation, and as some schol-
ars have previously noted, the two should not be conflated into a single
history (Halberstam, 1998; Newton, 1996). In large cities such as London
and New York, drag is known to have been a vibrant part of gay (and to a
lesser extent lesbian) communities since the late nineteenth century, and the
theatrical traditions of gender impersonation and mainstream socio-cultural
practices such as masquerade balls are thought to have been a necessary
precursor to twentieth century gay drag (Chauncey, 1994; Halberstam,
1998; Kennedy & Davis, 1993; Rupp & Taylor, 2003). As George
Chauncey (1994) points out in his history of gay world-making in New
York during the 1920s and 1930s, the drag queens or fairies on display
at the balls embodied camp culture in their inversion (and often burlesque)
of gender conventions (p. 297). Furthermore, he suggests that it was at the
drag balls, more than any place else, that the gay world saw itself, celebrated
itself, and affirmed itself (p. 299).
In the gay tradition of drag balls and supper clubs, drag queen per-
formances generally were organised into two different performance
styles commonly understood as high camp and low camp drag. In rela-
tion to Isherwoods distinctions discussed in the previous chapter, high
camp drag is best described as maintaining an underlying seriousness of
the performance, while low camp drag reproduces its performance as an
entertaining (and often self-parodying) hysterical failure (Zervigon,
2004). Drag performances in both high and low camp styles often draw
from and transform popular culture. Traditionally, many drag queens
chose (and some still do) to impersonate a famous female singer/actor
92 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
with which gay men identified, such as Ethel Merman, Joan Crawford or
3
Judy Garland. And even those who did not choose to do specific
impersonations of female stars would usually source the songs for their
musical routines from mainstream culture.
In the style of low camp drag, there is a tendency to emphasise the
performers fraudulent femininity through grotesque or absurd repre-
sentations of women. Acts in this style often resort to crass humour
and/or musical performances that mock the original sincerity or meaning
of a song through over-articulation of seriousness or the exaggeration of
flaws. In contrast, high camp drag strives for sophistication and authen-
ticity in its delivery. High camp drag is a skilfully crafted artistry that
aims to tastefully and respectfully recreate an idealised performance of
femininity. In the high camp style, a drag queen may choose to imper-
sonate Judy Garland, for example, but unlike low camp drag, this
performance is never intended to mock Garlands particular style of
femininity or exaggerate the flaws in her character. Instead, high camp
performances generally pay homage to the original performer, stressing
with great detail the exact quality of her voice, appearance and gesture.
During the 1950s and 1960s in Britain and America, gay bars and
establishments where drag queens often performed were targeted by law
enforcement agencies; homosexuality was a crime and the frequency of
police raids escalated. For many gay performers, being a drag queen was
an increasingly political role in that drag performances had become an
affirmation of ones sexuality and cultural identity (Baker, 1994). The
most famous of all police raids occurred in the early hours of the morn-
ing of 28 June 1969 at a New York bar frequented by drag queens called
the Stonewall Inn. Emotions were particularly heightened at this time, as
many of the bars patrons were mourning the death of Judy Garland and
had attended her funeral the day before. According to some of the vary-
ing historical accounts, drag queens and butch lesbians were at the
3 These women and others belong to what is known within queer cultural studies as
the cult of the diva. The diva may be an opera singer, stage performer or film
actress who is appropriated as a role model. She is generally someone with
extraordinary talent who, either in her personal life or stage roles, embodies the
heartache and suffering felt by many marginalised homosexuals (Dyer, 1986). In
more recent times, opera and popular singers such as Barbra Streisand, Cher, Renee
Fleming, Kathleen Battle and Madonna have acquired diva status among
predominantly gay male audiences.
CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender 93
Traditionally drag has been a form of escapist entertainment, like the alternative
version of TV-sitcoms for fags What we do reflects the mentality of our genera-
tion. We approach serious causes with humor and react to whats going on in our
culture and society. (cited in Hilbert, 1995, pp. 46465)
Emerging out of a punk sensibility in the early 1980s, the radical drag of
10
the Wigstock generation was yet another evolutionary marker in the
history of drag as queer activism: they have read all the feminist and
queer theory, boned up on hagiography, and behave in a postmodern
manner with quotations marks around their drag, writes Laurence Se-
nelick (2000, p. 434). Queens of the Wigstock generation were a stark
contrast to the impoverished 1980s Harlem Voguers depicted in Jenny
Livingstons documentary film Paris is Burning (1991). Where the poor
black and Hispanic gay men and transgenderists as depicted by Living-
ston employed drag as an attempt at gender realism a way of
compensating for their low status and embracing a cultural elitism asso-
ciated with the white capitalist hegemony that oppressed them
Wigstock was firmly grounded in camp irony and parody. Queens such
as Lurleen and her contemporaries, Lady Bunny, RuPaul and the black
power advocate Vaginal Crme Davis, acknowledged the important role
that drag had played in the fight for gay civil rights during the late 1960s
and 1970s, and as such they attempted to politically mobilise drag for a
new generation of queers who were currently in the midst of an AIDS
10 Pioneered by the notorious radical drag queen Lady Bunny in 1984, Wigstock is an
outdoor drag festival that was first staged in New Yorks East Village on Labor
Day. Since then, Wigstock has grown into an annual event, and 2 September, was
officially declared Wigstock Day by Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger
in 1991. In her speech, Messinger declared that the Wigstock experience, a
celebration of music, peace, love, drag and gay pride, helps New Yorkers realize
the celebration of difference makes us all richer (cited in Senelick, 2000, p. 436).
For a detailed depiction of this event, see Wigstock: The Movie (2003).
CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender 95
crisis: AIDS has forced gay people to think about who we are and what
our relationship with straight society really is, said Lurleen. Im no
strident Marxist, but when there is a reactionary government in power,
its kind of hard to get up onstage and lip-synch Barbra Streisand and
then say, drink up, everybody (cited in Hilbert, 1995, p. 463). More-
over, the Wigstock generation of queens fashioned their own drag
personas, rejecting the culture of mimicry and impersonation that had
preceded them and instead choosing to create their own cultural capital.
For example, Lady Bunny launched the Wigstock festival in 1984; she is a
deejay and has released disco singles such as Shame Shame Shame
(1996) and The Pussycat Song (1996). RuPaul has released numerous
singles and studio albums (the latest, entitled Glamazon, was released in
2011), starred in many films, such as RuPaul is: Starbooty (1987), and has
both appeared on and hosted an array of television shows. Meanwhile,
Vaginal Crme Davis fronted punk and thrash concept bands such as
Pedro, Muriel & Esther, The Female Menudo, Black Fag and the Afro
Sisters and is the editor of the queercore zine Fertile La Toyah Jackson.
Through political engagement and the self-fashioning of individual drag
identities, the radical drag of the 1970s and the Wigstock generation of the
1980s produced a queerer modality of drag performance.
In its recent history, certain forms of drag have championed queer
politics through drags role in gay liberation, its anarchic display of
social disobedience and its tactical performances of genderfuck. As such,
drag can be read a form of social commentary, specifically a queer the-
atrical marker of heterosexualitys false claim to gender authenticity and
a way to perform queer imaginings of the self and the social. While it is
clear from this concise history that not all drag intends to be subversive,
Butler argues that drag can be read for the way in which hyperbolic
norms are dismantled as the heterosexual mundane Norms, taken not
as commands to be obeyed, but as imperatives to be cited twisted,
queered (1993, p. 237). It is the incongruences that arise out of the act
of citing, twisting or queering that produces a queer mode of gender
performance, unsettling gender normativities.
Most of the writings on drag and camp are one-sided in that they
often address the performance of femininity by males, but largely ignore
the performance of masculinity by females. This has produced a large
body of literature around the culture of queening, but at the same time
rendered theatrical forms of female masculinity largely obscure. Very
96 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
little scholarly or popular criticism of drag kings existed before the late
1990s (see DiFrance, 2004; Halberstam, 1998; Troka, Lebesco & Noble,
2002; Volcano & Halberstam, 1999), and to date less has been published
in regard to the drag role of the bio queen.
11 References to butch/femme lesbian gender roles date back to the 1920s and can be
explained in the simplest sense as equating to an overtly masculine or overtly
feminine performance of gender. During the 1970s, lesbian feminist identity
politics criticised butch and femme identities for reproducing a false and
dichotomous representation of lesbianism within the hetropatriarchys system of
oppressive gender norms. However, butch and femme gender roles continue to be
(re)made and celebrated in queer circles. Butch and femme roles are highly
complex and variable, taking many forms for example, stone butch, stone femme,
power femme, daddy, girl, mummy and boy among others. For detailed discussions
of these roles, see The Persistent Desire (Nestle, 1992), Boots of Leather, Slippers
of Gold (Kennedy & Davis, 1993), Female Masculinity (Halberstam, 1998),
Butch/femme (Munt, 1998), Lesbian Sex Scandals (Atkins, 1999) and Femmes of
Power (Volcano & Dahl, 2008).
CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender 97
Kate Davy (1994) and Halberstam (1998), that a gay camp aesthetic was
unable to serve the needs of lesbian theatre in the same way as it did gay
male theatre because true masculinity is considered original, authentic
and non-performative in contrast to the artificiality of feminine gender
roles. Therefore, in order for a woman to pass as a true butch that is, to
present herself as authentically masculine her performance must not be
perceived as artificial. She must not appear to be acting a role, but in-
stead her physical portrayal of masculinity should be perceived as the
embodiment of her true self. This suggests that the theatrical roles of the
drag king and the drag queen as they are understood today do not share a
joint or symmetrical history, and as such the role of the drag king de-
serves to be attended to separately in order to avert confusion.
Drag kings can broadly be defined as anyone (regardless of gender
and/or sexual preference) who turns masculinity into an act through a
conscious performance of the signs of maleness. Such acts may include
the wearing of facial hair, male clothing, a prosthetic penis, stylised de-
portment and other physical mannerisms normatively deemed male. Just
like drag queening, the nuances of drag king acts are highly varied; how-
ever, it should be noted that the literature on this topic identifies two
specific sub-types of kinging: butch or male-identified drag kings; and
female-identified or androgynous drag kings. Halberstam (1998) and
Elizabeth Ashburn (2004) distinguish the two sub-types by suggesting
that the butch kings elaborate in their acts their off-stage female mas-
culinity (Ashburn, 2004, p. 88), often maintaining a male gender identi-
fication offstage by wearing and performing masculinity as part of her
quotidian gender expression (Halberstam, 1998, p. 232). In contrast,
female-identified drag kings are often involved in a parody of mascu-
linity, assuming masculinity merely as an act in which they expose the
theatricality of maleness. Annabelle Willox, a contributing author to The
Drag King Anthology (2002), summarises the contemporary emergence
of the drag king as a queer role, suggesting that the drag king has em-
erged out of recent moves towards gender blurring as a subversive act
that denaturalises categories of gender advocated by queer theory
(2002, p. 274). As I will soon demonstrate, local drag king and bio queen
performance troupe the Twang Gang falls into the latter category, and I
argue that a camp sensibility favouring parody and artifice is available to
these female performers a sensibility that they employ extensively both
in their drag king and bio queen performances.
98 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
If drag must entail a cross to the opposite of ones true identity, then that origi-
nal, that biological sex-based identity becomes normalized and immobile, thus
denying both the validity of the performers self-identified gender and the power a
drag performance has in questioning gender realness. (Devitt, 2006, p. 30)
femininity as a feminist act. They viewed performing girl drag as one way to
claim space for and empower femininity (2007, p. 264).
Because the roles of the drag king and bio queen are presumed to be
lesbian roles (although this is not always the case), drag king and bio
queen performances make further commentary on lesbian sexual identity
that is, that lesbians perform gender in a multiplicity of ways. Thus the
recent emergence of lesbians performing masculine parody and hyper-
femininity has complicated the lesbian butch stereotype the butch be-
ing the most dominant image through which society has judged and
comprehended lesbian sexuality for decades (Willox, 2002). Moreover,
the execution of gender hyperbole that is crucial to both these roles
would further suggest that camp as theatrical political praxis is, in the
present day, available to lesbians who perform drag in these ways.
The self-fashioning of radical drag identities that are not based solely on
the performance of gender-crossing or gender-passing can be located
within the an expression called genderfuck. Genderfuck is a postmod-
ern term used to describe a person or performance that plays/fucks with
or mocks normative images of gender, and in the process of play desta-
bilises the gender binary and subverts the logic of the sex/gender para-
digm. For Stephen Whittle, genderfuck is concerned with practical en-
actments of the theoretical premises of queer theory: it is a full frontal
theoretical and practical attack on the dimorphism of gender- and sex-
roles (2005, p. 117). In June L. Reichs highly cited article on this topic,
entitled Genderfuck: The Law of the Dildo, she proposes that gen-
derfuck structures meaning in a symbol-performance matrix that crosses
through sex and gender and destabilizes the boundaries of our recogni-
tion of sex, gender, and sexual practice (1999, p. 255). In this article,
Reich goes on to suggest that genderfuck could be conceptualised as the
effect of unstable signifying practices in a libidinal economy of multiple
sexualities (1999, p. 264). Thus genderfucks multiple symbolic per-
formances of gender, which separate the performers anatomy (sex) from
genders semiotics, produce a visible array of sexual subjectivities that
lie outside the heterosexual matrix.
100 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
temporary drag, none thus far have theorised its effect in relation to
drags genderfucking potential, or what it may signify about the sub-
version and/or articulation of the body and gender identity of drag per-
formers. Therefore, I give this specific consideration in the case study of
the Twang Gang to follow.
What the majority of studies have shown in passing is that, in the
long tradition of both gender impersonation and drag, music has always
been a necessary feature. In earlier times before the prevalence of re-
corded music performers would always sing in their acts, usually ac-
companied by live music. However, the introduction of recorded music
into clubs (most notably during the 1960s) allowed for a new style of
drag performance to emerge, which became known as a recorded vo-
calist or lip-synch performance. In Esther Newtons famous text Mother
Camp: Female Impersonations in America (1972), she notes that the
introduction of lip-synching in drag performances caused contention
amongst performers. A prestige was afforded to those who sang, and as
such singers were revered as stage performers while lip-synching was
considered to be a more amateur style of street performing. In the ma-
jority of drag performances today, those who sing live are not necessa-
rily held in higher esteem than those who lip-synch, as lip-synching
currently appears to be the most common method of song delivery
among nightclub performers.
In relation to performances of sex and gender through the body, I
suggest that lip-synching potentially can be theorised as an act of gen-
derfuck. In Cusicks essay On Musical Performances, she proposes
that:
Voices stand for the imperatives of sex because, unlike the behaviours we might
agree are performances of gender (clothes, gestures, ways of walking), voices or-
iginate inside the bodys borders and not on the bodys surfaces. We assume that
physical behaviours originating within the bodys borders (in the bodys cavities)
are determined by their site of origin, by the body itself. Thus, they cannot be
performances, in that they seem not to be choices. We believe that the voice is
the body, its very breath and interior shapes projected outward into the world as a
way others might know us, even know us intimately I believe one key element to
the usefulness of Song as a medium for the performance of gender and sex is the
relation of Song to the borders of the body: all voices, but especially singing voices,
perform the borders of the body. (1999, p. 29, emphasis in original)
102 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
If, then, we are to agree with Cusicks summation that voices necessitate
and articulate the sexed body, I would argue that lip-synching is one way
in which drag performers can subvert the bodys borders. If the voice
produced in the act of singing reveals without choice an intimate truth
about the performers body, then a performance of lip-synching reclaims
the right of a performer to choose what they reveal about their bodies,
and thus confounds this intimate physical truth. In essence, lip-synching
is the ultimate subversion of the vocally codified sexed body. If, for ex-
ample, a female performer chooses to wear male drag and sing in her
natural female sexed voice, her vocal performance is inescapably sexed
as female and may consequentially be gendered feminine because, ac-
cording to Cusick, the natural voice signifies her sexed body. We be-
lieve, she says, that the voice is the body (1999, p. 29, emphasis in
original). Therefore, whatever the extent to which a female performer
might go to subvert the bodily markers of her femaleness, she ultimately
is reduced to them via singing. Lip-synching breaks down the physical
given of the body. The vocal incongruences that occur in a lip-synching
performance when a female is perceived to be producing a male voice
or vice versa is one example of the way music can be used to subvert
the borders of the body, demonstrating that things are not always as they
seem or sound, thus queering the vocal production of sex and gender
signification and genderfucking with the vocal cues of sex and gender in
the process.
It is clear from the preceding discussion that the histories, styles and
functions of drag are many and varied. To some, drag may have ap-
peared simply as an entertaining charade; however, here I have shown
that the power of drag extends beyond the comedic image of a man in a
frock or the sensual image of a woman donning top hat and tails. Since
the 1970s, drag performance increasingly has served a disruptive agenda,
one that is grounded in a recent history of camp as a theatricalised form
of political praxis. We see this particularly in the self-fashioning of radi-
cal drag identities that are not based solely on the performance of
gender-crossing or gender-passing: drag that employs genderfuck; drag
that purposefully troubles gender, upsetting heterosexual hegemony. The
style of drag that is most commonly associated with contemporary queer
culture is drag that mixes multiple signs of sex, gender and sexuality,
engaging in symbolic play and performance, both visually and aurally.
CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender 103
What has been missing thus far from scholarly discussions of drag is
the significance of music and other aural signifiers such as lip-synching
and vocalisation. It would appear that the songs that are performed and
the methods of vocalisation appear largely inconsequential to many
scholarly observers; therefore, I address this with priority in the case
study of local drag troupe the Twang Gang. I also pay close attention to
the use of camp within Twang Gang performances, as I believe that a
camp sensibility favouring parody and artifice is available to these fe-
male performers, which they employ in an attempt to be both entertain-
ing and political, engaging and empowering their audiences and troupe
members while denaturalising categories of gender and performing
parodic social commentary.
the Twang Gang had approximately 130 members of the local gay, les-
bian, trans and queer communities performing with it at one time or an-
other. In November 2005, I interviewed six of these members: Dita
Brooke, Mary Alexander, Jo Lieven, Kylie McGill, Analea Holmes and
Melissa Hall. In their daily lives, all members of the Twang Gang with
whom I spoke suggested that they self-identified as queer/lesbian fe-
males. On stage, however, they perform a variety of drag king and bio
queen roles, which they have named and nurtured throughout their per-
forming careers: Brooke performs as drag king Rock Hard and bio queen
Mitzee Burger; Alexander performs as drag king Tricky and bio queen
Boom Bang; Lieven performs as drag king Bonn Apiteet and bio queen
Elektra Fying; McGill performs as bio queen Mystery Bound; Holmes
performs as drag kings Mr Frisky Bob and Inspector Muff; Hall
performs as bio queen Miss Match. Pictured from left to right in figure 1
are Electra Fying, Rock Hard and Tricky.
The Twang Gangs unique style of drag cabaret welcomes female- and
male-identified performers of all ages, races and sexual persuasions to
join and experience what Brooke refers to as empowerment through
entertainment (personal communication, 29 November 2005). While
the Twang Gang has at times had both cis and trans male troupe
CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender 105
members, there were none regularly performing with the troupe at the
time of this research. On the odd occasion that male performers did
participate in Twang Gang shows while I was observing the troupe, they
were usually guest artists rather than actual troupe members. The Twang
Gang members stressed that this was not because they did not welcome
men; rather, it was an indication of the gender segregation that is preva-
lent in lesbian and gay culture, which they are still trying to overcome.
The ages of troupe members varied from people in their late teens to
those in their early forties. The racial identity of troupe members was not
exclusively white; Brooke is an Indigenous woman.
Twang Gang members use their bodies, via singing and dancing, to
perform a part of themselves that is often restrained in their daily lives.
This idea of empowerment is central to the Twang Gangs ethos, as
troupe participants explicitly claim that one of their primary motivations
is to provide members of the queer community (especially women) with
an accommodating space for self-discovery, specifically a space that is
drug and alcohol free. The Twang Gang stressed that members always
perform free from the effects of drugs and alcohol, as they feel the queer
communities often resort to excessive drug and alcohol consumption in
social situations. Therefore, in the interest of promoting an alternative to
this, the Twang Gang encourages its members as well as its audiences to
gain confidence from the spirit not the substance (personal communi-
cation, 29 November 2005).
The Twang Gang has a playful, almost celebratory, feel to its per-
formances, maintaining that self-empowerment, entertainment and
community engagement are integral parts of its show. When I inter-
viewed the members of the Twang Gang, Brooke commented, and the
other members agreed, that:
From being on stage it [empowerment] now overlaps into our real lives. It [per-
forming] gives you the space and the freedom to express yourself in any way you
want the confidence of doing it on stage starts coming into your real life and the
level of empowerment is phenomenal it helps you stand on your own two feet
and be more confident with who you really want to be. You dont have to fit into a
pigeon hole of any sort, you dont have to conform to society, you can make your
own rules and so long as theyre cool and groovy within yourself you can do and
achieve whatever you like. (personal communication, 29 November 2005)
106 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
was an excessively large prosthetic penis and testiculi. The penis was
made out of stocking material and continued to unravel, like a giant
erection, through out the performance. During this act, a number of fe-
male audience members got up and walked out of the performance,
clearly offended by what they had witnessed on stage. It was unclear,
however, whether they were offended by the phallus or by the fact that a
known lesbian was wooing a gay male in drag. When I asked Brooke
and Holmes about this incident, and specifically why they thought the
women had left, Brooke remarked:
There are a lot of hardcore dykes who are anti-men and they dont know how to
take us because they think that we want to be men and yet we are women who are
very out and in touch with our own sexuality. Were portraying men affectionately,
we dont take the piss out of guys, were just embracing a part of the world and
having fun with it. Weve lost a lot of dykes from our audience because of this.
(personal communication, 29 November 2005)
While Holmes agrees with Brooke regarding the Twang Gangs por-
trayal of men and masculinity, she goes on to comment that she feels
very natural when performing as a man, and does not understand why
some women may take offence at this:
Its strange because I felt particularly comfortable in that male role. When Im be-
ing a bloke on stage I feel, well, there are facets of your personality that are latent
in everyday life but when you get up there its a licence to let them go, and for me
theyre naturally there During the show I was sitting down at one point and I had
fake balls under my lap-lap and it just felt so nice. It felt really comfortable on my
body and there was nothing that felt awkward about it. You can get up there and be
tough and dirty and silly and really have a lot of fun and it comes through naturally
because its already there inside. (personal communication, 29 November 2005)
For me its not about pretending I have a dick, its got nothing to do with that. Its
interesting its really empowering, it feels fantastic and its such a release
when youre on stage its another world, its my world I like the androgyny of it
too. Its quite sexy. To me it really doesnt feel like Im trying to be a boy. (per-
sonal communication, 29 November 2005)
108 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
Lieven and McGill stressed that they prefer performing as bio queens,
and they do not care much for wearing a dildo or any other kind of male
phallic symbol. For forty hours a week I drive a forklift, said Lieven,
and to get up on stage with a pony tail wig in fishnets and little hotpants
feels fantastic. For me, it gives me a chance to be a woman (personal
communication, 29 November 2005). McGill remarked that: Im ex-
tremely femme and I dont enjoy being a boy, I just dont get off on it.
Id rather be in a corset. Youre suppose to have short hair if youre a
dyke and you cant wear lipstick. She sees her role within the Twang
Gang as challenging that stereotype through the overt expression of her
femininity (personal communication, 29 November 2005).
The self-made worlds created by each troupe member on stage are
many and varied. Performances of femininities, masculinities and an-
drogyny point to the diverse and deeply personal expression of gender as
it is experienced, lived and enacted by each troupe member, thus ac-
counting for the multiple experiences and expressions the individuality
of queer female sexuality. Further discussion on this topic revealed that
the Twang Gang members see themselves as pioneers of queer sexual
politics; specifically, they feel that they challenge the norms of lesbian
gender and lesbian sexual identity, but they also suggested that this was
quite often a difficult task to undertake. The gay press is killing us,
Brooke said, because they often refer to us as an all female produc-
tion. Moreover, the gay venues wont hire us because they think were
not attractive to the men (personal communication, 29 November
2005). Similarly, Alexander remarked:
We still suffer the stigma of being only for women, even though our audiences are
mixed. Because most of our shows are at Options13 and it has been a girl bar for so
long, guys still have that assumption. Even with our advertising its hard to get the
gay press not to market us for the girls. The local papers will refer to us saying
come on girls or go on girls and we havent even put that in our info sheet. (per-
sonal communication, 29 November 2005)
13 Options was a gay and lesbian bar located in the inner city Brisbane suburb of Spring
Hill that regularly ran a women-only club night called The Birdcage. Options has
since closed down.
CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender 109
We dont discriminate against age, race, sex, gender we want to embrace everyone,
especially those who are generally outcast within our community. The more odd you
are, the more well like you. (personal communication, 29 November 2005)
Since its beginnings in the music halls of Great Britain and on the
vaudeville circuit throughout the United States, drag has involved musi-
cal performance to some degree. However, the musical styles and song
choices of drag artists have received very little critical attention to date.
During the time I spent observing the Twang Gang, it became apparent
that the music was given just as much consideration in the design of the
troupes acts as the costuming and choreography. Furthermore, it is evi-
dent that the musical style and song choices of the Twang Gang contri-
bute significantly to the troupes capacity to cause genderfuck, further
aiding its enactment of a queer camp sensibility.
As popular music studies has shown, rock music is synonymous
with the conventional concepts of authentic, heterosexual masculinity,
while pop music, disco, dance music and dancing have been tagged as an
effeminate, feminised and in some cases gay pursuit (Currid, 1995;
Dibben, 2002; Dyer, 1995; Frith & McRobbie, 1990). Recognising this,
the Twang Gang plays with, or queers, these conventions by drawing on
a range of musical styles across genres of rock and pop. In particular, the
Twang Gang seems to favour musical styles that are seen as contrary to
mainstream gay and feminine musical sensibilities. When asked specifi-
cally about the Twang Gangs musical choices, Brooke remarked:
110 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
When we first started, one of our catch phrases was if it aint got a twang, it dont
mean a thang, so every song that we chose has to be different from the disco clubs.
Because we were always performing in nightclubs, we decided that every song had
to have some twang in it. Twang meant a bit of guitar, which you didnt find [in
gay clubs] back in 2000. Everything was dance or techno there just wasnt any
guitar being used in dance clubs, so when our songs came on, and we often used
classic type rock songs, it separated us from what was happening in nightclubs.
(personal communication, 29 November 2005)
of the sexed body. Subverting the sexed body in this way problematises
the last bastion of hegemonic sex/gender logic: the supposedly inescap-
able signs of our biology, signs upon which gender is constructed. Ac-
cording to Cusick (1999), as discussed earlier, we commonly perceive
the voice as the body since it originates inside the body, from within the
bodys borders. Moreover, Cusick suggests that all voices but the
singing voice in particular, due to its unmistakable timbre are perform-
ances of the bodys borders borders by which the natural singing
voice is ultimately limited. Therefore, in instances of lip-synching, the
rejection of the performers natural singing voice may also be under-
stood as a rejection of the limitations attached to a biologically sexed
body and a means of transgressing the supposedly fixed borders of the
sexed body. Here I am not suggesting that these performers are rejecting
their female bodies, as they quite openly admit to embracing them, but
rather the act of lip-synching queers in this case, certain physical im-
peratives of the female body.
In addition to genderfuck, a camp sensibility is employed exten-
sively in Twang Gang performances. Observing the Twang Gang, it was
clear that they appeared very comfortable with camp, and agreed that a
camp sensibility was particularly evident in their costuming, song choice
and musical sketch comedy performance style. Previously, the relation-
ship between lesbian drag king performances and camp sensibility was
identified by Davy (1994), Halberstam (1998) and Kennedy and Davis
(1999) as awkward and unaccommodating, the reason being that camp is
inherently a performative sensibility that favours parody and artifice. As
such, camp is incongruous with acts of masculinity because masculinity is
generally perceived as original, authentic and non-performative. In con-
trast to this, the Twang Gangs use of camp marks an attempt at revealing
the inherent theatricality of masculinity (through drag king performances)
as well as femininity (through bio queen performances), and suggests that
Twang Gang performers have no desire to appear as authentically masculine
spectacles or pass for men. As female-identified drag performers who per-
form a variety of masculine and feminine identities in an exaggerated man-
ner, camp becomes an exceptionally useful device that aids in the denatu-
ralisation of gender categories as advocated by theories of camp as a form of
queer political praxis. Furthermore, the Twang Gangs reclamation of drag
and camp, once reserved for gay men, can be read as a feminist act through
CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender 113
15 The rock god is an iconic figure of rocknroll subculture. This status is generally
reserved for men who achieve great success and fame from playing rocknroll.
16 Spiderbait is an Australian rock band that had a number one hit in Australia with a
cover of an African-American working song, Black Betty in 2004. This song was
originally made famous by Ram Jam in 1977.
114 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
Figure 2: The Twang Gang performs Our Tribe at Pride Fair in Brisbane, 2005
Twang Gang 2005
Our Tribe opened with Closer (1994), by industrial rock band Nine
Inch Nails. The narrative of this song refers to debauchery, temptation
and sexual desire as a means for bringing one closer to god, themes
that are further authenticated by the dark sexual undertones and grinding
mechanical rhythms of industrial music. During this song, Brookes drag
king character Rock Hard was being tempted by one of the bio queens
who put Rock Hard in bondage. The second song in the medley was
Like a Prayer (1989) by Madonna. This song was chosen as a repre-
sentation of the inner turmoil many queers experience as they are com-
ing out to their friends and family. While the lyrics of this song do not
make any specific mention of such a situation, the music video that ac-
companied this song when it was released in 1989 told the story of a
woman who had witnessed a crime and a false criminal accusation made
against a black man. The woman, who was very conflicted about what
she should do, decided to pray. Once she had looked deep inside herself,
she realised that there was only one right course of action and that was to
testify so that the wrongly accused man would be free. By using this
song, the Twang Gang was drawing on the theme of inner conflict and
the idea that we all need to testify to our true feelings, even if our true
feelings may bring some hardship upon us.
The third song in the medley was a remixed version of Aretha
Franklins (Pride) A Deeper Love (1993). Since the first release of this
song in 1993, it has received notable attention from gay audiences, and
116 CHAPTER 4: Doing Drag, (Un)Doing Gender
A life of listening to disco is too high a price to pay for your sexual identity.
(T-shirt slogan cited in Spencer, 2005, p. 281)
To be a queer punk or fan of hardcore means, in many local music scenes, being
outside the dominant sexual orientation articulated to a music practice; to be a
queer punk means having taste and style that lies outside dominant notions of what
music mainstream adult gays and lesbians perform, listen and dance to. (1993,
p. 73, emphasis in original)
Lesbians have gravitated towards folk-rock, whereas the gay boys are all about that
pumping house music I know tons of out musicians, but very few who gravitate
towards the harder, punk edges of sound. (cited in Ciminelli & Knox 2005,
pp. 116117)
Mainstream lesbian and gay music cultures appear to be not only genre
specific, but gender specific as well. Iconic music festivals that attract
high levels of interest from the international lesbian press and communi-
ties of lesbian festival attendees, such as the Michigan Womyns Music
Festival, Wiminfest, Ladyfest and Lilith Fair, are patronised predomi-
nantly and in some cases exclusively by women. Gay male dance
music scenes, which are typically located in gay-identified nightclub
spaces such as the Wickham Hotel in Brisbane, G.A.Y in London,
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 119
In creating their own alternative to the gay culture they saw around them they could
employ their own values concerning gender, money and censorship [T]hey were
opposed to the prevailing attitudes of mainstream gay culture, which was often seen
as sexist They attacked the idea that due to your sexuality you should be offered
only one choice of social scene, challenging one particular aspect of gay culture:
the idea of separate gay and lesbian bars. Through Homocore events, they aimed to
create a space for men and women to be together, as opposed to the sense of gender
segregation which was the norm in mainstream gay culture. (2005, p. 281)
1 The original punk movement was fairly short-lived, lasting in its original form for
only two years between 1976 and 1978 before diversifying (Laing, 1985; Steward,
1984). The term, however, is still used frequently, and has come to signify a variety
of hybrid musical styles and subcultures within contemporary popular music
discourses such as hardcore (Blush, 2001), anarcho-punk (Gosling, 2004), post-
punk (Reynolds, 2006) and straight edge (Haenfler, 2006), to name a few.
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 121
Dolls and Alice Cooper, all contributed to the visual spectacle and outra-
geousness of punk performance and punks gender-bending subversive-
ness (Auslander, 2006; Hebdige, 1991; Laing, 1985; Thomson & Gut-
man, 1996). Bowies performances of ambiguous gender and sexuality
specifically transvestism and bisexuality along with the shock rock
tactics of artists like Alice Cooper, challenged the dominant cultural
standards of masculinity, thus paving the way for punks purposefully
shocking fashions and non-normative expressions of gender to come.
While these comments point to punks accommodating capacity for
gender and/or sexual experimentation, they do not suggest that punk was
predominantly (or even moderately) populated by queers; however, they
do tell us that the original punk movement was a cultural space that was
open to gender and sexual non-conformity. The connection between punk
and queer culture therefore lies in punks celebration of the social misfit;
its willingness to articulate dissatisfaction with social normativities and
cultural hegemonies; and its gender-bending potential.
Since the late 1980s, punk culture has diversified, sprouting a
variety of hardcore and alternative sub-genres, each with distinctive
musical and ideological qualities that deviate from punks original sound
and ethic. As the global popularity of hardcore and pop punk styles has
grown, subsequently becoming consumed by the major record labels and
gaining popular/commercial acceptance, punk in its various contem-
porary incarnations has been charged with abandoning its cause and
failing to extend the boundaries of its social critique. Elaborating on
Fensters (1993) remark cited at the beginning of this chapter, punk (in
particular, American hardcore punk) had become hostile towards
outward expressions of queerness. By the mid-1980s, skinheads (or
skins) had developed an affiliation with American hardcore which led, in
part, to increasing racism, sexism, heterosexism, nationalism, violence
and right-wing attitudes among scene participants (Blush, 2001; OHara,
1999). Queer punks thus became marginalised within the emerging
hardcore scenes. Self-identified queer punk and social activist Stephen
Donaldson (aka Donny the Punk) addresses this in an edition of a street
2
zine called Homocore. He states:
2 Edited by Tom Jennings and Deke Motif Nihilson, Homocore was published between
1988 and 1991, and distributed in San Francisco. An extensive selection of back issues
is now available to view online at <http://www.wps.com/archives/HOMOCORE>.
