Queer: Identities, Theories and Politics.

J o d i e

This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant literatures 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 creative practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club cultures, the author’s 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.

J o d i e Tay l o r

J o d i e T a y l o r received her PhD in Musicology from the Queensland ­ onservatorium of Music, Griffith University, Australia. She is a Postdoctoral C Research Fellow in Cultural Sociology at the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research, Griffith University. She has published numerous articles on aspects of queer culture, popular music and ethnography and is currently co-editing three anthologies on erotic cultures, festivalisation and mainstream music.

Playing it Queer

ISBN 978-3-0343-0553-2

www.peterlang.com

Playing it Queer

P o p u l a r M u s i c, Ident i t y and Q u e e r Wo r l d - m a k i n g

Peter Lang

P

opular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative capacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make and make sense of identity and ­a llows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arousing 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)cultural world-making.

T a y l o r

J o d i e

T a y l o r

Playing it Queer

Po p u l a 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

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Taylor, Jodie Playing it queer: popular music, Identity and queer world-making / Jodle Taylor. p. cm.

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CHAPTER 1

QUEER – Identities, Theories and Politics

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 origin” (“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 abnormal 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 similarity to queer as we understand it today, and provides another etymological 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-à-vis the dominant norms of heterosexuality used queer as a self-descriptor (Chauncey, 1994). However, it soon became a pejorative term of reference to homosexuals 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.

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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, bisexual 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 unifying factor” (2003, p. 44). The second use of queer, which informs this study, is as a term of resistance imbued with anti-assimilationist and deconstructionist rhetoric that aggressively opposes hegemonic identificatory and behavioural norms, including liberal lesbian and gay identity politics.

When used in this second sense, queer is destabilising, liminal, unfixed and contingent, and quite possibly above all else, it is highly contested. 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 definitions and legitimisations, queer perpetually refuses to be defined or legitimised, 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 something/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

Although Queer Nation was a relatively short-lived movement, it was instrumental in the reclamation of the pejorative term ‘queer’ and had a lasting impact on sexual identity politics in the United States (for a detailed discussion of Queer Nation, see Berlant & Freeman, 1993).

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quality, a mode of interpretation or way of seeing, a perspective or orientation, or a way of desiring, identifying or disidentifying.

This may be a confusing start to a chapter for a reader new to queer theory, while the theoretically advanced reader is likely to be very familiar with such abstrusity and attest to its greyness. Queer theory is a minefield of contested conversations, disputed perspectives, unsettled epistemologies and multidisciplinary approaches, and in light of this confusion I write this chapter specifically for the reader new to queer theory. Because queer thinking is at the core of this book, I wish to give new readers a chance to acquaint themselves with queer ideas, but I also acknowledge that the more theoretically advanced reader will be familiar with the discussions in this chapter.

The following pages seek to clarify how we come to know ourselves as gendered and sexual subjects through discourses, institutions and practices that are historically contingent and socially constructed. I begin this chapter with a genealogical account of homosexuality and homosexual rights movements in Western culture, enabling us to understand how we have arrived at queer. I acknowledge that this account is partial, as it is meant only to introduce key theories and is by no means offered as a 2 complete historical picture of the discursive development of sexuality.

3 Grounded in the deconstructive logics of poststructuralism, queer theory draws on a range of arguments across a number of disciplines including philosophy, second-wave and postmodern feminisms, lesbian and gay studies. Throughout the course of this chapter, I unpack some of these arguments as necessary so that we may clarify the messiness of queer theory to which I have alluded in these introductory paragraphs. Highlighting key literatures from the corpus of queer theory, this chapter 2

3

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 (D’Emilio, 1983) and Epistemologies of the Closet (Sedgwick, 1990).

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.

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identifies the theoretical arguments and political debates that underpin the queer identities, cultural practices, aesthetic sensibilities, (sub)cultures, styles, performers and music-makers that are the focus of this book.

Sexual ‘Deviance’: A Brief Introduction 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 landmark 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 midnineteenth century, a sex act was not understood as an expression of a person’s psyche and did not characterise an innate identity. Instead, sex acts were either considered to be ‘natural’ – and thus moral and legal – or ‘unnatural’ – 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. Psychiatrists identified, named and thus discursively constructed a plethora of new sexualities at this time – zoophiles, auto-monosexualists, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inversts and dyspareunist women – and among these was the homosexual. The first sig4

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.

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nificant publication on homosexuality was by Karl Westphal, a German neurologist and psychiatrist who published an article in 1870 entitled “Contrary Sexual Sensations”. According to Foucault, this article marked the conception of the homosexual as a subject of psychological and physiological inquiry: the homosexual had become a new ‘species’ and homosexuality was born: 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 active 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)

The reconfiguration of the habitual sinner into the homosexual as a type of person raised questions surrounding the legalities of homosexual activity. In the mid-1860s, German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrich began arguing that homosexual acts should not be punished because they were a fact of nature (albeit an uncommon one). Ulrich suggested that homosexuality was congenital, occurring during inter-uterine development: “some males are born with a strong feminine element or psyche … [and] some females are born with a strong masculine drive”, he argued (cited in Sullivan, 2003, p. 4). In other words, homosexuals were considered to be ‘inverts’: a theory that argued male homosexuals were women ‘trapped’ in men’s bodies and female homosexuals were men ‘trapped’ in women’s bodies. Notable sexologists such as Westphal and his German contemporary Richard von Krafft-Ebing skewed Ulrich’s assertions of naturally occurring homosexuality. Instead, they maintained that it was a disease of the mind, or psychological illness, advocating that homosexuals were degenerate human beings and, while they should not be criminalised, they should be ‘treated’.

The work of British doctor and sexual psychologist Havelock Ellis marks an adjustment in thinking about sexuality in exclusively biological terms. While he did not wholly dismiss the notion of congenital homosexuality, he rather controversially rejected the notion that it was a disease. Notably, he also advocated for an understanding of sexual inversion that, while still grounded in one’s physiology, was also influ-

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enced by cultural factors. In a study from 1896 entitled Sexual Inversion (1940), Ellis puts forward an argument that suggests one’s disposition towards inversion can be encouraged by certain social and cultural circumstances that might trigger one’s homosexuality, awaking it from its slumber; thus it followed that if such circumstances could be controlled, then the risk of homosexual arousal could be diminished. In Sexual Inversion, Ellis gives three examples of possible cultural triggers for homosexuality: sex-segregation in schools, which he argues plays a role in developing sexual inversion; the seduction of a younger person by an older person whose inversion is already developed; and for a congenital invert to be disappointed with ‘normal’ – meaning heterosexual – love.

In 1897, doctor Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Wissenschaftlichhumanitäre Komitee (Scientific-humanitarian Committee) in Berlin. His agenda was to educate the public about homosexuality in order to reduce unnecessary suffering and persecution. Hirschfeld understood same-sex attraction somewhat differently from Krafft-Ebing and Westphal. Initially, Hirschfeld built upon Ulrichs’ argument suggesting that homosexuality was a congenital condition and the homosexual was a kind of ‘third sex’: an amalgamation of both masculinity and femininity. As his studies progressed, however, he radicalised his thinking and came to acknowledge a form of sexual pluralism that preposed multiple forms of human sexuality in contrast to the rigid polarity of other nineteenthcentury paradigms. Sullivan states that Hirschfeld “positioned a notion of infinite sexual variability that he compared to the distinctiveness of fingerprints … [and he] totally undermined the distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ forms of sexuality and challenged the popular theory of constitutional degeneracy” (2003, p. 12). Attempts to ‘cure’ homosexuality were erroneous under Hirschfeld’s model: instead, he advocated for legal and moral acceptance of sexual difference, and thus became a leading figure in the early homosexual rights movement.

Almost a decade before Hirschfeld, another man had similarly spoken out against the growing illegality of homosexuality in Germany.

Given that homosexuals were degenerates who were perceived to be suffering from a sickness of the mind, many questioned the degree to which they should be held legally accountable for such actions. In 1869, Austrian-born journalist Karoly Maria Benkert is said to have coined the term ‘homosexual’ in an open letter he wrote to German legislators calling for the emancipation of homosexuals, suggesting that people who

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partook in these activities should not be punishable by law because homosexuality was inborn. Benkert’s actions marked the beginning of, and partially set the agenda for, the homosexual rights movement that would follow (Jagose, 1996).

The work of German writer and anarchist Adolf Brand offers a momentary reprieve from scientifically grounded theories of sexuality and represents a radical shift in thinking. Brand’s ideas, which he published between 1896 and 1932 in his journal Der Eigene (meaning ‘The Peculiar’ or ‘One’s Own’, depending on translation), argued against the medicalisation of homosexuality and the popular notion of inversion, specifically male homosexuality being associated with the feminine.