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 123
When punk made the transition from the classic style to Hardcore, there started a
new emphasis, not part of the original idea of Punk, on being hard, and this was
identified with being macho. Given the popular image of homosexual activities as
unmanly, it was not surprising that homophobia soon became a part fortunately
a very controversial part of the Punk scene. (cited in OHara, 1999, p. 120)
gay culture not only didnt include me, it was antagonistic to me. People
were, like, You like rock? You dont like Judy Garland? (cited in Ar-
nold, 1995, p. 25).
In 1985, gay filmmaker and pornographer Bruce LaBruce and les-
4
bian filmmaker and musician G.B. Jones published a zine titled J.D.s,
which is widely acknowledged to be the zine that launched the queercore
movement (Ciminelli & Knox, 2005; Fenster, 1993; Spencer, 2005). On
the pages of J.D.s, LaBruce, Jones and others rant about the prevailing
heterosexism and gender segregation that has become typical of punk
rock (sub)cultures as well as the orthodoxy and assimilationist attitudes
of the Western gay mainstream. Expressed in the pages of J.D.s, queer-
core enacts a conscious move away from lesbian and gay specificity,
which is further reflected in a manifesto that featured in the first issue of
J.D.s zine (1985) titled Dont Be Gay. LaBruce explains:
Were tired of the gay scene, which even in the 80s was starting to get assimila-
tionist and conformist, so we turned to punk rock because it seemed more glamor-
ous and political and aesthetically pleasing. But we quickly discovered that punk
had become sexually conventional and boring, betraying its early roots. The
original punk movement, like the early gay movement, was about embracing all
sorts of nonconformist behaviour. Early punks experimented with homosexuality,
bisexuality, transsexuality, and trisexuality theyd try anything. But by the mid-
80s, with the advent of hardcore and the mosh pit, a new era of machismo and het-
erosexual rigidity was ushered in We started J.D.s as a reaction against the in-
creasing sexual conformity of both the gay and punk movements. (cited in
Ciminelli & Knox 2005, p. 8, emphasis in original)
It was through J.D.s that this scene and its associated punk rock
musical style first became known as homocore; however, the prefix
homo was soon replaced by queer in order to better represent the di-
versity of scene participants and to distance the movement completely
from lesbian and gay conventions. Homo or queercore was an emerging
(sub)culture and an ideological space articulated first and formally
act on the national tour of commercially successful American punk rock band
Green Day. For a more detailed discussion of Pansy Division, see DeChaine (1997)
and Cynthia Fuchs (1998).
4 Some accounts suggest J.D.s ran for eight issues between 1985 and 1991 (Spencer,
2005), while others propose that there were nine issues starting in 1986 and
finishing in 1991 (Ciminelli & Knox, 2005). A selection of J.D.s back issues is
available through the Queer Zine Archive Project at <http://www.qzap.org>.
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 125
6
Dresch and founder of Candy-Ass Records, expresses her anger towards
major labels that often advise queer artists to use heteronormative pro-
nouns in their lyrics, claiming that queer narratives limit the marketing
potential of an artist. Why arent straight people limiting themselves
[when they sing about being straight]? Bleyle argues. I didnt live Bob
Dylans songs, and I didnt live the Guns n Roses shit, but I still got
their records and listened to them (cited in Ciminelli & Knox 2005, p.
56).
In its beginnings as a musical genre, queercore was akin to punk:
this is signified by the suffix core, which is indicative of its punk rock
extraction. Originally, queercore was distinguished by its loud, fast and
raw sound, its physically energetic and interactive performance style
and, most significantly, its lyrics. Queercore lyrics are typically queer-
centric, remorselessly vulgar, antagonistic and political, relying heavily
on a balanced mix of both anger and humour. Notable queercore bands
7
such as the gay punk Pansy Division and the dyke punk Tribe 8, for ex-
ample, brashly tackle a range of sexual themes in their songs including
fisting, oral sex, masturbation, transgenderism and S/M, to name a few,
while also attempting to incite commentary on political and social con-
ditions that result in gender and sexual oppression. However, defining a
queercore sound has become somewhat problematic because, according
to various published accounts from queercore participants, the music is
defined largely by its extra-musical qualities such as its politics, themat-
ics and queer narratives rather than by its musical qualities. Gina Arnold
suggests that queercore should not be thought of as a genre; rather, its
a subculture. The bands involved may be allied with one another in their
goals, but they sound entirely different from one another (1997, pp.
8
161162). A definition posted on the official Queercore Blitz website
characterises queercore as:
6 Team Dresch is a queer punk rock band that also shares strong ties to the riot grrrls
movement. The band formed in Portland, Oregon in the early 1990s.
7 Tribe 8 formed in the early 1990s in San Francisco, California. The band takes its
name from the lesbian term tribade, which means a woman who partakes in the
sexual practice of tribadism.
8 Queercore Blitz was a festival showcasing queercore bands that toured the United
States in 2004 and 2005.
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 127
able, most examine the actions and cultural products of queercore musi-
cians and scene participants, locating these within discourses of punk,
queer activism and queers disidentificatory (or anti-identity) politics (e.g.
see Ciminelli & Knox, 2005; Cooper, 1996; du Plessis & Chapman, 1997;
Fenster, 1993; Fuchs, 1998; Spencer, 2005; Wiedlack, 2011). Here, I too
draw on these connections but I also use DeChaines (1997) work on
queercores sensibility of play, as it proves useful for theoretically
framing the case study of queer punk band Anal Traffic that is presented
at the end of this chapter. Moreover, I build upon this to argue that
queercore also exhibits a highly developed sense of camp. To do this, I
draw on an earlier discussion of camp from Chapter 3 suggesting that
camp is an operative modality of queer subjectivity, a way of bringing
the queer subject into being through playful irreverence for the estab-
lished order and cultural norms. Moreover, camp is a theatricalised form
of queer political praxis, functioning as a cultural critique and a non-
violent form of social protest.
The conditions of play outlined by DeChaine are strongly grounded
in Mikhail Bakhtins (1984) notion of the carnivalesque. As the argu-
ment by Kleinhans (previously cited in Chapter 3) suggests, camp as
queer parody similarly exhibits awareness of the grotesque, of carnival,
and of anger, sensuality, and sexuality (1994, p. 199). Therefore, before
attending directly to queercores sensibility of play, a preliminary dis-
cussion of the carnivalesque is required. Within a context of humour and
jest, the carnivalesque exhibits qualities of parody, mockery, playful an-
archy and grotesque realism. A carnival atmosphere favours vulgarity
and profanity; it displays a total lack of reverence towards systems of
power and through ritualised social theatrics; it encourages criticism and
subversion of standard social hierarchies. The carnival offered its par-
ticipants an escape from the social norms that governed appropriate or
acceptable behavioural conduct, affording them an imaginary and tem-
porary reality or, as Bakhtin describes it, a second world and a second
life outside officialdom (1984, p. 6), in which the oppressed could tem-
porarily escape the conditions of their oppression by inverting, mocking
and parodying the norms of the ruling class. The essence of grotesque
realism within the carnival atmosphere is further described by Bakhtin
as degradation the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal and
abstract (1984, p. 19). He specifically points to this in relation to the
body, which has long been organised in negative binary opposition to the
130 CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal
mind and/or spirit. To degrade means to concern oneself with the lower
sanctum of the body, the life of the belly, the reproductive organs; it
therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, preg-
nancy and birth (1984, p. 21). Within the carnival context, the body is
emphasised and exaggerated, bodily pleasures are stressed and the body
becomes a playful site of public spectacle.
According to Attali (1985), music plays a significant role in social
organisation: its order stimulates social order, and its dissonances ex-
press marginalities (1985, p. 29). Through the channelling of noise and
social disobedience, music gives order to bedlam. For Attali, the origins
of music that is, music as it first existed outside systems of economic
exchange and value can be located in the ritual sacrifice of the scape-
goat and carnival. Music channelled disorder: it accommodated tempo-
rary chaotic episodes and the transgression of social order masked by the
exhibition of carnival, which in turn marked the limitations of social
normativities and affirmed boundaries of social respectability. Music
operated as both a mirror of mainstream sensibility and power relations,
and a strategic resource in the disruption of order. Attali suggests that
musics primary function under this system is not to be sought in aes-
thetics but in the effectiveness of its participation in social regulation
(1985, p. 30). Under a system of economic exchange, music behaves
quite differently: once valorised, music is no longer able to remain a
pure, uncensored social affirmation. Much like punk, which in its origi-
nal form resisted social conservatism, appropriate gender and sexual
conduct and commercial modes of production via a DIY ethos, the ori-
gins of music itself and the value of its function, according to Attali, can
be located in the potential for music to facilitate disobedience and affect
the central ideologies that govern society.
Queercore shares a particular affinity with Bakhtins carnival and
Attalis system of music as ritual sacrifice. Like the carnival, queercore
does not operate in isolation from the mainstream, but rather playfully
and critically interacts with it from the margins. For the most part,
queercore is resistant to mainstream commercialisation, not only due to
the ethos that underpins it, but also because its themes generally are too
controversial to be marketed to conventional audiences. Then, thinking
through Attali, queercore potentially retains its power of subversion and
its capacity to effect social organisation and affirm the existence of the
queer outside the dominant social order. The queercore movement may
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 131
notion of camp (Dyer, 1999; Meyer, 1994), and does not serve as a
function of camp within a queer context because camp within a queer
context is always a property of queer visibility and is thus inherently po-
litical. However, I would argue that the incongruity of pastiche, its
ability to disrupt linearity and completeness (1997, p. 16), as
DeChaine puts it, shares some resonance with queer camp because pas-
tiche, in this way, problematises notions of cultural authority and
authenticity, particularly the authority of high culture, which privileges
authenticity. As such, pastiche acknowledges the false truth of authen-
ticity in terms of a work of art and also in terms of the self, which in
Foucauldian terms may also be considered a work of art pointing to the
inherent theatricality and incompleteness of identity and of self that is
recognised through queer perception.
The final tactic of play identified by DeChaine is bricolage, which
closely relates to appropriation and has always been a particularly im-
portant feature of punk. Punk exemplifies most clearly the subcultural
uses of these anarchic modes. It attempted through perturbation and
deformation to disrupt and reorganize meaning, argues Hebdige (1991,
p. 106). Punk like queercore is notorious for its bricolage of form,
genre and style in that it often appropriates the musical qualities of reg-
gae, industrial, electronic and pop idioms in the creation of its own
musical artefacts. Moreover, punk again like queercore employs
elements of parody and pastiche in the construction and performance of
musical bricolage, and in its fashions and artwork. In his explanation of
bricolage, DeChaine draws on Hebdiges often-cited argument that cer-
tain subcultures can be considered bricoleurs in the way that they ap-
propriate another range of commodities by placing them in a symbolic
ensemble which served to erase or subvert their original straight mean-
ings (Hebdige, 1991, p. 104). It is in this subversion of original or
straight meaning that bricolage exhibits qualities of camp, particularly
a campish perception of an object in which the process of perception and
recontextualisation of the object comes to signify queer agency. As such,
I would argue that while bricolage can be posited as a tactic of play as
DeChaine suggests, it along with the other stylistic elements of parody
and pastiche, and semiotic and/or ideological appropriation and resig-
nification can also be considered tactical ways of enacting a queer
camp sensibility. Therefore, while I do not dispute that a sensibility of
play remains central to queercore, I do extend upon the sensibility of
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 133
Sensibilities at Play:
A Case Study of Queer Punk Band Anal Traffic
Weve got multiple agendas there are a lot of expressions of queer sex, lots of
sex, but were a politically conscious bunch with a lot to say about society as a
whole so in the best traditions of punk were trying to do a bit of commentary at the
same time. (personal communication, 22 November 2005)
The lyrics of songs from Anal Traffics 2005 EP, such as Six Beer
Queer, In Past Your Wrist, Daddys Chocolate Kisses and Two
Pumps and a Squirt, exemplify Anal Traffics preoccupation with sex-
140 CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal
ual acts, specifically acts that defy normative sexual practice and are, in
many circumstances, deemed unnatural or morally corrupt. The sexual
content in each of these songs is unashamedly explicit, broaching such
controversial themes as anal sex, oral sex, fisting, coprophilia and
voyeurism. In an attempt to make queer sexual acts publicly visible,
Anal Traffic uses excessive sexual profanity to intensify its argument
and over-articulate sexual perversions. These linguistic tropes used to
describe casual and hedonistic queer sexual encounters can be seen as an
example of Bakhtins (1984) carnivalesque grotesque realism. That is,
these lyrics represent a playful subversion of social and sexual norms
and make constant references to the lower sanctum of the body (p. 21),
in particular stressing acts of sexual perversion and defecation. In Two
Pumps and a Squirt, for example, we hear Darfur shout with unyielding
fervour, I dont want you to love me / Just take your cock and stick it
right up me / Ill hold on tight and if you do it just right its just / Two
pumps and a squirt. While in Daddys Chocolate Kisses, Rollo sings
with a self-knowing sense of irony: Im ready and waiting on the floor
with my mouth wide open / Just squeeze it out, dump your sweet love on
me / Ive got the taste for something brown and warm.
Here we see Anal Traffic engaging with carnival play through stressed
bodily pleasure and sexual vulgarity. Moreover, the band uses terms of play
for example, playing inside someones body, as noted in the song In Past
Your Wrist to describe gratifying sexual encounters. Garvey defends
Anal Traffics sexually explicit content, arguing: Anal Traffic is all about
exploring our inner filth, weve all got it (personal communication, 30 June
2006). Jones supports this argument, suggesting that:
Its all about dirty disgusting sexual things that people are probably doing this very
minute and we make no judgement of it. I want listeners to get into the heads of
people who get off on things that others dont find very savoury. Ive always
wanted to write something about shit and people who are into scat [coprophilia] be-
cause I find it really fascinating. Its like the best and worst things you can think of
are happening right now and someone is into it, thats human nature. People seem
so surprised when they hear these things but really if they understood themselves
theyd know that nothing is surprising. (personal communication, 12 December
2005)
Band members acknowledge that these lyrical tactics are also a means of
antagonising mainstream (and particularly straight) sensibilities. As such,
the lyrics are camp in the way that they problematise acceptable or nor-
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 141
simply because Darfur, Garvey and Jones the primary lyricists lacked
experience upon which to draw. However, Jones told me of a song that
he had written for the ladies titled Minge Binge, which the band is
planning to work into future sets (personal communication, 12 December
2005).
Anal Traffics socio-political consciousness, referred to previously
by Darfur, is particularly evident in the remaining two songs from the
bands six-track EP. These songs, titled Shit for Dickheads and
Scapegoat, form the basis of a critical parodic commentary on a range
9
of issues including John Howards conservative government, inflation,
environmentalism and urban sprawl, sweat-shop manufactured goods,
10
the 2001 Children Overboard affair and social prejudice towards
queers. In Shit for Dickheads, Darfur executes a lyrical polemic
against consumerism, shouting: I went down to shit for dickheads, and I
bought ten kinds of crap / Its all plastic made in sweat-shops and I cant
take it back / All that shit from shit for dickheads costs four-fifty, beg
you pardon / It will only last a weekend but it gives me a consumer hard-
on. Meanwhile, in Scapegoat, Rollo chants: Got my foot right to the
floor / Jonnys getting really bored / Throw some children overboard /
Sit back take note queers are the scapegoat / Go straight for the throat.
As evidenced by these lyrics, Anal Traffic use camp parody and
irony extensively in a musically facilitated commentary on a range of
political issues and social conditions, demonstrating that queer issues
and concerns reach far beyond matters of sexual preference. These songs
in particular mark the use of camp as a theatricalised form of queer po-
litical praxis, functioning as a cultural critique and a non-violent form of
social protest. In this way, Anal Traffics members can be seen as queer
cultural activists (in the tradition of groups such as ACT UP and Out-
Rage), using music and a sophisticated camp parody, with its critical and
ironic undertone, as a means of critiquing the flaws they identify within
9 John Howard was the leader of the conservative Liberal Party and Prime Minister
of Australia from 1996 to 2007.
10 The Children Overboard affair was an Australian political controversy. The Howard
government, which at the time was up for re-election, claimed that asylum seekers off
the coast of Australia had thrown their children into the water in a plea for them to be
rescued. Howard then suggested on radio that genuine refugees would not do this. A
Senate inquiry into the matter was launched, as it was later proven that there was no
evidence to suggest that children had ever been thrown overboard.
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 143
the dominant social order. Moreover, in discussions with the band, the
performers stressed their distance from what Darfur described as the
appeasement lobby of the gay community (personal communication,
November 22, 2005). This comment further emphasises Anal Traffics
desire to challenge both hegemonic as well as mainstream gay politics:
for example, [gay] marriage rights, says Darfur, are not on my ag-
enda (personal communication, November 22, 2005). This attitude is a
hallmark of both punk and queercore in that it situates the band as being
anathema to both straight and gay mainstreams. This marginal position is
one that the band revels in and uses as political leverage to execute its
musical contestations of sexual and social normativities.
When I questioned Darfur, Garvey and Jones with regard to Anal
Traffics reception, they suggested that the band had received mixed
audience responses. Darfur commented:
What weve found is that most people find it amusing and the people that dont like
it dont say much about it so weve heard indirectly that theres a few people, in
fact interestingly, most of the feedback is from other queer people who find it a bit
too extreme, although there have been various straight people who get a bit squirmy
and find it hard to deal with but mostly they think its amusing anyway. I guess
were not really getting out there to a very mainstream or straight audience so Im
sure if we played at a regular punk night we might find that some people are a little
more put off, maybe not with punks, I dont know. So weve had a surprisingly
positive reaction even though people dont identify with what theyre hearing all
the time. Theyre okay with it, they find it amusing, and the material we sing about
is so diverse and so extreme that we dont identify with all of it either and so for us,
its just putting out another character or story thats not necessarily about us. (per-
sonal communication, 22 November 2005)
2005 Pride Fair rejected Anal Traffics proposal to play at Fair Day. The
reason the committee gave for rejecting the band was that Anal Traffic was
too offensive and not family friendly. Later in the interview, Jones went
on to suggest that it was potentially a good thing that Anal Traffic was not
widely embraced by the entire community because while the band remains
on the fringes of queer culture it is free to keep pushing the boundaries of
acceptability without agitating the morals of too many people. Jones
pointed out that popularity brings with it certain expectations:
Because then you get people waving fingers if you put a foot or a flap out of line
and thats something I dont want. I just want to play a few bits and bobs here and
there and keep the subversiveness in the subversive queer community. (personal
communication, 12 December 2005)
A lot of people, especially in our queer audience, take this song the wrong way. The
chorus goes Im nineteen I want a cock up my arse, Im eighteen I want a cock up
my arse, etc. all the way down to Im thirteen I want a cock up my arse, twelve,
and thats where the chorus ends. And thats all that people hear. People hear
twelve and they go, theyre singing about fucking twelve year olds up the arse.
11 As the law currently stands in Queensland, anal intercourse under the age of
eighteen is punishable under the Sodomy Law ( 208209 of the Criminal Code of
1899) with up to fourteen years imprisonment. Queensland is the only state that
still holds an unequal age of consent law, which potentially puts young people at
greater risk of harassment, impedes strategies for HIV and AIDS prevention and
hinders the provision of support services for Queenslands queer youth.
CHAPTER 5: Queer Punk Identity Through a Distortion Pedal 145
But it isnt, its sung in a fashion that suggests that there were quite a few of us
who, when growing up, knew what we wanted at a very young age. (personal
communication, 12 December 2005)
Garvey, who wrote this song, reiterated that it is based on personal ex-
periences of sexual maturity and is intended to stress to the listener that
in developing their sexual self-concepts, queers are fully capable of
making the decision to engage in penetrative anal sex at the same age at
which straight people are deemed legally capable of making the decision
to engage in vaginal intercourse.
The negative reception of this song, particularly by members of the
queer community, highlights an underlying fear that queer sexuality is,
in some instances, associated with paedophilia. Jones concluded that:
This song is easily misconstrued because people just pluck at the thing they find
most fearful. I think specifically in the queer community they pick up on that sim-
ply because there have been so many incorrect allegations about homosexuality and
paedophilia, and they think oh you cant sing about that because youll undo all
our good work. (personal communication, 12 December 2005)
The reception of this song highlights the negative images of queer sexu-
ality, and in turn the damaging effect that these misassumptions have upon
the self-image and collective identity of many queers. Anal Traffics per-
sistent interest in matters of sex, politics and governance evident in the
song Age of Consent, among others suggests that the bands music
infringes the public/private dichotomy, which has reinforced queer sexual
oppression. This bold mixture of in-your-face sex and political commentary
highlights the potential for queer cultural practices to deconstruct the binary
and opposing spheres of personal and political, intimate and public. Anal
Traffics lyrics thus challenge and subvert the oppressive institutions and
social hierarchies that reinforce these dichotomies.
primarily via the physicality of the bands performance and through the
juxtaposition of the performers bodies and gender identities against the
sexual themes explored in their music.
are rather incongruous with the image on the cover of Inches that is,
none of them appears to resemble the tanned, buffed, hairless, scantily
clad and sexually suggestive image of homosexual masculinity pictured
here. In fact, this image on the cover of Inches is juxtaposed with the
physicality of the band members.
Another contradiction between the bands physical image and a
homosexual stereotype is evident in the bands lyrics. Anal Traffics
sexual narratives, most of which deal with themes of overtly aggressive
homosexual masculinity and sex contextualised in sex club spaces, sug-
gestively position Anal Traffic within a hyper-masculine perhaps
leathermen and/or bear culture. Such cultures emphasise a butch rug-
gedness, are male-centric and place an emphasis on hyper-masculine
somatic ideals such as leathermens preference for acute muscle tone and
bears preference for large, hairy bodies and facial hair. Leathermens
fashion is typified by tight leather, uniforms and fetish wear, while bears
tend to preference denim and flannel (e.g. see Hennen, 2008; Suresha,
2009). However, the somatotypes, fashions and physical gesticulation
normally associated with hyper-masculine sexual identities are playfully
undermined by the collective physicality of the band. Parodying such
gay stereotypes, Anal Traffic juxtaposes the overt sexual vulgarity and
aggression associated with hyper-masculine gay men, against slender,
boyish, non-muscular and even female bodies, thus causing incongru-
ence between the lyrical narratives and physical spectacle on stage and
in the image in Figure 7. As Jones remarks:
I find that some of the gay men, like the rough trade who are into leather, will turn
up to see us and because Im a skinny little thing and Shanes tall and slim, and
Sams a woman, we dont fit their ideal of what dirty filthy shit pigs and bears
should be so they put their guard up. Ive felt it a few times when people like that
look at us and go oh [with a confused expression], then walk off because were
not the big rough brooding masculine men they thought wed be. I find it hilari-
ous. I think theyre too busy upholding the image of masculinity theyre trying to
attract. (personal communication, December 12, 2005)
Figure 7 and in their physical performance. Instead, the male and female
bodies that perform the music of Anal Traffic present a fractured array of
gender identities encompassing masculinity, boyishness, androgyny and
femininity. These multiple and incoherent representations of sexuality
expressed by Anal Traffic through the bands lyrics, physical presenta-
tion and promotional imagery point to the broader project of queer. That
is, by demonstrating the multiple manifestations and representations of
male homosexuality, the band is in effect queering homosexuality, dis-
mantling the idea of a homogenous or universal homosexual male gender
in the process.
The bands on-stage antics further point towards its members desire
to be confronting and to challenge the conventions and exceed the boun-
daries of both punk and local queer performance styles. While the simula-
tion of masturbation and male-to-male fellatio are common features of an
Anal Traffic show, it is these same stage antics, as well as the bands lyr-
ics, that both visibly and audibly position the group outside of Brisbanes
alternative and punk scenes and on the edge of local queer culture as well.
By locating the band in this marginal space, Anal Traffic has created a
new position one that is unique in the context of local queer and local
punk cultures. Drawing on the rhetoric and style of queercore, it is a posi-
tion that problematises sexuality within a punk rock context, and a posi-
tion that playfully undermines and confuses gay male stereotypes through
punk rock. Akin to the zeitgeist of queercore, Anal Traffic uses playful
tactics and its members keen sense of camp to negotiate the politics of
sexual identity, to subvert categories of hetero- and homonormativity, and
to resist the musical trappings of mainstream gay culture. Through musical
composition and performance, the band members have found a means of
expressing themselves, emphasising their sexual, social and musical devi-
ancies that they embrace as queer individuals. Anal Traffic marks a site of
queer and musical identity production; it constitutes a way for these indi-
viduals to enact their contestations of the normal and to aesthetically cri-
tique the hetero-normal/homo-deviant dichotomy. In doing so, the band is
calling into question the truth, stability and normativity of sexual identity
in general, and putting in its place campish parodies that celebrate all the
fun and filth that its members suggest are at the core of all human
sexual desires.
CHAPTER 6
This 1916 labour song, written as an ode to American labour leader act-
ivist and feminist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, could, with the right musical
accompaniment, just as easily work today as unruly punk or anarcho-
pop. While the rebellions impetus (and indeed the meaning of queer)
may have changed, women still rebel and songs continue to be written to
give voice to, celebrate and memorialise womens struggles, and to in-
cite other women to do the same. In queer times more akin to our own,
women musicians have defended their right to express anger towards a
patriarchal hegemony that continues to quash assertions of femininity,
femaleness and woman-centre sexuality, and they have conveyed these
expressions though various forms of popular music-making employing
music as forum of self-expression and self-experience. Popular music-
making especially rock music discourses has long depended on the
reiteration of gender normativities. Rock in particular, suggests Norma
Coates, is indeed a technology of gender in that masculinity is re-
inforced and multiplied in its many discursive spaces (1997, p. 52).
Moreover, rock musical spaces are constructed as pre-eminent represen-
tations of largely white, heterosexual masculine supremacy (Bayton,
1993; Coates, 1997; Dibben, 2002; Frith & McRobbie, 1990; Whiteley,
150 CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas
1
2000). In the spirit of womyns music and lesbian feminist culture,
recent iconoclasms within popular music discourses, such as the
development of the riot grrrls movement and dykecore, have reignited an
awareness of both feminist and queer issues within popular music, chal-
lenging the impossibility of female articulations within phallocentric
popular music discourses.
The music and associated cultural styles to be discussed in this
chapter are locatable across two cultural and political forms that are both
complementary and, some would say, at odds: queer and feminism. The
connections between feminist and queer cultures and activist forms are
broadly acknowledged, however directly or indirectly, outside scholar-
ship. Yet within scholarly theoretical frameworks, queer theory has often
been charged as exclusionary, erasing lesbian specificity, rewriting
feminism, implicitly referring to the queer subject as white, gay and
male, and advocating a false sense of identity fluidity that does not re-
flect the lived realities of lesbians and gay men (Edwards, 1998;
Escoffier, 1990; Jeffreys, 2003; Walters, 1996; Weed, 1997). From a
lesbian feminist perspective, Sheila Jeffreys claims that queer theory is
largely hostile towards lesbians, and disputes its claims of inclusivity.
Moreover, she believes that queer theory is dangerous to women because
it is founded upon and primarily supports articulations of masculinity,
which she defines as the behaviour of male dominance (2003, p. 7).
Suzanne Walters posits a slightly more positive relationship between the
two paradigms, noting the usefulness of theorising beyond gender rig-
idity, as queer does, while also acknowledging that queer sometimes
forgets the very real and felt experience of gender that women, particu-
larly, live with quite explicitly (1996, p. 844). While it is important to
be aware of these tensions, I do not wish to add to the theoretical debate
here; rather, I suggest that outside of the academy, women musicians
have enacted, and continue to enact, a politic that borrows from both
feminist and queer discourses. Drawing on riot grrrl-style third-wave
feminism, since the 1990s a younger generation of women have largely
rejected the overtly intellectualised debates around gender and sexual
identity (be it explicitly feminist or queer). Many riot grrrl spokeswomen
1 The term womyn (or wimmin) is an alternative spelling of women, and has been
used largely by feminists as a means of removing the reference to men from the
category of women.
CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas 151
The position of women within Western popular music cultures has often
been a subordinate one. Since the 1950s, the patriarchal power structures
of rock music in particular have succeeded in most instances in regulat-
ing the role of women to little more than that of the fan, the consumer,
the subservient follower, the sexual object or the groupie. While pop and
152 CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas
Feminists created an alternative musical world of their own. This world offered the
chance to rewrite the rules: of lyrics, of band membership and organization, of the gig,
of the stage, and even of the music itself. Feminists enthusiastically and optimistically
promoted alternative values: collectivism and co-operation instead of competitive indi-
vidualism; participative democracy and equality instead of hierarchy. (1993, p. 179)
Alix Dobkin and Cris Williamson created original music and their own
alternative musical institutions as a means of combating the patriarchy
and misogyny of the music industry. In 1973, Dobkin released Lavender
Jane Loves Women, which was ground-breaking in its attention to les-
bian feminist themes. Dobkin wanted lesbians to have tangible musical
proof of their existence (1979, p. 12). In the same year, Williamson
launched Olivia Records, the first label dedicated solely to the recording
and marketing of womyns music. Olivia Records was a separatist or-
ganisation that employed a feminist business model, as it not only pro-
duced womyns music but also solely employed women. For female
musicians of this kind, the personal was intensely political, and this was
reflected in their musical style and lyrical content. The message and
politics of the womyns movement were articulated primarily through
folk music styles because folk was already imbued with political themes
and its sound was considered softer, less aggressive and therefore less
masculine (Bayton, 1993; Kearney; 1997). Lyrically, womyns music
dealt with issues of suffrage, lesbianism, domesticity, motherhood, the
female body and other explicitly female themes.
As womyns music continued to position itself in opposition to male
music styles such as rock, punk and metal, its focus on gender differ-
ences within music proved to be somewhat problematic for future gen-
erations of feminist musicians. Some women were frustrated by the
tendency of womyns music to downplay female sexuality and to re-
define lesbianism as a sensual rather than sexual experience. Peraino
recalls that, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new generation of
lesbians inspired by third-wave feminism, queer theory, punk rock cul-
ture and AIDS activism flatly rejected womens music as part of a
reevaluation and critique of cultural feminisms construction of wo-
maness and women identification (2006, p. 175). As younger women
grew sceptical about second-wave feminism and the gender rigidity of
womyns music traditions, new musical cultures began to emerge, most
notably the movement know as riot grrrl.
Riot grrrl is a DIY feminist punk movement that first emerged in the
early 1990s in Americas Pacific Northwest region, initially around
Olympia, Washington and Portland, Oregon. Drawing inspiration from
earlier female punk musicians such as The Slits and Poly Styrene from
154 CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas
2
the X-Ray Spex, the riot grrrls evoked a renaissance in angry, loud, ag-
gressive and bratty female music-making. Much like the queercore
movement, the riot grrrls were angered by the gender orthodoxy and ma-
chismo prevalent in the American hardcore punk scene, with its violent
forms of audience interaction in the mosh pit and its sexist attitude to
women musicians (Schilt, 2004). The name riot grrrl signals the vitality
of youth implicit in the term girl as opposed to woman, while adding
energy, rage and a growl to the idea of girl by spelling it in this par-
ticular way. The riot grrrls, suggests Kearney, were:
Often highly critical that second wave feminism operated like a fundamentalist
religion with prescriptions on how to dress, behave and think, young feminists such
as the riot grrrls [began] infusing feminist politics with forms of confrontational
cultural activism which relied less on exposing gender differences than on decon-
structing them. (1997, p. 224)
2 Forming in London in 1976, both The Slits and X-Ray Spex were forerunners in the
punk scene. X-Ray Spex most notable single Oh Bondage, Up Yours! (1977) can
be described as a riot grrrl premonition due to its attention to feminist and anti-
capitalist themes (Leblanc, 1999; Lee, 2002).
CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas 155
Often overlooked in discussions of riot grrrls are the ties between this
movement, queercore and the history of lesbian feminist culture more
generally. Although many riot grrrls were queer punks and vice versa,
156 CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas
exclusively associated with punk. Riot Grrrl Ink., for example, produces
and supports artists across a variety of popular genres. On its website,
the label avoids stating that it has an affinity with a particular style of
music. Instead, it claims to provide resources and financial support for
political, radical and revolutionary art it all forms art that defines and
inspires contemporary queer culture and its ongoing revolution and
evolution (Riot Grrrl Ink., 2008). Thus Riot Grrrl Ink. further points to
the expansion of riot grrrl-style feminism and its attentiveness to queer
issues and queer cultural production.
The combining of queer politics and theory with riot grrrl feminism
has largely been responsible for refocusing musical presentations of fe-
male gender and sexuality, encouraging women to celebrate a variation
of gender roles, deconstruct sexual and bodily normativities and create
new modalities of female genders, and alternative performances and
articulations of female sexualities. And in doing this, queer female artists
have evoked and invigorated a broad range of musical styles. Musicians
like the self-proclaimed queercore/dyke punk rock outfit Tribe 8 employ
a unique style of feminist politics in their lyrics while addressing and
critiquing queer dyke gender, sex roles and desires in songs such as
Masochists Medley (1996), Tranny Chaser (1996), Neanderthal
Dyke (1995), Estrofemme (1998) and Femme Bitch Top (1995),
among others. In doing so, Halberstam suggests that Tribe 8 is producing
a taxonomy of queer lives and a dissonant record of dyke punk and
dyke genders (2007b, p. 57). Team Dresch the de facto riot grrrls of
the queer rock scene (Ciminelli & Knox, 2005, p. 182) interweaves
queer and feminist themes in its music. On albums such as Captain My
Captain (1996), Team Dresch critically explores issues of sexism and
heterosexism, aiming to educate younger fans on the history of lesbian
political struggle as well as addressing current anxieties around lesbian
sexual freedom and public expression. Discussing this album and the
lineages of dykecore more generally, Angela Wilson explains how, in
terms of lyrical themes and liner note text, this album gives a direct nod
to the earlier generations of lesbians like those involved with Olivia Re-
cords stress[ing] the importance of remembering the struggles les-
bians have faced through time (2008, p. 53).