Although his notions were overtly masculinist, Brand based his argument on Max Stirner’s theory of self-ownership and the sovereignty of 5 the individual, suggesting that sexual desire was a personal choice and each person had the exclusive right to control his own body and sexual conduct (Kennedy, 2005; Stirner, 1974). Der Eigene was not a journal of sexual behaviour, but rather the first ever literary, art and cultural journal dedicated to male homosexual culture in the world. According to historian Harry Oosterhuis “most authors of Der Eigene were of the opinion that their feelings and experiences could not be understood in scientific categories and that art and literature provided the better means of expression” (Oosterhuis, cited in Kennedy, 2005, para. 6). Brand’s journal gave rise to the foundation of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Peculiar or Community of One’s Own) in 1903. Bringing together writers and artists who expressed individualistic and anarchistic ideas about homosexuality, Gemeinschaft der Eigenen is understood to have been the second homosexual movement in Germany (Hirschfeld’s being the first).

Returning now to scientifically grounded theory, in 1905 Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud rejected all claims of congenial sexuality, suggesting instead that sexuality (including heterosexuality) was not predetermined but rather continuously constructed through human social development. In other words, Freud radically proposed that heterosexuality, while a necessity for the continuance of humanity, was not natural. According to Freudian scholar 5

Stirner originally published The Ego and His Own in 1844, from which Brand drew upon the theory of self-ownership.

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Juliet Mitchell: “Freud’s achievement was to transform the biological theory of instincts into the notion of the human drive, then to trace its possible expressions and to regulate them to their place within the person’s history and subjectivity” (2000, p. 27). Freud theorised that hu6 mans are born polymorphously perverse, and it is only through social instruction that they learn heterosexuality. Thus, in the event of incorrect instruction or social development, a person may exhibit sexual deviance.

Another radical scientific thinker about sexuality was American biologist Alfred Kinsey, whose research caused enormous controversy, outraging academic, medical and social institutions alike. During the 1940s and 1950s, Kinsey (with the support of the National Institute of Mental Health) conducted extensive surveys collecting data on the sexual identity and practices of individuals. From this he contributed to the publication of two landmark texts, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (Kinsey, Pomeroy & Martin, 1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (Institute for Sex Research, 1953). In this work, Kinsey derived a seven-point scale with exclusive heterosexuality marked at one end, exclusive homosexuality at the other and bisexuality (or equally heterosexual and homosexual, as Kinsey termed it) as its midpoint. Kinsey’s extensive statistical data showed that most people regarded as heterosexual have at some time in their life experienced varying degrees of sexual interaction with members of the same sex. Thus the majority of people are not exclusively heterosexual, and instead can be located somewhere along a sexuality continuum.

The social propagation of the homosexual as a kind of deviant served to segregate and control homosexual identity by drawing clear boundaries between the normal and abnormal, while at the same time perpetuating a homosexual character stereotype. In 1968 (pre-dating the work of Foucault), British sociologist Mary McIntosh published “The Homosexual Role”, proposing that homosexuality was not a medical or psychiatric condition, or human deviance; instead, it was a social role – a socially constructed identity. Using cross-cultural examples, McIntosh argues that behaviours labelled homosexual vary across time and cul-

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.

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tures, defying categorisation and thus suggesting that there are homosexual 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 reinforce these ideas” (1968, p. 189). By labelling and persecuting homosexuals, 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 reproductive organs (D’Emilio, 1983). In was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association agreed to remove the classification of ‘disease’ from the condition of homosexuality. In response to such torture 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.

Homophiles, Liberationists and Lesbian Feminists 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 advancements. Beginning again around the 1950s, a number of civil rights groups – which can be referred to collectively as the Homophile Movement – 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 one’s 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.

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British Homosexual Law Reform Society and the Australian-based organisation known as CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution), lobbied to transform public attitudes towards homosexuality. The agenda of the homophile movement was largely based on the politics of assimilation (see Altman, 1972; D’Emilio, 1983; Jagose, 1996). Such organisations tended to stress the biological innateness of homosexuality. While they opposed the inhumane treatment of homosexuals, they argued that sexuality was private and should therefore not be a matter of concern to the church, state or medical profession. Moreover, homophile groups tended towards conservative representations of homosexuality, arguing that homosexuals were just like everyone else while disavowing the less ‘respectable’ elements of homosexual (sub)cultures such as drag queens, butches and transsexuals.

In 1969, exactly a hundred years after Benkert first called for the emancipation of homosexuals, the gay liberation movement was ignited when, on 28 June, police raided a New York gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in Christopher Street, Greenwich Village that was frequented by the so-called disreputable elements of gay culture. A glorified and now somewhat mythologised moment in the annals of gay history (see Altman, 1972; Duberman, 1993; Carter, 2010), the Stonewall riots are said to have provoked a new movement of collective resistance against sexual oppression, signifying a refusal to stay respectably closeted any longer.