158 CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas
3
Explicit in both its lyrics and music, electroclash ensemble Le Tigre
pays homage and makes multiple references to various queer and femin-
ist artists, musicians and writers who have inspired the band both cre-
atively and politically. The song Hot Topic from Le Tigres self-titled
1999 debut album serves as a notable example of this as it recites an
extensive list of female musicians, critical thinkers and performers such
as Joan Jet, Gayatri Spivak and Yoko Ono, among many others. On the
4
Butchies album We are Not Femme (1998), this queer punk outfit per-
forms a cover of Cris Williamsons iconic womyns anthem Shooting
Star; the Butchies rocked-up rendition of this folk song is noted by
Halberstam as a way for riot dykes to build a bridge between the rau-
cous spirit of rebellion and the quieter, acoustic world of womens music
from the 1970s and 1980s (2006, p. 18). Queer dyke duo Bitch and
Animal similarly perform an act of intergenerational connectivity in the
making of their 2003 album, Sour Juice Rhyme. Here, while also lyri-
cally signalling many great queer women and feminist thinkers, they
teamed up with June Millington to co-produce and co-record the album.
Millington, a godmother of womens music, was in one of the first all-
female rock bands, Fanny (formed in 1970). In this instance, the folk
stylings of Bitch and Animals album could be seen as building a styl-
istic bridge in the opposite direction a further feminist deconstruction
of the soft/hard, folk/rock, female/male dichotomy.
Selecting from a history of dyke music, queer electronic/dance
quartet Lesbians on Ecstasy have re-recorded and thematically reinter-
preted lesbian folk, country, rock and punk favourites from artists such
as the Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, Team Dresch and k.d. lang. On
their self-titled 2004 album, Lesbians on Ecstasy covered langs Con-
stant Craving (1992), transforming it from a romantic ballad into an
anti-consumerist manifesto. Meanwhile, the disco/soul/punk stylings of
The Gossip and its self-proclaimed fat femme queer dyke front woman
Beth Ditto make multiple lyrical references to queer and feminist issues
in songs like Standing in the Way of Control (2006). Meanwhile,
through their music, one can hear echoes of earlier female artists like
3 Le Tigre was formed in 1998 by riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna, formally of Bikini Kill.
Currently, its members include Johanna Fateman and JD Samson.
4 The Butchies is a punk rock lesbian feminist band that formed in 1998 in Durham,
North Carolina. Some of the bands members have also played in Team Dresch, as
well as other notable riot grrrl and queercore bands.
CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas 159
Siouxsie Sioux, Grace Jones, Mama Cass and Janis Joplin. Often pro-
claimed as by the press as carrying the riot grrrl torch, Ditto says in an
interview with Diva magazine:
Riot Grrrl as a look is gone, but as an ethic and a code of behaviour, its still very
much alive because of the way pioneers like Kathleen Hanna behaved and changed
females in music. Artists like Peaches and Uffie can exist in the way they do, and
enjoy it too; the message is the same, in a new package. The doors are now open for
all kinds of messages and motives, like if you wanna sing about fucking a guy in
the ass, you can. (cited in Coope, 2007, para. 7)
berstam (2007b, pp. 5758). Although she writes this with specific refer-
ence to the work of Lesbians on Ecstasy, among others, this notion,
grounded in a somewhat stylistically schizophrenic logic of queer tem-
porality and (sub)cultural (de)construction, is broadly applicable to the
riot-grrrl style ethic that, as Ditto pointed out, is still very much alive and
well in contemporary queer feminist music. Artists such as those dis-
cussed in this chapter bands and performers who borrow from both
feminist and queer cultural styles and political discourses suggest that
during the 1990s a cross-pollination of feminist and queer politics within
and outside of the riot grrrl movement produced a new politico-musical
discourse that has produced, and continues to produce, different forms of
queer feminist music-making.
Today, women continue to seek expression through genres and forms
that traditionally have been reserved for men forms like reggae and/or
funk that often relegate femaleness (particularly queer forms of femaleness
and female sexuality) to the margins. Many women demonstrate a re-
tainment of female solidarity and continue to perpetuate broad-scale social
justice and healing through music-making. In the following case study of
Bertha Control, I refer to and expand upon this. I demonstrate the ways in
which these women execute their challenge to patriarchy, sexism, hetero-
sexism, racism, ageism and capitalism. Moreover, I argue that both queer
and feminist agendas remain central to their work.
Sistas at Play:
A Case Study of Queer Feminist Band Bertha Control
out that, like rock music forms, reggae and funk traditionally are male-
dominated genres, thus their approach to the formation of Bertha Control
is firmly grounded in their experience as women, particularly women who
are trying to make their way in a male-dominated musical style. Preece
commented that the band members aim to be role models for young
women coming through, or just women generally who want to play music
If they can see six women doing it maybe theyll think, wow, its actu-
ally possible (personal communication, 30 November 2005).
Bertha Control takes great pride in its members role as mentors to
other women, encouraging female participation in all aspects of per-
forming and promoting their music. Alexander stated that:
We try and skill up women in all the different aspects of it cause in a way having a
band is like having a small business; there are all these auxiliary things attached
like the cover artwork and the graphic design on the website and the live sound. We
make sure that all these roles are filled by women when we can. And if we could
find appropriate recording studios which were working on, wed have women in
that role as well. For example, at the last gig we had two trainee sound mixers
watching over the woman who does our sound. These were two women who were
wanting to learn how to do sound and I love giving people the opportunity to do
that kind of thing. Its [live sound] another area where there arent many women.
(personal communication, 30 November 2005)
Cottone added that this idea of nurturing was something that the band
fostered internally as well:
I think our role is awareness-raising. I feel really conscious when were playing that
yeah were all having a great time and having a great party but firstly were on sto-
5
len land, having this great time at other peoples expense. I think we need to be
aware of that but without dampening the situation because another role I think we
play is a healing role. We offer healing to people doing really hard work and we
support a lot of activist movements so when everyone gets together to listen they
can all relax and celebrate and have healing though music. (personal communica-
tion, 30 November 2005)
The notion that music is both a weapon and a healing tool is a central
theme in Rastafarian reggae music, marking the cohesion between the
bands post-colonial politics and musical style. Moreover, as previously
noted, queer feminist music is highly attuned to its healing capacity.
In terms of the bands musicality, Bertha Control exhibits a rather cu-
rious, or possibly queer, approach to style. I posit this because the bands
sound specifically its rejection of rocks whiteness and misogyny in-
corporates elements of funk, reggae, ska, rap and occasionally punk styles,
thus situating the group queerly within the discourses of typical feminist
music production and also within the dominant styles of queer cultural
production, as funk, reggae, ska and rap are not genres traditionally asso-
ciated with either feminist or queer cultures. Bertha Controls sound is
typified by funk guitar, bass grooves and interlocking 4/4 rhythms. In the
style of funk, many of the melodic instruments often take on rhythmic
qualities, contributing equally to the percussive drive of the music, and to
its timbric and tonal qualities. Songs frequently incorporate the off-beat
sounds of reggae with its recurring accents on the third beat of the bar,
intricate vocal harmonies, freestyle rapping, and classic ska-style key-
board, saxophone and trumpet riffs. The bands occasional use of flute
melodies, and Latin rhythms and harmonies, suggests that the band draws
on a vast array of non-white musical influences, further distinguishing it
from a standardised rock or pop sound.
A recurring phrase employed by the women in my discussion with
them was the Bertha vibe. The women used this phrase in reference to
both their sound and their stage performance. When I asked them to
elaborate on its meaning, Cottone and Preece suggested that it was a
feeling or atmosphere that the group created on stage, a type of exchange
between the band and the audience. The women also agreed that there
was a political aspect to the vibe. Cottone explained:
Its all part of the vibe, theres definitely a political side to it, theres also a per-
formance aspect to it and I think just simply having six women on stage playing all
the instruments is quite new and different for a lot of people, it has its own feel to it.
One different thing about Bertha from the other bands is the traditional thing of
focusing on the lead vocalist and everyone supporting the lead vocalist, but we
equally share the stage, which is pretty different in general. But theres definitely a
political element to it as well. (personal communication, 30 November 2005)
Again, Cottones remark points to the strength that the band members
draw from their identity as women, and also from their identity as female
instrumentalists. Furthermore, it is strength and an energy that the band
members exchange with their audience in a live context. As an attendee
at many Bertha Control gigs, I can attest that this exchange is evident
most notably in their positive and encouraging dialogue with their audi-
ence, their playful personas and colorful stage attire, and their ability to
rouse their audiences enthusiasm through dance.
As Cottone pointed out above, Bertha Control does not have a desig-
nated lead singer: vocal performances are shared between the band members.
This idea of equally sharing the stage and the role of vocalist is a central
performance aesthetic of the band. It is a marker of the members equality as
individuals and their collective resistance to hierarchical power structures
again reminiscent of a second-wave approach to musical organisation. Bertha
Controls members acknowledged that when they made this decision it was
difficult to find a similar performance model from which to work. Generally
in popular music formations, the lead singer is accompanied by the rest of
the band. This is reflected in all aspects of stage design, press photography
and even credit listing, as the lead singer is generally named above all others
166 CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas
6 The rainbow flag is a widely recognised symbol of queer pride and has been in
global circulation since it was first designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker
in 1978 for use in the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade.
CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas 167
During the first two years of Bertha Control, the band predominantly sup-
ported womens and queer events and movements, receiving the majority of
its airplay on local queer community radio programs. However, Cottone
pointed out that: weve always thought our music goes far beyond that and
we dont want to be limited to that audience because we think weve got a lot
to say to everyone (personal communication, 30 November 2005).
Indeed, Bertha Control does have a lot to say on a broad range of issues,
and by mid-2005 numerous community radio stations on the east coast
of Australia had begun playing the bands music. Its songs have also
been included on various reggae and ska compilation discs, signifying
the diversification of Bertha Controls audience. While the women
maintain their loyalty to Brisbanes queer community for example, by
performing at Brisbanes annual Pride Fair and other queer fundraisers
the band exhibits a resounding social consciousness for a variety of top-
ics that do not exclusively pertain to queer matters.
Much of Bertha Controls musical output directly addresses themes
of social justice and governance, positioning the majority of the bands
work within the context of protest music. Arguing from a strong leftist
perspective, a range of contemporary political debates are voiced
through song. Lyrics that deal with Australian politics, censorship, ra-
cism, feminism, environmentalism, refugee rights, social pluralism, the
abuse of policing powers, anti-corporatisation and anti-capitalism domi-
nate their agenda, fulfilling the bands role as minority spokeswomen
and awareness-raisers. This is evident, for example, in songs such as
Fight, from Bertha Controls 2005 album Out of Control. This acoustic
guitar-driven funk tune is accompanied by a rapped vocal line uttering
the words, Hey Mr. Howard can you hear us when we scream / We
dont want a war, we wanna free the refugees. Time, a song from the
same album provides a useful example of their attention to feminist
themes. For Bertha Control, feminism is always located within a broader
anti-capitalist and environmental context. This percussively elaborate
salsa-inspired track speaks of the boys club that rules the world, and
arrogantly prescribe to women what that can and cant do with their
bodies: the same White upper-class men are making our laws / Ma-
nipulating the media to believe in their wars, sing Bertha Control.
Alexander made mention that, in the past, Bertha Control had been re-
7
jected from a gig in the Queen Street Mall for being an anti-capitalist
band, which Alexander suggested was one of our proudest political
moments (personal communication, 30 November 2005). Elaborating
on the bands politics, Alexander said:
7 The Queen Street Mall is the central shopping area of the Brisbane CBD.
CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas 169
We all have our individual politics and I guess the recognition and support of each
others politics is anarchist in a lot of senses. I personally identify as an anarchist
and I think we all would identify as anti-capitalist. (personal communication,
30 November 2005)
that such negotiations encompass. Speaking about her gender and sexual
identity, and her expression of this in Bertha Control, Alexander pointed
out that:
[On stage] I feel that I clearly come across as a lesbian, I love it when I sing I hope
your daughters gay and have a good fucking day, but even Mona does that and
shes queer I see us all as being sistas, so it [sexuality] is kind of linked to a
family identity of the band. But Ive always felt a bit of conflict in how to express
gender identity because as a lesbian if you do something like have hairy armpits or
wear a tank top youre conforming to societys idea of what a lesbian is but if you
wear a dress youre conforming to societys idea of what a woman is so you just
have to get past that. Either way youre conforming to someones stereotype of
something. So I really enjoy playing around with different kinds of costuming. I
personally identify as a woman, but I enjoy wearing things that would shock people
and conflict with being a woman but at the same time conflict with being a lesbian
too We all have hairy armpits and hairy legs but at the same time we dont look
like standard dykes, but to a lot of people who look at us they just look straight at
those armpits and go youre all a bunch of lesbians. It all depends on your subjec-
tive view of someone. Like you [indicating me, the interviewer] would be used to
seeing images of lesbians who dont look like lesbians but to a straight man that
comes along to our gigs we are really confronting. Even that there are six women
on stage and the stereotypes attached to that, like the fact we have women drum-
mers. (personal communication, 30 November 2005)
After hearing what Alexander had to say, Preece, with a slightly sur-
prised tone, admitted that she had not really thought about it to such a
degree. She commented that in her experience gender and sexuality are
about what Im feeling and whats right for me, and the music she cre-
ates is an expression of that (personal communication, 30 November
2005). Preece gains a lot of personal strength from being a female
drummer, and remarked that she feels both her femaleness and drum-
ming abilities are central to her self-image. Cottone added that she finds
the performance and musical space of Bertha Control to be generally
accepting of, and accommodating to, her multiple gender and sexual
identity performances:
I think Im definitely a woman but I also think Ive got a really strong boy spirit
that I have a lot of fun with I actually got recruited halfway through Bertha
Controls life into being a lesbian so Im a cross-over case, so I identify mostly as
queer but also as bisexual and lesbian and heterosexual, so I identify as lots of dif-
ferent things and Im not afraid to express all of those different identities on stage
or musically. Patty and I do a song called The Rap Against Homophobic Crap
CHAPTER 6: Womyn, Grrrls and Sistas 173
which we wrote together, and were out there saying, were gay and if you dont
fucking like it fuck off. But a lot of my songs are about men that Ive been in love
with too. (personal communication, 30 November 2005)
Haircuts, the suburb [where you hang out] i.e.: New Farm versus West End, the
Adidas shorts, the sporting dykes. Ive been a part of that [the mainstream] com-
munity being an ex-sporting person and what I perceive to be the difference in the
cultures is that a lot of those women are chasing what I see to be a heterosexual
dream. Like wanting to own their own house, have a dog, go to Options every Fri-
day night, listen to Top 40 radio. They arent really politically aware, they would
question me being vegetarian, question my hairy armpits. Theyre just not as aware
as the West End crew or what you might call the alternative queer culture. (personal
communication, 30 November 2005)
The gay community want to have fun, we want to be taken somewhere and feel a
good energy and music is a big part of that so what would we be if it wasnt for
the music? I wouldnt be anyone if it wasnt for the music. (DJ Neroli, personal
communication, 8 March 2006)
In the above quote, taken from an interview with deejay and producer
1
DJ Neroli, who began and developed her career on the Brisbane scene,
she emphasises the centrality of music to the local scene. Indeed, music
is so central to the scene that she is unable to imagine what form it
would take in musics absence. Reinforcing the role of music within the
scene, she goes on to quote the lyrics from a track by Faithless entitled
God is a DJ. She says: this is a church, this is where I heal my hurts,
it really does say it all Ive always know that if I had a shitty week I
could go out dancing all night and Id feel better (personal communica-
tion, 8 March 2006). As we continued talking, she told me how music
derives its importance in the scene because it can be both a sexual and
spiritual experience. Furthermore, she gestures towards the idea that she
structures her own identity and place within the local scene in terms of
her musical role. Similarly, for local scene participant Peter, music
structures and gives purpose to scene gatherings and, depending on
whether the music is good or bad, can influence the way he experiences
his night out. He says:
Music has been the binder of the queer community over the years, because the
queer scene has been just that, a dance scene, a music scene. When people get to-
gether and go out for a night its music that they go to. You hear them say oh the
musics crap, or I had a good time but I couldnt dance to anything or I had a good
1 At the time of writing, Neroli was residing in London and held a residency at
Heaven (one of Londons most iconic gay superclubs).
176 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
time but they were playing really shit music. Music binds social outings especially for
the queer community because the scene was burgeoning in the clubs where you could
escape from the rest of the world. (personal communication, 12 December 2005)
For Neroli and Peter, as for the other musicians and performers that I
have introduced in previous chapters, music is essential to the collective
social expression of sexual difference. It can be a healing, structuring
and empowering form of expression for all sexual minority communities,
both in terms of what Neroli refers to as the gay community and what
Peter refers to as the queer community. In other words, music is not sim-
ply an addendum to pre-existing activities, but a crucial aspect of the
queer worlds constructed locally.
As Peter suggested, music and dancing as well as accompanying
styles of dress, gesticulation and even the sensibilities of drug and alco-
hol consumption are integral to scenic participation and identification.