Homosexual identity was being dramatically reconfigured and an unapologetic and distinctly gay identity constructed in its place – “one based on pride in being gay” (Altman, 1972, p. 109). The counter-cultural politics of the 1960s were sweeping the Western world, and while Stonewall did not single-handedly launch a movement, it symbolically marks a shift in the assimilationist agendas of the homophile politics and towards a revolutionary counter-cultural logic akin to other political demonstrations of the era.

For many lesbians and gays in the post-Stonewall era, collective pride became a platform upon which liberationist efforts were mobilised and a new and publicly visible identity was constructed. Annamarie Jagose explains that “‘gay’ was mobilised as a specifically political counter to that binarised and hierarchised sexual categorisation which classifies homosexuality as a deviation from a privileged and naturalised heterosexuality” (1996, p. 72). An international collection of groups (originating in New York in 1969 and London in 1970) known as the

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Gay Liberation Front began publicly protesting against the persecution of lesbians and gays in a far more disruptive fashion than their homophile allies. The Gay Liberation Front rejected the biological model of homosexuality, instead opting to assert a notion of choice. As Sullivan suggests, “in response to the image of homosexuality as a [shameful] biological anomaly … liberationists claimed that one’s identity ‘needs no excuses’, that, in fact, it is something to celebrate” (2003, p. 30). Lesbians and gays began openly celebrating their identity, and various cultural products are testament to this. Pride songs began circulating through gay communities and musicals such as Let My People Come (1974) and films such as La Cage Aux Folles (1979) explored deviant gender and sexual identities on public stages and screens. Scholarly discourse surrounding the history, culture and politics of non-heterosexual gender and sexual identity also started to appear.

Australian Dennis Altman contributed significantly to this with his publication of Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1972), as did Karla Jay and Allen Young’s edited volume, Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation (1992), which first appeared in 1972. Akin to the logics of what we now call postmodernism, liberation politics radically suggested, among other things, the dispensation of sexuality from the repressive mutual exclusivity of heterosexuality and homosexuality; the transformation of gender relationships and roles; the rejection of institutionalised marriage and monogamy; and a reconfiguration of the family unit. According to Steven Seidman, “liberation theory presupposed a notion of an innate polymorphous, androgynous human nature … [and] aimed at freeing individuals from the constraints of the sex/gender 8 system” (1993, p. 110). Basing its politics loosely upon what Robert Reynolds calls “a utopian vision of liberated bodies and unrepressed psychic drives” (2002, p. 70), gay liberation sought a new and radical approach to the way gender and sexual identity were conceptualised for all human beings.

The liberationist project critiqued not only the power structures of gender and sexuality, but also those of race, class and nationalism.

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.

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Strong critics of capitalism, liberationists advocated for developing world freedoms, and aligned themselves with radical anti-war movements and black power counter-cultures. However, conflicting identity politics stifled such attempts, and factions within the movement began to destroy the hope of achieving a unified state of resistance. As white, middle-class lesbians and gays gained greater mainstream acceptance during the 1970s, the liberationist model (to which contemporary queer radical politics are considerably indebted) was outmoded in favour of an ethnic (and at times essentialist) model of minority identity politics.

The ‘legitimation’ of lesbian and gay sexuality, and the mobilisation of lesbian and gay lobby groups throughout the Western world, consequently resulted in a return to assimilation (Reynolds, 2002; Wotherspoon, 1991). Jagose efficiently summarises the contrasts between the two models: According to the liberationist model, the established social order is fundamentally corrupt, and therefore the success of any political action is to be measured by the extent to which it smashes that system. The ethnic model, by contrast, was committed to establishing gay identity as a legitimate minority group, whose official recognition would secure citizenship rights for lesbian and gay subjects. (1996, p. 61)

The notions of erotic freedom, the challenges to traditional gender roles and the right to choose one’s sexuality that underpinned liberationist ideals were discarded as the ethnic model necessitated visible, stable and commodified sexual identity communities, as this was crucial to the struggle for civil rights such as the right to marry, the right to raise a family and inclusion within the military. Rather than attempting to destroy normalising and oppressive systems, the goal became inclusion within existing heterosexist structures and the hegemonic social order.

Furthermore, during the 1970s and 1980s, liberation efforts increasingly became gender separatist as many lesbians grew disillusioned with the political position of women in what they saw as the increasing supremacy of the misogynistic and anti-feminist agendas of gay liberation.

Similarly, many lesbian women were also angered by the marginal position of lesbians in feminist movements at the time, with certain heterosexual feminists believing that lesbianism hindered their struggle for women’s rights, referring to lesbians as the ‘lavender menace’. Consequently, lesbian feminism – a distinct and more radical faction of second-wave feminism – attempted to reconstruct the category of lesbian,

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shifting it from a category of sexuality to a political position – one that all women who rejected men could assume, regardless of whether they has sex with other women or not. This was a call to the ‘woman-identified woman’ (see Radicalesbians, 1992).

In this sense, lesbianism was regarded as a kind of consciousness.

One means by which this consciousness could be achieved was through the rejection of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich, 1980). Compulsory heterosexuality is the assumption that heterosexuality is the natural and universal form of sexual desire. It suggests that men and women are innately attracted to each other, and leads to an institutionalised inequality of power between women and men, as well as between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals. Adrienne Rich (1980) suggested that heterosexuality is not natural but rather a condition into which we are coerced by the patriarchy in order for men to maintain social, economic and physical power over women. In other words, through denaturalising heterosexuality, Rich set out to expose it as an institution grounded in unequal power relationships; however, she did this (as did some other feminists) but naturalising gender in its place.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, representational struggles over gender and sexual identification, and in particular lesbian sexuality, were debated and constructed in a number of often contradictory ways that I cannot unpack adequately here. However, it is important to understand that gay and lesbian liberation efforts were multiple and divergent. Some returned to assimilationist attitudes, opting for an end to discrimination and systematic mainstream recognition on the grounds that they were ‘respectable citizens’ whose sexuality was a private concern. Others, such as sadomasochists, transgender people, butch/femme lesbians, sexworkers or pornographers, challenged hegemony though public sexual dissent and consequently were regarded by some lesbian feminists and other feminists as obscene (see Duggan & Hunter, 1996). Some womenidentified women avoided replicating the oppressive politics of heterosexual hegemony through a rejection of all men, masculinity and even certain kinds of sex between women, such as sex with a dildo (a phallicshaped object), which they saw as male-supremacist and anti-feminist.

Still other women-identified women believed – as did liberationists – that gender role rigidity was grounded in male supremacy and oppressing to all people, and thus a deconstruction of these roles would lead to erotic freedom for everyone.

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Importantly, as Jagose notes, lesbian feminism productively informed queer theory in three crucial ways: “its attention to the specificity of gender, its framing of sexuality as institutional rather than personal, and its critique of compulsory heterosexuality” (1996, p. 57). Indeed, many of the insights and aspirations of lesbian feminism and the gay liberation movement have concomitantly inspired much queer thinking about gender, sexuality, power, difference and utopian visions. However, as we will now see, a major difference between the liberationist agendas and what we might call a queer agenda is that queer dispenses with the universalising goals and grand narratives of sexual freedom, which encapsulates the liberationist ideals, in favour of a politics of difference.

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 involved 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 poststructuralism, queer theory takes up the critique, as set out by Jean-François Lyotard (1984) and others, of truth, knowledge, objectivity and authenticity, 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 Foucault’s (1979) work on sexuality, queer theory proposes that identities 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 deconstructive 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

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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 ontological 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. 1–2). 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 categories, and encourages “an analysis that embeds the self in institutional and cultural practices” (Seidman, 1993, p. 137) rather than a preoccupation 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, Discourse and Heteronormativity 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 behaviours, 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 Muñoz’s Dissidentifications (1999), Sulllivan’s chapter, “Queer Race”, in her Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003); Ian Barnard’s Queer Race (2004); and Max Kirsch’s Queer Theory and Social Change (2000).

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à-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 society, 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 acceptable 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 reinforces 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 discourses 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 demand legitimisation or naturalisation by this group using the same institutional discourses are problematic because, while it might be in opposition 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 derive 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)

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In this sense, following Foucault, queer is not a singular oppositional position, but rather evokes a broad range of radical critical responses, which are constantly questioning the dominant discourses that produce ever-shifting logics of social and cultural normativity and non-normativity.