However, the ways in which music and style become meaningful are
multiple and complex. Other scene participants often interpret the clubs
you go to, the clothes you wear and the kinds of music to which you like
to listen or dance to as indicators of your queer credentials. In other
words, these choices contribute to the kind of queerness twink, bear,
leather, punk, butch, femme, kink, and so on you stylistically perform.
Particularly when examining sexual minority culture in a local context,
music and style emerge as significant aestheticised markers of intra-
scenic distinctions. For example, in Chapters 5 and 6 I discussed how, by
aligning themselves with punk, both queercore and riot grrrl musicians
and fans initially rejected certain logics of taste regarding what they con-
sidered to be typical gay or lesbian music. Yet, as I also demon-
strated, queer scenes are not hermeneutically sealed from other forms of
lesbian and gay culture, but rather feed into and out of multiple cultural
sites predicated on gender and sexual difference. Up until this point, I
have focused on the stylistic histories and the practices of music makers
and performers. In this chapter, I turn to data I have collected not only
from these people, but also from local club organisers and scene partici-
pants in order to reconnect with an argument I made in Chapter 2 re-
garding the excessive musico-stylistic features of queer scene forma-
tions.
While queer scenes often emerge in particular places and exhibit
stylistic preferences, they cannot be considered discretely local or dis-
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 177
As Whiteley reminds us, the search for social and cultural meanings in
popular music texts inevitably involves an examination of the urban and
rural spaces in which music is experienced on a day-to-day basis (2004,
p. 2). Thus far, I have offered detailed accounts of the cultural histories
and meanings of queer popular music-making and performance, so now I
want to consider the everyday urban spaces in which these texts are
made, and in which they circulate and are experienced. To date, little has
been written about Brisbanes LGBTQ scenes, especially in terms of
2
music and style. Therefore, I also write this chapter in the spirit of creat-
2 Clive Moores Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian
Culture in Queensland (2001) offers an historical account of Brisbanes lesbian and
gay culture. His book offers a particularly useful account of lesbian and gay social
scenes from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. However, Moore never discusses the
178 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
ing an archive of local queer practice. In this chapter, the empirical data
relating to Brisbane have been drawn from the following sources: par-
ticipant observations made while attending both commercial gay clubs
and DIY queer events in Brisbane between January 2004 and December
2010; in situ ethnographic conversations recorded in field journals; semi-
structured interviews conducted with scene participants, musical per-
formers and club organisers between November 2005 and December
2010; event posters, flyers and other ephemera collected in the field;
local gay newspapers and music street press; and online texts sourced
from websites of clubs, events, musicians and performers. In terms of the
broad overview of Brisbane clubs and scene spaces that I provide in this
section, where possible I have tried to make sure that details of venues
and scene spaces reflect the time of publication.
Following Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane is Australias third
largest city, and the capital of the state of Queensland. From 1957 until
1989, Queensland was governed by conservative politics. Serving as
state premier, the ultra-conservative National Party leader Sir Joh
Bjelke-Petersen governed between 1968 and 1987, condemning
Queensland to a time that progressive citizens saw as the states dark
ages. During this time, police brutality against queers was rife, and offi-
cial politics were unsympathetic to gay liberationist efforts that were
making changes elsewhere around the country (particularly in Victoria,
New South Wales and South Australia). Queensland was one of the last
states to enact homosexual law reform, finally decriminalising homosex-
ual activity in 1990 (followed by Tasmania in 1997); as previously noted
in Chapter 5, Queensland continues to uphold inequitable age of consent
laws that permit vaginal sex at sixteen, while the legal age for anal sex is
eighteen.
While strict legislation confined homosexual culture to discrete bars,
movie houses, coffee shops, beats and private properties for much of the
early and mid-twentieth century, queer events still managed to emerge
even in the more oppressive times of ultra-conservative governance. One
scene in terms of music and style. Additionally, in 2007 the Queensland Review
published a special issue on Queer Queensland, vol. 14(2). While some of the
contributing authors provide a contemporary account of lesbian/gay/queer scene
spaces in Brisbane (see, in particular, Thomson, 2007; McWilliam, 2007),
discussions of music and style remain absent. For additional empirical studies that
refer to music within Brisbanes queer scenes, see Taylor, J. (2010, 2012).
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 179
normalised gay (and lesbian) lives are often associated with leisure spaces, and
particularly the rise of commercial leisure spaces, as well as with particular
relationship forms, consumption patterns, housing choices and so on (2011, p. 181).
As inner city nightlife contracts and expands with the times and
trends, a number of commercial gay venues that feature prominently in
the memories of the people I interviewed venues such as the Terminus,
the Hacienda, the Alliance and Options have come and gone through-
out the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. However, the closing of one venue of-
ten means the shifting of its clientele to another. As I write in 2011,
Brisbane has three commercial gay venues and each is a local institution
catering to specific demographics within the scene: the Wickham Hotel,
4
the Beat Mega Club and the Sportsman Hotel. The Sportsman Hotel or
Sporties, as locals call it is a small, friendly bar in Spring Hill fre-
quented predominantly by an older, less fashion-conscious male crowd.
Like the Wickham and the Beat, which I will discuss in depth later, it has
regular drag shows and a small dance floor where punters can dance to
an array of gay classics and Top 40 dance music. However, it is more
of a pub than a club, where people go to chat, drink and play pool rather
than to hear a deejay or dance. Sporties also incorporates the basement-
level space called the Mineshaft Bar, which is open on Friday and Satur-
day nights and regularly hosts special events such as Karaoke competi-
5
tions, Hellfire parties and regular men-only events organised by local
leather/kink collective Boot Co. and the local bear community, Bris-
Bears.
In April 2011, a new venue opened called The Royal Brisbane Boys
Club. It is yet another men-only club operating on Friday and Saturdays;
according to the local gay press, it features commercial dance music and
all-male revues. In addition to these men-only spaces and events, the
scene also features a regular men-only dance party called White Wolf,
which takes place four to five times a year. Inner-city Brisbane also has
four commercial saunas/cruise clubs the Den, Wet, Body Line and
Klub Kruise all of which cater exclusively to male clientele. Not only
are there many more spaces and events that cater exclusively to men, but
even those spaces that are mixed such as the Wickham, the Beat and
the street-level bar of Sporties are predominantly marketed to and fre-
quented by men.
In Clive Moores account of gay and lesbian history and culture in
Queensland, he states in reference to Brisbane venues in the 1990s that
4 An historic building dating back to the 1890s, the Wickham Hotel has been a
prominent gay venue since 1994. Local entrepreneur John Hannay reopened the
Beat, once called the Cockatoo Club, in 1984. The Sportsman Hotel is Brisbanes
only gay-owed and operated hotel, and became a gay venue in 1989.
5 Hellfire is an iconic BDSM and fetish club, with branches across the world. Hellfire
Brisbane welcomes people of all gender and sexual identities.
182 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
commercially successful weekly gay club night, is the most popular and
elaborate of these, and is hosted by The Family, one of Brisbanes larg-
est and most famous nightclubs. While the commercial scene, including
Fluffy, caters largely to gay men, there are a range of smaller club nights
and semi-regular events run by local collectives and social groups tar-
geted at specific scenes within the scene. Such events are temporally
and spatially distinct from the commercial scene in that they are usually
staged on an occasional or a semi-regular basis in smaller upstairs or
downstairs rooms of existing gay or heterosexual venues, and almost
never in premier commercial space. For example, the statewide HIV
support and advocacy group Queensland Positive People runs a quarterly
social event/dance party in Brisbane called Planet Positive, which over
the years has been held in various rooms-for-hire across the city. Cur-
rently, Brisbanes most popular lesbian club night, Scarlet, is a women-
only event run by a community group called City Lickers, and is held
monthly at St Pauls Tavern. Other less frequent womens events such as
Vu Du (a recent incarnation by a collective of women who have had a
long history of running womens events such as Lez Vegas and Grinder)
and Lady Bird also provide a scenic context for women to meet, dance to
commercial house and Top 40 music, drink and pick up. Promoted by its
organisers as the first inclusive and regular trans, genderqueer and gender-
6
diverse social event in Brisbane, T Bar began in October 2010 and has
been running ever since as a monthly event. As Paige Elliot (one of T
Bars co-founders and past organiser of the now-defunct lesbian event
called Club Phoenix) stated in an interview with local gay street press
QNews, trans and genderqueer people have limited social outlets, as they
are often excluded from men-only and women-only events: We encour-
age trans people to bring their friends which should see a refreshing
change for trans people who are often left at home because they dont fit
into many of the community spaces currently available (Elliot, cited in
Longhurst, 2010, p. 7).
Similarly to the queer politics of T Bar, and indicative of yet another
scene within the scene, Brisbane is also host to an array of semi-regular
queer and alternative events that dwell on the fringes of local gay and
lesbian culture. Since the early 2000s, the number of queer and alterna-
tive club nights and events staged by local DIY collectives and event
organisers in Brisbane has slowly been increasing. Selected examples of
such events include Omo (launched 2000), Black Fag (launched 2003),
Cut and Taste (launched 2006), Taboo (launched 2006), Skank
(launched 2008), Briefs (launched 2008), Decadance (launched 2008),
Lolly Factory (launched 2009), Qsesh (launched 2009) and most re-
cently, Show Your Bones and Queer to Queer (both launched 2011).
With the exception of Qsesh, which ran as a fortnightly live music and
burlesque event advertised as the Sunday session where sexuality
doesnt matter, these kind of events tend to occur at less frequent, and
often unpredictable intervals, as they are governed by the time and fi-
nancial restraints of small scene collectives, friendship groups or indi-
viduals. Distancing themselves from the scenes commercialised leisure
spaces, these events are non-commercial and not-for-profit ventures,
usually staged in legal available-for-hire or occasionally illegal fly-by-
night locations scattered around the inner-city suburbs of Fortitude Val-
ley, West End, South Brisbane and Spring Hill. Event advertising is gen-
erally done on tiny budgets in local street press or via zero-cost means
such as photocopied flyer distribution, social networking and word of
mouth. Door policies are usually relaxed and unrestricted in terms of
gender/sexual identity, and while the majority of these events charge
entry fees, this is usually only to cover costs and thus they are kept to a
minimum. Financial factors, venue availability and the people-power
required to stage these events tend to make DIY queer leisure spaces
unsustainable in the long term, so they often last only for a few years
before disappearing, sometimes never to be seen again and at other times
reincarnated under different names.
While, individually, the style and atmosphere of Brisbanes afore-
mentioned DIY queer events are varied usually attributable to the
music and stylistic preferences of an organising committee they share a
common distinction in that they all position themselves as an alterna-
tive to the mainstream gay scene, which queer event organisers com-
monly characterise as stylistically homogenised, apolitical, commodi-
fied, male-centric and body image obsessed. For example, in an
interview with a local street magazine, one of the organisers of Black
Fag, who calls himself Dead Man Talking, told the reporter:
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 185
We wanted an alternative for cool poofs and cool dykes to go to, where it wasnt
hands-in-the-air, awful, terrible music. Thats fun when youre coming out when
you 15, but its a whole different scene its not mine. And it bores me shitless. Its
the same with the gay press, in that its entirely beholden to its own stereotypes. Its
basically saying that gay men are no more complex than speedos, STDs and rules
about one night stands. We want to respect our punters give them something a bit
more complicated. (cited in Ape Sex, 2005, p. 9)
I reckon its the difference between buying into the capitalist heterosexual patri-
7
archy and not. The kind of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the Wickham, and all
that stuff about how perfect your abs are and how waxed your back is in the gay
male culture which translates in the female culture by women just wanting to move
into single couple households and have kids and a picket fence just like the heteros
do. I think as queers weve got the opportunity to expand beyond that because
were put outside that paradigm to start with and then we have to choose to go back
or choose to go somewhere else and I think thats where the chasm is. (Mandy, per-
sonal communication, 30 November 2005)
The gay community is like a condensed version of normal society with so many
straight lines running through it. Yet to the rest of the world theyre all going ac-
ceptance, peace, blah blah blah yet within themselves the racism, sexism and age-
ism is just rife. I find this really quite amusing, disturbing and disheartening at the
7 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was a television series that aired between 2003 and
2007. The premise of the show was to have five gay men make over a straight
man so he would be more appealing to his female partner. According to some (e.g.
see Sender, 2006), this show typifies the neoliberal project turning gay sexual
identity into a marketable commodity. Moreover, it perpetuates a stereotype of the
gay male as effeminate, fashion-conscious and image obsessed, concomitantly
limiting the range of socially acceptable gay masculinities.
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 187
same time Thats the problem with the gay inverted commas scene now that
theyve homogenised and pasteurised themselves for public consumption. (Peter,
personal communication, 12 December 2005)
8 It is useful to be aware that my informants did not always imbue words with the
same meaning as queer scholars: some informants used the terms gay/lesbian/dyke/
fag/poof/queer interchangeably and a number of people used the term gaystream
as a more specific reference to the mainstreaming of gay culture.
188 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
Im so driven by music and I will go to places primarily because of the music and
not because of the decor. And not even sometimes for the people, its the music I
think its [music] one of the most important things, its not thee most important
thing, importance is shared with the venue and the type of people that attend but I
think that the music facilitates that and allows that to happen. Weve all been in
clubs before and said god this music is shit and that will ruin your night, it really
will. If its one handbag song after another then you feel like crap but if its some-
thing youre relating to then that will allow you to amplify the good time that
youre having. (personal communication, 30 June 2006)
tive clubs in Brisbane. For this purpose, I have chosen to examine Bris-
banes three most popular gay clubbing destinations: the Wickham, the
Beat and Fluffy. Since the Beat is actually a mega club, in that it fea-
tures five distinct bar areas, each with its own dance floor and deejay
booth, when referring to the Beat I am talking primarily about the popu-
lar upper level dance floors incorporating the Cockatoo Club and Crys-
tals. The queer club events examined are Omo (queer and alternative
club), Cut and Taste (queer and alternative club), Taboo and Decadance
(both queer, alternative and fetish clubs). Here, I focus specifically on
the music that is performed and deejayed at these clubs and events, as
well as elements of extra-musical style, drawing out the relationship
between the music, style and the gay/queer sexual politics.
Nightclubs and club-style events, which are predicated on music and dan-
cing, are integral spaces in gay/queer social worlds, functioning as visible
entry points into select social scenes. Like straight club spaces, they are
suffused with sexuality and eroticism. As Phil Jackson proposes in Inside
Clubbing (2004), people of all sexualities go to dance clubs: some go in
search of sex and others to express their own sexuality, deriving pleasure
from displaying their bodies in a sexual way. Music provides a context for
erotic body manoeuvres through dancing, allowing us to outwardly ex-
press sexual energy simply for the independent joy of it or to signal our
lustful desires for a potential mate. Dancing, suggest Frith and McRobbie,
is both creative and physically satisfying and a socially sanctioned sex-
ual activity (1990, p. 388).
In Queer Noises, John Gill writes that the dancefloor has always
been a holy space but it is particularly so among men and women at-
tracted to their own sex (1995, p. 134). Similarly, in Fiona Bucklands
(2002) account of New Yorks gay club scene, she suggests that dance
music and dance spaces are vital sites for the construction of gay/queer
identities and communities. Since the 1970s, dance music genres like
disco, garage and house, and more recently contemporary electronic
dance music (EDM) genres such as techno, drumnbass and trance, are
played in gay/queer clubs around the world, providing a soundtrack for
all sorts of sexual encounters. While EDM and club culture remain
190 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
central to both the mainstream gay and alternative queer scenes in Bris-
bane (and elsewhere), intra-scenic distinctions frequently are articulated
in specific musical and stylistic terms that transform the notion of gay
and queer from sexual to aesthetic signifiers. For example, local scene
participants I interviewed would often speak in terms of liking/disliking
what they called gay music. To older generations (and perhaps for
some straight people), the idea of gay music may conjure an image of a
show-tunes queen campishly clutching at a Barbra Streisand album and
belting out an impassioned rendition of Dont Rain on My Parade
(1964). After all, musical theatre was (and for some still is) gay music
(e.g. see Clum, 2001). More commonly, however particularly given the
popularity of television programs like Queer as Folk, which regularly
featured scenes of shirtless, sweaty and drug-affected men dancing up a
frenzy at Babylon the association of gay culture with dance clubs and
9
the circuit party scene has become ubiquitous. Concomitantly, for many
people gay music has come to mean dance music, especially house
music.
House music is an up-tempo style of EDM, generally around 120 to
135 beats per minute. In its original form, it features a distinctive four-
10
to-the-floor rhythmic structure, repetitive drum loops, synthesised bass
lines, layered melodic keyboard riffs and sampled vocals. A product of
remix culture, house music often draws on pre-existing pop songs that
are manipulated and layered over the house beat, enabling deejays (who
often perform further manipulation on the dance floor) to mix tracks
seamlessly from one to another. With its sonic and stylistic roots in
disco, house emerged in North America in the late 1970s/early 1980s,
where it was extremely popular among and pioneered by African-
American, Latino and gay communities (for various historical accounts,
see Bidder, 2001; Currid, 1995; Rietveld, 1998; Reynolds, 1999). Taking
9 Generally a multi-day/night event, circuit parties are another name for large-scale
gay dance parties particularly popular among gay men in the 1980s and 1990s,
serving as celebrations of gay sexuality and community (see Lewis & Ross, 1995;
Weems, 2008). These events have often attracted negative attention due to their
links with sexual promiscuity and recreational drug use such as ecstasy (MDMA),
speed (amphetamine), crystal meth (methamphetamine), fantasy (GHB), acid
(LSD) and poppers (amyl nitrite).