The mutual exclusivity of heterosexuality/homosexuality, for example, places the ‘unnatural’ or deviant category of homosexuality in binary opposition to the normalised and thus ‘natural’ category of heterosexuality, and it is the discourse of normativity – the natural/unnatural, normal/abnormal binary logic – that produces oppressive knowledges and power relations. Queer instigates its challenge around the structuration of any action or identity as natural or normal. As Sullivan reiterates: The punishment or stigmatisation of so-called ‘unnatural’ actions and identities is everywhere apparent in our society, and functions to reaffirm or naturalise that which is held to be ‘normal’. And we are all both agents and effects of disciplinary regimes. (2003, p. 84)

Where liberationists attempted to argue that homosexual sex is just as natural as heterosexual sex, queer theory and politics argue that while the act of having sex might be an historical fact, there is indeed no such thing as a natural or normal way to have it.

This institutionalisation of heterosexuality is called ‘heteronormativity’, and it is a valuable conceptual addition to sexual discourse on the part of queer theory. According to Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, heteronormativity is “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality not only coherent – that is organised as a sexuality – but also privileged” (1998, p. 565). These structuring norms organise homosexuality as its binary opposite. Thus, within heteronormativity, the category of homosexuality works to maintain heterosexuality as the primary, correct or normal sexual identity. It is important to note that heterosexuality and heteronormativity are not interchangeable terms. Furthermore, heterosexual sex is not necessarily heteronormative, as heteronormativity is constituted in the regulation of normative desires and practices favouring monogamy and other ‘natural’ sexual relationships and institutions such as marriage and kinship families.

The impetus of queer theory is to confuse these sexual binaries and deconstruct fixed categories on the grounds that “fixed identity categories are both the basis for oppression and the basis for political power”

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(Gamson, cited in Gamson & Moon, 2004, p. 50). Fixed categories assign 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, Christian 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 marginality, 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 content 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 conclusion, 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.

Sex, Gender, Sexuality and Performativity In 1990, poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler published what was to become a highly influential book entitled Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, considered by many as one of queer theory’s foundation texts. In Gender Trouble Butler proposes that gender is in no way natural or stable, but rather is constructed by a series of repeated gestures understood as performative acts. She says: Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally constructed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured 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 enacted 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 obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. (1990, p. 136, emphasis in original)

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According to Butler, gender is discursively produced by social institutions of knowledge that shape our understanding of gender as an outward sign of biological sex. Gender discourse – the ways in which we describe masculinity and femininity and the repetitive bodily enactments that we associate with lexicons of gender – are, in fact, all that gender is. Gender essence is an illusion, and it is only through discursive re-enforcement and repetitive performance that gender appears innate. Ontologies of gender are fictions created by disciplinary regimes for the purpose of normalising and limiting gender performance to benefit the appearance of heterosexuality and gender polarity as natural: 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 fictions 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 necessity 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)

In simpler terms, the two distinct gender categories of masculinity and femininity that we have come to accept as reality are nothing more than fictions that, albeit unwittingly, we are coerced into performing on our bodies. Those who do not ‘perform’ as they should risk punishment for appearing to have an unnatural gender identity – that is, a gender identity that conflicts with or hyperbolises the sexed body.

Furthermore, it is a culturally and historically specific performance of gender that informs natural gender identities and ways of being and knowing our gendered selves. The cultural and historic specificity of gender suggests that the ways in which we ‘do’ gender are variable, thus what constitutes ‘proper’ masculinity and femininity will vary according to social, cultural and temporal contexts. “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender”, says Butler. “Identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (1990, p.

25). Butler contends that we have no essential gender identity that informs how we behave; instead, how we behave (our performance of gender) is all that our gender identity is. Therefore, gender does not express a biological essence, but instead is an effect of power.

Sexuality, too, is performatively constructed, argues Butler:

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CHAPTER 1: Queer – Identities, Theories and Politics If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is “before,” “outside,” or “beyond” power is a cultural impossibility … The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual 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. 30–31, emphasis in original)

Here, Butler is arguing that any notion of an original – thus natural or ‘normal’ – gender or sexual identity is a fiction because there is no original. Instead, these concepts are made intelligible via a matrix of power: the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990, 1997). The logic purported by the heterosexual matrix suggests that our biologically categorised body determines the expression of gender and, in turn, gender determines the bodies/objects we are normatively permitted to desire. In other words: man = masculine = attracted to women/femininity; and woman = feminine = attracted to men/masculinity. Gender norms fundamentally stabilise and maintain heterosexuality. Thus homosexuality is often attributed to failed or misconstrued gender roles. Heteronormativity positions the gay male as feminine because his gender non-normativity is generative of his sexual non-normativity and thus essentialises the heterosexual male’s masculinity. Similarly, the lesbian female is often perceived as masculine because she too normalises society’s construction of the heterosexual woman as feminine.