10 Four-on-the-floor refers to the percussive elements of the music, indicating a
prominent kick drum on every beat.
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 191
its name from a famous gay nightclub in Chicago called the Warehouse,
the style was pioneered by Frankie Knuckles, who deejayed at this club
between 1977 and 1983. Indeed, both disco and house music have been
the two forms most commonly associated with contemporary gay cul-
ture. In his celebrated article, In Defence of Disco, Dyer (1995) argues
that the whole body eroticism of disco has made it particularly appeal-
ing to gay male scene culture, validating aspects of gay embodiment and
community. For Brian Currid, house music can be read in part as a
narrative of gay community solidarity through time and place (1995,
p. 176). Since its emergence, the style has fractured into a plethora of
sub-genres deep house, progressive house, hard house, acid house,
tribal house, ambient house, tech house, New York house and French
house, among others reflecting stylistic variations, locally specific taste
cultures and niche marketing strategies.
In Brisbanes gay clubs, house music continues to dominate the scene.
The staple soundscapes on any given Friday or Saturday night at the
Wickham would best be described as uplifting vocal and progressive
house, particularly songs currently charting with the occasional classic gay
club hit thrown into the mix. The dominant sound at the Beat is also vocal
house but decidedly more pop than progressive. The Beats deejays tend to
favour classic gay anthems such as Its Raining Men (originally re-
corded by the Weather Girls in 1982) or I Will Survive (originally re-
corded by Gloria Gaynor in 1978) and twelve-inch remixes of commercial
pop songs by the likes of Kylie Minogue, Madonna or (more recently)
Lady Gaga. Similarly at Fluffy, house music rules the dance floor. How-
ever, Fluffy is where you are more likely to hear an ever so slight devi-
ation from the standard gay progressive/ uplifting/vocal/commercial pop
club sound as deejays here will occasionally experiment with tribal
house beats or the harder, faster edges of trance.
Generically, the style of house that is played at these gay venues is
often referred to as handbag house. Sometimes called diva house,
handbag is perhaps the sub-genre of house music that is most commonly
associated with commercial gay dance clubs. Featuring soulful or bom-
bastic diva-style female vocals, long piano breaks and uplifting chord
progressions, handbag generally has a jubilant, often anthemic feel to it.
The term is thought to have originated in Northern England, and ac-
quired its name from commercial dance clubs where, notionally, groups
of girls stereotyped as inauthentic ravers by certain participants in
192 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
scene would gather and dance around their handbags (Fritz, 1999;
Thornton, 1997). Handbag is often employed as a pejorative term, used
dismissively by serious makers and consumers of EDM when referring
to the mainstreaming of rave culture and the commercialisation of house
music in the early 1990s.
While this definition of handbag house has clearly arisen far from
Brisbanes gay and queer scenes, it is a term that was commonly used by
local gay/queer scene participants when referring broadly to the style of
music (mainly vocal house music) typically played in local gay venues.
Moreover, when I was talking about music with participants who fre-
quented queer events, they also referred to handbag to distinguish be-
tween the kinds of music that typified the commercial gay scene and
subsequently the kind of sound that you wont hear at queer and alterna-
tive events. As Sarah Thornton (1997) argues, the tendency for one
scene to distinguish itself in opposition to the mainstream positioning
the mainstream as other, homogenous and commodified can be
understood as a tactical discursive strategy in the struggle for power
between closely associated scene groupings. Thus the pejorative use of
the term handbag in the local context has a dual effect: it marks the
queer scenes resistance of what participants interpret as a monolithic
gay sound while also pointing to their albeit discriminating strive for
distinction, which is enacted by simply not sounding like a gay club. As
Roger, a long-time scene participant and queer event organiser told me:
I tend to go to small independently organised type events, and occasionally Ill end up
at a Sleaze Ball or the Wickham or whatever, but most of the time it is smaller, non-
profit, community based events, or political activist-type events In queer clubs the
music is more diverse and it just tends to be defined as alternative queer by not being
Kylie, Madonna etc. that you usually get at the gay venues When I went to uni in
my teens and early twenties there was still a clich around that gay clubs had the best
music, and Im sure it wasnt quite true but at least gay clubs had good dance music or
at least they werent playing just Top 40 pop stuff, and by definition the music they
were playing wasnt really charting well some of it was, the diva type stuff of
course. But really since the 90s gay clubs internationally have been playing the worst
kind of music in my opinion. So now you really have to go out to other events, and its
great going to somewhere like the Arena and see Kruder and Dorfmeister or going to
the Concert Hall and see Diamanda Gals and suddenly then you see the queer posse
who are interested in good music who go to those sort of things. And often at an event
like that, well maybe not in the Concert Hall but at a club type of thing, youll find
that the queers will organise themselves into a particular place on the dance floor or
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 193
something like that and youll get a little sub-community within the community. (per-
sonal communication, 22 November 2005)
In terms of performance, drag is the only thing were offered up and I sometimes
dont find that the drag queens in Brisbane are exploring the notions and politics of
camp. Its like hearing the same tune over and over again and its not going anywhere
interesting for me. At Omo, they still put on performances it might be drag-ish or
that kind of gender bender stuff incorporating camp and incorporating drag but its
not drag like you get in the gay bars. And thats what Omo always was, a space for
people to do interesting performances. That may be live music, a performance piece
or a circus piece, or whatever. (personal communication, 30 June 2006)
Similarly, Peter told me that while he loves drag and thinks it has the po-
tential to be a radical form of queer performance, in his opinion it really
only represents and appeals to a small part of the community. Queers are
194 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
creative and good drag is good, but we have more to offer than just drag,
he said. Talking about one particular drag show he had seen around the
time of the interview, he went on to say that he was also sick of drag
queens slagging off at all the girls in the audience and making what he
called unnecessarily cruel jokes about female bits (personal communi-
cation, 12 December 2005). One night while I was at the Wickham talking
with a group of lesbians, a number of them also commented to me that
they were sick of cunt jokes, which they insinuated made them feel un-
comfortable particularly when some of the men in the audience would
grimace or verbally express disgust by booing or laughing in sympathy
with the performer. These remarks point to the complex gender relations
within the scene, and the embedded forms of misogyny that are often
played out in the context of drag performance.
The absence of drag king and/or bio queen performers in Brisbanes
commercial gay venues also frustrated a number of local performers. In
my interview with Dita Brooke, she revealed that when her troupe, the
Twang Gang, entered a drag competition at the Wickham in 2000, com-
ing second in the competition, she later found out from the judges who
admitted to her that the Twang Gang should have won that because her
troupe was female, they were unable to take first prize. Since the com-
petition organisers had expected that a drag queen would take the first
prize, they had arranged this to be an opportunity for a queen to perform
in Sydneys Arq nightclub. They had fixed it up for a drag queen to
perform there, said Brooke, so we couldnt win (personal communi-
cation, 29 November 2005). Eight years later, on 8 June 2008, the
Twang Gang (now renamed the Gang Stars) would, for the first time in
their performance career, take the main stage at the Wickham. In a post-
performance conversation with these women, one of them recalled this
and other instances as evidence of being ignored by the gay scene: As
dykes weve really had to fight to be taken seriously, you know, because
gay venues really just dont care that much about dyke culture (Brooke,
personal communication, 8 June 2008).
The waning appeal of the music and entertainment on offer at clubs
at the centre of Brisbanes established gay scene was the most com-
monly cited argument for staging/participating in queer events. Omo was
one of the first queer events in Brisbane, and was the longest running.
According to its organisers, the idea emerged when two scene members
were returning from Sydney after having just attended a dance party. On
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 195
the road-trip home, one of them said to the other: How can we go back
to Brisbane and have our entertainment limited to the Beat and the
Wickham? So it was decided that we should just start our own club
(personal communication, 22 November 2005). Built upon a strong DIY
ethic, Omo operated in Brisbane at semi-regular intervals between 2000
and 2006. In 2007, the organisers of Omo teamed up with other members
of the queer scene and launched a new event called Skank, which con-
tinues to be staged semi-regularly and has maintained Omos original
queer politic. Within a few months of Omos final event in June 2006,
two other queer events appeared: Cut and Taste launched its first event
in November 2006, Taboo was launched in December of the same year
and Decadance started in November 2008.
The activation of two new queer events so soon after the closure of
Omo would suggest that DIY queer events were becoming increasing
popular alternatives to the mainstream club scene. As one of the organis-
ers of Omo told me, one of the main reasons we started Omo was so
you could go out and be with queer people and not have to listen to that
Top 40 remix bullshit (personal communication, 22 November 2005).
Similarly, on their website, organisers of Cut and Taste claimed that
their event was an alternative to handbag dance parties and camp vocal
house for the Queer community of Brisbane (Cut and Taste, 2007). The
music deejayed at all three events was a variation of dance and rock
styles, including electroclash, tribal house, dirty house, industrial, dark-
wave, indie and punk. Omo and Cut and Taste were particularly keen to
encourage new and emerging deejays to the decks, and make a conscious
effort to accommodate as many tastes as possible, ensuring a variation of
musical styles over the course of an evening. Referring again to Cut and
Tastes website:
[Cut and Taste] is about sampling different flavours, and putting together some-
thing new each time for a really vibrant scene of creative people. We aim to please,
and every event is different. You can never know what to expect. But one thing is
for sure, the music is deep, phat, dirty, electronic and totally twisted. Handbag, this
aint! (Cut and Taste, 2007)
The aesthetic of both Taboo and Decadance was decidedly queer but
with a darker edge, tending towards BDSM and kinky fashions. The
music deejayed at both these events suitably matched this: Taboo fa-
voured the darker sounds of industrial, dance remixes of metal, and in
196 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
the latter stages of the evening the dance floor was kept alive with tribal
house and trance beats. Similarly, the sound of Decadance was darker
progressive house, electroclash, acid house and tribal house.
Where drag queens are the staple form of live entertainment in gay
clubs, queer spaces often define themselves by offering alternative forms
of live musical entertainment. For example, Omo regularly showcased
performances by local queer punk band Anal Traffic as well as featuring
circus performances and campish gender-bending cabaret routines. Cut
and Taste events featured live performances by local darkwave/ambient
band Dizzygotheca, electro rock singer/songwriter and bassist Zia and on
other occasions, roaming theatrical performers. Taboo featured fetish
fashion parades, drag king and bio queen performances, and BDSM
shows. Decadance also featured kinky sex shows and roving adult en-
tertainment.
When talking with the organisers of Decadance, Emily and Lucy, they
like the organisers of all of the aforementioned queer clubs acknow-
ledged that their impetus behind creating their event was to fill both a sexual
and sonic void in their experience of the local scene. Emily said:
Were both big on dancing and were both big on quirky bent queer stuff so if we
hadnt been out for ages then sometimes wed just go wherever there was queers
and music which might be at the Wickham or Scarlet or something that doesnt
generally fit our idea of good music or sexuality I mean theyre both great,
like I have fun at Scarlet and sometimes I like Top 40 and I like to go to support the
people who run it, but so we found a hole in the Brisbane market and it seemed
to be that if you wanted good music to dance to, and good obviously being subjec-
tive, but good dance music, you either had to do something like Sleaze Ball or a big
type one-off event I think Omo was the first kind of environment that I went to
that was a regular kind of that was where you could be anything or do anything
there. (personal communication, 31 March 2009)
Emily also referred to what she called a lesbian uniform and a lesbian
sound: You know, what we call the jeans and sneakers types, the
straight lesbian bars lets just say we dont get off on k.d. lang and
Melissa Etheridge. Lucy went on to express how at different times in
her life she had felt ostracised from other women and was never really
able to fit into the lesbian scene because she didnt like the right music,
wear the right clothes or do gender in the right way: People often have
this box youve got to fit in and if you dont fit then, well, you get
judged (personal communication, 31 March 2009).
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 197
If you look at sexuality in terms of what music gets played and where in my
opinion, in queer spaces you get music with more of an edge. In a queer space
youve got the room to be a lot more creative, a lot more experimental whereas in a
gay space youre limited and its frustrating sometimes gay stuff can be queer
but its also more open to being something different. (personal communication,
8 March 2006)
In John Connell and Chris Gibsons (2003) work on music, identity and
place, they offer various accounts of how music contributes not only to
the creation and maintenance of identity, but also to the gendering and
sexualisation of spaces. Indeed, a number of people to whom I spoke
maintained the notion that the sexuality of a scene space whether a gay
male, lesbian or queer scene space manifests as a quality intrinsic to
the musicality of that scene space. In other words, the monolithic sound
of commercial gay clubs bespeaks more uniformed sexual style or at
least this is how it appears to be interpreted by those who create and seek
out queer and alternative scenes in Brisbane. Scene spaces that were
dubbed queer and alternative rather than gay clearly demonstrated vary-
ing degrees of stylistic excess, and acquired meaning in tension with
commercial gay scene culture and its musical, stylistic and social norms.
198 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
Browne and Bakshi argue that relations between lesbian, gay, bisex-
ual, trans and queer people are often structured around homonormativity:
in the gay/queer debate, it has been assumed that queer anti-normative
lives are resistant, transgressive and diverse in contrast to the homoge-
neity of gay privilege and the desire be the same or normal
(2011, p. 182). Indeed, some of my interviewees indicated that the preva-
lence of handbag house and Top 40 dance remixes in commercial gay
clubs was a marker of homo-normalisation, and so, for these interviewees
at least, the act of rejecting this kind of music functions as an oppositional
one: a semiotic mode of resistance to homogeneity. Of course, this
gay/queer homo-normal/transgressive dichotomisation is problematic, and
as Browne and Bakshi (2011) and Jasbir Puar (2007) argue, reliance on
these binary distinctions risks ignoring the complex power relations that
must be negotiated in the creation, performance and maintenance of all
non-normative identity positions. By producing a false understanding of a
coherent homo-normative centre, we obstruct more complex understand-
ings of the social lives of all non-normative gender and sexual subjects.
Music is intrinsically valuable to both gay and queer scenic structures and
the identities within them, providing a template for both counter-public
scenes. Indeed, the signification of any gender and/or sexual queerness
through music whether lesbian, gay, transgender, queer or otherwise
contributes to the project of queer world-making. Logics of taste aside,
even the most mainstream gay and commercialised megaclub is a site of
world-making, where punters labour to appropriate, manipulate and gener-
ate individual and communal narratives by queering cultural artefacts.
Yet, speaking in terms of aesthetic enunciations and the stylistic
parameters of this labour as I am doing here, queer musical style appears
to consciously acquire meanings that, while always multiple and contin-
gent, are in many ways distinct from gay style and socio-musical norms.
It is this tendency towards always being in tension with what is identifi-
able, coherent and hetero/homonormal and thus being disidentifiable,
incoherent and transgressive that appears to dictate the sound of queer
scenes. Moreover, to varying degrees scene participants use these styl-
istic tensions as a way of maintaining a sense of their own sexual differ-
ences and to distinguish between the multiple expressions of queerness
that occur intra-scenically. As Altman previously has suggested, queer
theory shares with much of contemporary postmodernism an emphasis on
representation as an aesthetic rather than a political problem, a desire to
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 199
In the 1920s Berlin became a buzzing centre of new ideas, social reform and other
vanguard positions At any given time, more than 100 gay and lesbian cafes or
bars existed. The homosexual scene was an integral part of the citys social and
cultural life, while heterosexual artists and writers explored the scene and found
new inspiration there. Important contributions to the arts, theatre and film also came
from proud, self-confident homosexuals. Bisexuality and a familiarity with gay and
lesbian lifestyles were fashionable. (2008, p. 81)
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 201
11 At the end of the Second World War, Berlin was divided up between the Allied
powers of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia. A wall
divided East and West Berlin to keep citizens in Berlins communist East from
defecting to the West.
12 See Foucault (1986) for a theoretical discussion of heterotopia.
202 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
boasts that it is a place with an openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit; the
site of the worlds first LGBT history museum (the Schwules museum)
and memorial to LGBT Holocaust victims; the birthplace to the now in-
13
famous Love Parade and the Folsom Street Fair (the worlds largest
leather event); the home to one of the largest Pride/Christopher Street
Day Parades in Europe; and an exhausting list of gay/lesbian/queer
dance clubs, bars, parties, restaurants, sex clubs, saunas, cinemas, retail
stores, hotels, squats and other forms of accommodation. According to
the entertainment listings in Siegessule (Berlins queer magazine), Ber-
lins gay/lesbian/queer commercial clubs and bars alone are well in ex-
cess of a hundred and its queer population is estimated to be roughly one
in ten of the citys three and a half million people (Gay Berlin, 2009).