While biological sex most commonly is understood as either male or female, Butler also questions the organisation of people into sexed categories, suggesting that – like gender – the sexed body is also a cultural construct, the consequence being that “the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (1990, p. 7). As Chris Beasley clarifies this with reference to Butler’s (1990) work: Gender … is typically interpreted as derived from the body. Bodily (anatomical) sex is seen as pre-dating culture, as eternal sex, the eternal male female binary.

However, in Butler’s analysis, the body is also a gendered performance which is socially constituted as the essence of gender, and it’s an intact, untouched foundation, and is all the more culturally powerful for this interpretation as being outside culture. Indeed, in her view, socially constituted gender creates anatomical sex, rather than the other way around, in the sense that the former makes the latter relevant in social practice. And if gender does not follow automatically from anatomical sex,

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then it is not axiomatic that gender refers only to the two categories designated in the binary men/women distinction. (2005, p. 101)

The existence of ‘ambiguously’ sexed or intersex bodies points to another category of body that contests the supposedly stable binary of sex itself. Moreover, since gender is not fixed to the sexed body, we are able to perform our gender in multiple and conflicting ways that challenge the distinction of man/woman. To do gender in contrary ways, suggests Butler (1990), is to cause gender trouble. The power of Butler’s theory of gender performativity is its ability to reveal that, as individuals, we are not locked into gender roles; there is no natural way to desire, and there is no natural way to perform identity upon our bodies.

In following chapters, I discuss in detail some of the performancebased methods employed by queers that attempt to reveal gender as performance. Drag performance, being the primary example of this, is offered by Butler as testimony that all gender identities are a mélange of concealed norms and performed acts. However, one must be careful not conflate these types of conscious performance with performativity. As Butler herself argues: “Performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-presentation; nor can it be simply equated with performance” (1993, p. 95). Rather, performativity is a precondition of the subject, a forced and repetitious performance of norms sustained by the constraints society applies to those norms that effectively endorse some sexual and gender practices and outlaw others. In contrast, performance is a condition of the subject, a chosen enactment that we ‘put on’ at will: 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 performer’s “will” or “choice”; further, what is “performed” works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake. (Butler, 1993, p. 234)

Thus performativity is not a voluntary act, while performance (for the most part) is voluntary. According to Sullivan, “the distinction between voluntarism and anti-voluntarism is often understood by commentators as the difference between performance and performativity respectively” (2003, p. 89).

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While the constitutions of performance are clearly defined by the will to act, interpreting a performance or the intent of the performer remains highly contestable. As Sullivan suggests, “all performances and all attempts at subversion will be ambiguous and open to multiple meanings” (2003, p. 92). The potential for a performance to subvert or expose the rigidity and unnaturalness of gender and sexuality will be a fundamental measurement of its success at queering normativity. However, the multiple potential of meanings suggests that the measurement of its success will always remain ambiguous, thus the political and subversive potential of performance is always contextual.

Queer Identities and Homonormativities Queer theory undermines the binary logic that constructs identities as oppositional and exclusionary, and seeks as its primary strategy the denaturalisation of identity categories. As Phelan notes: Queer theory [has] pointed to the fundamental indeterminacy of identities – of inside/outside communities, of masculine/feminine, of homo/hetero/bi, of male/female, and of racial and ethnic categories. Ultimately queer theory’s target is identity itself – the assumption of unity or harmony or transparency within persons or groups. (1997, p. 2)

Queer theory says we do not have to confine our identificatory practices to the limited patterns of behaviour like those insisted upon when the fixed labelling of a sexual identity is heterosexual, lesbian or gay, and when a gender identity is labelled either feminine or masculine. In fact, queer manifests in opposition to such bourgeois models of identity, refuting definition based upon material sexual practices. In this space of refusal, queer sexualities then emerge as “a series of improvised performances whose threat lies in the denial of any social identity derived from participation in those performances” (Meyer, 1994, p. 3). Queer displaces the notion of self as exclusive, abiding and continuous in favour of a concept of self as performative, improvisational and discontinuous, constructed through the repetition of stylised acts. It understands identity as constructed categories of self-knowledge, capable of shifting over time. Borrowing the Deleuzian idea of ‘becoming’, queer theory explores the dynamism of desire and mutability of life itself. So if queer is improvised, unfixed, processional, troubling and, as

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some have argued, implicitly unknowable, what does it mean to call oneself 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 themselves 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 anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically …

Anyone’s use of the word “queer” about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else … “gay” and “lesbian” still present themselves (however delusively) as objective, empirical categories governed by empirical rules of evidence … “Queer” seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation. (1993, pp. 8–9)