While gay/queer venues and events are able to be located in almost
every district, the most visible clusters of scene spaces are in three main
areas: the historically gay and glamorous western district of Schneberg;
the now hip and gentrified eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg and the
grungy western but ethnically diverse district of Kreuzberg (though each
scene spills into bordering neighbourhoods). At a superficial glance, gay
tourist marketing, local queer media, club soundscapes, event ephemera
(flyers, posters) and many of the stylised queer bodies that inhabit these
spaces collectively generate a cohesive triptych that narrates queer Ber-
lins stylistic palette or, more accurately, a cohesive triptych that sells
three kinds of ready-made youthful white gay masculinity to other
white gay men looking to quickly plug into the appropriate scene. For
14
example, on its cover, Schnebergs gay city guide features a waxed,
tanned, buffed guy in his early twenties. His hair is sitting flawlessly,
hes wearing Dolce & Gabbana underwear and an unbuttoned black
dress shirt, with an in vogue upturned collar. Mr Prenzlauer Berg is
represented on the cover of the districts gay city guide as a young, at-
tractive, clean-shaven, preppy-looking guy, wearing Diesel underwear (a
13 Beginning in West Berlin in 1989, the Love Parade was a famous EDM festival and
parade attended by hundreds of thousands of people annually, which was popular
among certain gay/queer audiences. In 2010 it was permanently cancelled when a
crowd rush killed twenty-one people and left hundreds of others injured.
14 Available in most LGBTQ establishments are pocket-sized district-specific gay
city guides published biannually by German company Queerline Media (see
<http://www.queerline-media.de>). The editions to which I am referring here were
from the second half of 2009.
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 203
more affordable street brand) and a casual but hip green t-shirt and base-
ball cap. Mr Kreuzberg is represented on the cover of his districts gay
city guide as what you might call heroin chic thin, pale and sexy.
While still young, attractive and white, hes wearing a silver hipster neck
chain with a cassette-tape pendant, his hair is styled to appear unwashed,
he has facial stubble, his underwear lacks any distinguishing branding
and his grungy look is completed with an unzipped grey hoodie and
black leather jacket.
To a degree, these marketing stereotypes are carried over into
everyday fashion and self-stylisation visible on the streets and inside the
clubs. Moreover, in numerous conversations with Berliners, districts
were associated with certain kinds of queer style and used to demarcate
one scenic element from another in ways not dissimilar to the logics of
intra-scenic distinction employed in Brisbane. As well as locality and
class, scenic divisions across gender and ethnicity were also common
themes that emerged from conversations with queer Berliners. For ex-
ample, in a conversation with Prenzlauer Berg resident Phillip, he arti-
culated his particular gay style to me in terms of where he goes club-
bing and, importantly, where he doesnt go clubbing: I would never go
to Schneberg, he said. The scene there is yuck. Yuck! Prenzlauer
Berg is more cool it has the best clubs and hottest boys (personal
communication, 9 August 2009). Pascal, who has been running gay sex
clubs in Berlin for over twenty years, told me:
Even though the wall has gone, the wall is always there. East people go to clubs in
the east and west people go to the clubs in the west. Not much has changed except
the scene is cleaner overall, you know, gentrified, more touristic Many clubs in
the west are money-making from gay sex, you know more glitzy and popular, like
Berghain, but the music is too loud and people take too many drugs compared to dir-
tier clubs in the east, like Greifbar But Berlin is big, yes, so people have their own
places to go. I think of places for gay men, homosexual Arabs and Turks, women,
though I have not been, transsexuals, also have not been, hedonistic heterosexuals and
people with fetish, yes, the fetish scene is as big as the gay scene really Women I
would say not so big, they are more green, ah, political I think these clubs not so
much for fucking. (personal communication, 19 August 2009)
Berlin is quite divided. Most of the time, men and women do cruising, partying and
politics separately people seem to stay out of each others spaces, but queer squats
204 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
like Schwarzer Kanal [in Neuklln, which neighbours Kreuzberg] are different. The
parties and entertainment are much more mixed and political, generally better than the
mainstream shit Id say. (personal communication, 10 August 2009)
own dialogue suggested that, even though local terminology and under-
standings may be different, scene spaces are certainly marked by cultural
logics of distinction that resemble translocal modalities of gay and queer
style. Therefore, it should be noted that here, unlike in my discussion of
Brisbane, my use of gay and queer only partially reflect local understand-
ings. Nevertheless, if we build upon the aesthetic enunciations of gay and
queer that I identified in Brisbane when examining the musical plurality of
Berlins queer scene, we see similarities between the musico-stylistic sen-
sibilities operating in both locations.
As one might expect of a queer world capital, there is an endless
availability of generic gay scene culture available to willing partici-
pants on every night of the week, and in almost every district. On my
first weekend in Berlin I went along to a club called GMF, which is situ-
ated in the eastern district of Mitte, close to the borders of Prenzlauer
Berg. The club occupies the twelfth and fifteenth floors as well as the
rooftop garden of a 1970s office complex. Phillip had told me that this
was the best gay party in Berlin on a Sunday. The crowd was predomi-
nantly young, male, white, body-beautiful and dressed in trendy street-
wear: jeans, branded t-shirts, designer sneakers. Upon entering the
twelfth floor, I was greeted by a room full of sweaty, alcohol- and drug-
affected men dancing to a c. 1990s vocal house remix of Blondies
Atomic (originally released in 1979), which was followed by a number
of unremarkable vocal and progressive house tracks. Making my way to
the fifteenth floor via a crowded lift in which I was the only woman, the
doors opened to a room full of people who looked identical to the crowd
I had just left. However, the music three floors up had a slightly harder
edge. It was hard house (no vocals, more distorted beats) and gradually
progressed into tech house (house music with elements of techno).
On my second weekend, I ventured across town to Schneberg.
Making my way to the very popular gay club Connections (popular be-
cause of its basement cruising labyrinth). I was promptly refused entry
on the grounds of my femaleness and told to come back on a mixed
night. When I did just that, I was again greeted by a room full of people
who looked very much like the people who were dancing at GMF the
week before. Again, the music was predominantly of the house genre:
some Top 40 vocal house as well as a few progressive house tracks
mixed in. Leaving Connections, I made my way to Toms Bar, a once-
famous leather bar-cum-cruising hotspot, also in Schneberg. While
206 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
technically the bar is open to women, I walked in, looked around and
saw that I was the only one in a crowd of a few hundred. The rugged
leather image Id imagined was in stark contrast to the predominantly
youthful buffed bodies and conservative casual fashions of Toms pa-
trons one of whom I noticed sitting near the entrance drinking a glass
of wine at a table with his two purebred dachshunds wearing diamante
collars on a leash beside him. Although I didnt stay at Toms for long,
and was unable to make my way into the bowels of the club due in part
to overcrowding but mainly because everyone was looking at me as
though my vagina was attached to my forehead I was surprised by the
juxtaposition of on-screen porn, camp music and table soccer.
The gay club sound and style with which I had grown familiar in
Brisbane seemed ubiquitous. Of the dozens of gay bars and clubs I vis-
ited while in Berlin both the iconic and the unremarkable I found
myself repeatedly presented with the same trademark gay club sounds of
vocal and progressive house while many of the smaller bars stuck with
tried and true camp pop of the Kylie and Madonna ilk. Even the popular
monthly lesbian party L-Tunes (held at SchwuZ in Kreuzberg) main-
tained this house/pop standard. One unassuming Wednesday night,
perched on a bar stool at Villis (a local bar in Prenzlauer Berg, across the
street from a popular mens cruising club, Greifbar) I took out my field
journal and began to write a description of this interesting little neigh-
bourhood gay bar.
The ceiling was covered in sparkly gold material, and hanging from
it were numerous gold-painted plaster cherubs and the obligatory mirror
ball taking pride of place over the main area of the bar. Looking around,
my eyes met those of the only other women occupying space: a group of
fifty-something butch dykes who looked back at me with disregard. Men
of various ages, sizes and styles some nondescript and other distinctly
bear-ish occupied all the other tables and stools. While I was in the line
to order a drink, some twinks walked in and approached the bar, spoke to
the bartender and gestured towards the sound system, which had been
playing an unfamiliar premixed dance music compilation at a volume
that made it almost impossible to make out over the raucous chatter.
Following their conversation, the bartender walked to the sound system
and changed the music immediately. With the press of a button, the
space was audibly elevated to a new level of gayness and the twinks took
to the floor and busted out a few moves to Kylie Minogues Better the
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 207
the distinctions between here and there, and the world that the here and now orga-
nizes, are not fixed they are already being undone in relation to a forward-dawn-
ing futurity. It is important to understand that a critique of our homosexual present
is not an attack on what many people routinely name lesbian or gay, but instead, an
appraisal of how queerness is still forming, or in many crucial ways formless.
Queernessess form is utopia. Ultimately, we must insist on a queer futurity because
the present is so poisonous and insolvent. (2009, pp. 2930)
times that lessen queer possibility and encumber the search for pleasure.
While in Berlin I met and talked with a number of people who originated
from Australia: some were musicians, deejays and club enthusiasts now
living in Berlin; some were merely passing through. I was fascinated by
the way they were drawn to Berlin in the pursuit of sensual indulgence, in
terms of both the musical distinctiveness and sexual freedoms that many
saw as fundamental to the Berlin scene. Although Weimarian romanticism
and tourism marketing represent the city as a queer Mecca, what these
conversations suggested was more in line with a notion of Berlin as a sym-
bol of newness and the promise that there is always something new still to
come. The Berlin scene is mythologised as a queer future that is still, and
potentially will always remain, dawning, rather than one that exists in the
here and now. In Kevins opinion, music can be a prominent signifier of this:
Berlin provides a playground of sex, social engagement, dance, music, art and perform-
ance that I havent experienced anywhere else The music in the majority of queer
venues in Berlin seems to have consigned the clich of what I call the international gay
radio sound of diva-based pop/house music to the rubbish bin. Well to be completely
accurate, you will still hear that kind of music at some more traditional gay venues in
Berlin. But the music chosen by deejays at most Berlin queer events is constantly
changing, leading the trends of international dance music I have often noticed that the
styles and genres of dance music that I hear in Berlin tend to go mainstream internation-
ally a couple of years later, often reflected through mainstream appropriation and wa-
tering down of the style by major artists. For example, the electro trend in Berlin of the
early 2000s and the later harder electro-house styles of 20042006 have now reached
audiences in Australia in commercial gay venues. In the mean time a couple of years
ago, around 20072008, euro-crunk and fidget house have taken their place in Berlin but
are receiving minimal mainstream play in Australia. These styles are now [2009] being
replaced by minimal techno and bass-driven house styles in German venues as main-
floor material, with smaller and earlier dance floors being driven by rock/electro. (per-
sonal communication, 16 September 2009).
For Kevin, it appears that the Berlin scene captures his imagination as a
place where the future sound of queerness can be heard sounds that
may signal potential changes to the sonic landscape of his local scene.
Although the international gay radio sound, as Kevin calls it, was far
from defunct in many of the Berlin clubs I visited, Kevins selective way
of listening to the scene, which he partially acknowledges in his remark,
suggests that he uses music strategically to envisage new queer worlds
and that music can be emblematic of scenic transformation.
CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene 211
The music on the main floor was repetitive 4/4 techno, which contributes to the other-
world feeling, especially after wed been there long enough for our brains and bodies to
tune into the sound. At first it sounded harsh and repetitive, but once you start dancing to
it the layers in the sound become apparent and you can start to feel the music as its meant
to be experienced [it was] geared towards total hedonism. Berghain felt like a temple
to hedonism and a celebration of indulgence. (personal communication, 29 October 2009)
Here, Christopher suggests that music (and the club setting) can engen-
der feelings of otherworldliness, allowing him a glimpse of queer pleas-
ures beyond what he describes as the boring pleasures of the
mainstream gay club scene. Moreover, Christophers remarks also high-
light how his idyllic notion of cutting-edge queerness and feelings of
otherworldliness remain relational with the past.
Located on the boarder between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain,
Berghain has acquired international fame as a techno club par excel-
16
lence. While not strictly a gay/queer club, its links with the now defunct
gay and fetish club nights, and its reputation as a place that encourages
decadence and sensuality (particularly through the provision of a dark
room in which to have sex), attract queer clubbers for around the world.
In conversation with Rocky, another Australian visitor to Berlin, he
impressed upon me his experience of Berghain as one of the queerest
places ever. Once inside the club, he said:
16 As testament to the clubs fame, Berghain has its own mix series released on the clubs
Ostgut Ton label. Additionally, Berghain has long been a topic of conversation in
respected EDM press such as inthemix.com, and has been discussed in internationally
renowned mainstream press such as The Guardian and The New York Times.
212 CHAPTER 7: Making a Scene
It felt like security was invisible and no one policed you for smoking joints or
whatever While I was taking a break from dancing I was checking out some hot
guy and then I saw him go into a cubicle with a woman and I thought shed have no
chance with him. But then, the woman comes out, goes to the basin, pulls her dick
out of her pants and washes it under the tap and then restyles her hair. (personal
communication, 19 September 2009)
sive scrutiny of the hard-faced and hulking Russian bouncers that run the
door.
Unfortunately for him, he was denied entry and never made it in-
side. About-faced, he was forced to walk back through a mass of still-
hopeful faces scattered across the fenced and dusty wasteland that sur-
rounded the club. To my mind, his disappointment punctuated the bleak-
ness of this landscape the landscape of the here and now. This, I
thought to myself, was a poignant allegory of how so many queer people
are driven by a longing to traverse such landscapes in the hope that we
will arrive at a queer(er) time and place the closest possible rendering
of a queer utopia that is situated within the here and now. Yet, for some
of us, the social and cultural systems of the white heteropatriarchy that
violently attempts to regulate, constrain or block our search for queer-
ness are impenetrable, forcing some to seek refuge within the confines of
a homosexual mainstream and submit to the tyranny of the homonor-
mative (Muoz, 2009, p. 26).
While some may get closer to glimpsing the imagined utopic spaces
of queerness than others via, as this book suggests, social music-making,
performance and consumption for all of us, utopia remains a fantasy
17
that cannot be sated. Nevertheless, in Muozs (2009) terms, the utopic
imaginary that presages a new queer world is crucial: it functions as a
reflexive critique of the limited pleasures offered in the here and now,
concomitantly mobilising desire for and striving towards queer(er)
horizons. While Berlin is not utopia certainly none of the locals or even
the visitors to whom I spoke described it in these specific terms, nor would
I imagine utopia to have an exclusive door policy the stories relayed to
me, particularly by people who were non-native to the Berlin scene, indi-
cated that both the musical and sexual excess gestured by the scene prom-
ised them a glimpse into otherworldliness. Predicated on echoes of a
mythologised queer past, a translocal queer scene like that of Berlin can
animate the utopic imaginary, encouraging a critique of what is accepted
as the mundane or familiar and illuminate the future potential of queer
worlds in the making. To those not from Berlin, the city signalled a form
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
As jesters and priestesses, our queer ancestors traded in the healing arts.
(Bronstein, 1994, p. 157)
In her book Gender Outlaw (1994), Kate Bronstein uses the analogy of
the jester as a link to queer people, acts and times past. The jester, she
argues, is our queer ancestor: an entertainer; a social commentator;
someone who played with gender and sexual roles; someone who
mocked authority and made visible their lies; someone who was laughed
at, often unkindly; someone who was humiliated and ridiculed; a profes-
sional fool. The rituals of the jester were those of healing: our ancestors
performed their rituals, their theatre, to heal themselves, and to heal their
tribes, suggests Bronstein (1994, p. 158). In the medieval British courts,
the jester was often considered a mentally and/or physically unsound
lunatic. Jesters therefore were allowed to speak freely with impunity be-
cause, by way of social ranking, the jesters absurdity preserved the su-
periority and dignity of the ruling class. Drawing on the work of Attali
(1985), Victoria Moon Joyce (1997) proposes a similar queer ancestry
regarding the jongleur. Joyce recalls how the jongleurs fulfilled a role
as social critics and used their compositions to reveal the ironies and in-
justices they saw in the various communities through which they trav-
elled and performed (p. 53). Through song, the jongleur would critique
the laws of the land because information flowed freely in musical forms
where it was otherwise restricted and segregated (p. 52). The role of the
jongleur was to entertain through music and through physical perform-
ance. The jongleur was both music and the spectacle of the body
(Attali, 1985, p. 14).
Jesters and jongleurs found a social niche accommodating their pe-
culiarities and a space for the creative articulation of their marginalisa-
tion. Because the ruling classes perceived jesters and jongleurs as lowly
and inferior, they were afforded a freedom of expression that was not
permitted to a normal person. They were a metic voice fulfilling the
216 CHAPTER 8: Concluding Thoughts
Summary
The work that is undertaken in and through music is more than simply
the organisation, production and consumption of sound: it is identity
work, and it reveals world-making attempts. In all its capacities, music is
a means of narrating the self and the social. It informs the way we situate
ourselves within the social, and it functions as a resource that actively
constructs social worlds. Throughout this book, I have shown how queer
identities can be composed, performed, negotiated and revealed in and
through music-making, performance and consumption. I have endeav-
oured to introduce the musically minded reader to queer theories, de-
bates, cultural production and social organisation while also encouraging
the queer reader and the reader with an interest in sexuality to think and
feel through music. By tracing the emergence of a variety of queer
popular musical styles, modes of performance and aesthetic sensibilities,
and by unpacking the logics of queer scene organisation, I have shown
how queer world-making can occur in and through music and how we
must engage with queer musicalised world-making on queer terms. Ad-
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