By calling oneself queer, one is not signifying a specifically inclusive or exclusive identity, but rather calling attention to identity as non-essential and provisional, moving away from the totalising effects of categories such as woman or lesbian. When identifying as a queer woman, for example, it is perhaps better to think of this as signifying a certain way of ‘doing’ the identity of woman and/or lesbian rather than something that is a specific or bounded identity itself. Thus Halperin (1995) suggests that instead of thinking of queer strictly as an identity, it might be better to think of it as a positionality that is available to anyone who aims to subvert hegemony, one that can be taken up by those who have been marginalised owing to their desires and/or because of their inability to locate themselves within a specific fixed identity category.

Noreen Giffney explains queer as signifying “the messiness of identity … a resistance to identity categories or easy categorisation, marking 10 a disidentification from the rigidity with which identity categories con10

Disidentification can be thought of as a performative mode of resistance to normalising discourses and dominant logics of identification (see Muñoz, 1999).

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tinue to be enforced and from beliefs that such categories are immovable” (2009, pp. 2–3). Queer is a politicised rubric that asserts gender and sexual multiplicity and fluidity, and is thus available to signify a range of non-normative gender and sexual subjectivities, practices and relationships of desire that defy the moral codes and normalising regimes imposed by the dominant society. Such subjectivities, practices and relationships that queer may signify include lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, asexual, butch, femme, androgyne, genderqueer, intersex, transgender, transsexual, two-spirit, fetishist, polyamory, nonmonogamy, sex work, practices of bondage, discipline, sadism or masochism (BDSM), or other radical sexual practitioners such as leathermen or dyke daddies among other things. As Alexander Doty (1993) has argued, queer can be conceptualised as something different, something more than lesbian and gay: the “intersecting or combining of more than one specific form of nonstraight sexuality” (1993, p. xvi).

Of course, it is important to note that the deconstructive tendencies of queer are not wholly celebrated. While unpacking the numerous contestations to queer theory is not something I have either the space or inclination to do here, I feel that it is only fair to signal this and offer readers the opportunity to engage with critical literatures. A number of scholars have waged critical assaults on queer theory, arguing that it is jargon laden and hierarchical, dominated by North American (and to a lesser extent British) theories and thinkers who fail to consider the contextual specificities of other locales. Some have suggested that queer theory has failed (Bawer, 1996), or that the time has come to move into a transdisciplinary post-queer critique (Ruffolo, 2009). Others contend that it does little to change social inequalities and debases collective political action by destabilising the subject and undermining sexual discourse (Edwards, 1998; Weeks, 2000; Taylor, Y., 2010). Moreover, it is said to sometimes deny the lived reality of women, lesbians and trans people (Jeffreys, 1993; Richardson et al., 2006; Stryker, 2006), and offers little in the way of thinking about identity beyond textual analysis (Escoffier, 1990; Plummer, 1998). I am mindful of such criticism and I agree with those scholars who stress the necessity and importance of empirical work on queerness. The cultural styles and artefacts that I examine in this book say a great deal about the lives of the people who make and produce them, and as such this research pays equally close attention to the lived realities of makers, producers and consumers of queer culture and

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their negotiation of gender and sexual difference in and through cultural participation.

A final distinctive point of queerness to which I attend in this chapter has to do with its contestation of the mainstreaming of lesbian and gay culture and identity politics. In relation to music, extended discussions of the distinctions between ‘mainstream’ gay culture and ‘alternative’ queer cultures are presented in Chapters 5, 6 and 7. However, for now let us considered the concept of ‘homonormativity’.

In the wake of assimilationist agenda, many queer activists argue that the call for civil rights and legislative gains – gay marriage, child adoption, military service, welfare and pension benefits – has forced the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity. In other words, in order to gain ‘equal’ standing within these social institutions, lesbian and gay identities have been normalised. The gay mainstream, argues Eric Rofes, “present[s] a sanitized vision of our people and replace[s] butch/femme dykes with Heather and her two mommies, and kinky gay men with domestic partner wedding cakes” (1998, p. 204). Instead of advocating for a pluralistic queer culture, certain forms of sexual non-normativity become privileged at the expense of others. Those that are most privileged and gain the most status are the ones that most closely replicate heteronormative ideals: wealthy, monogamous, same-sex couples. For example, Warner argues that marriage is a “vehicle for a great load of privileges, and because it confers status that has a great deals of normative force, it is an inherently discriminatory system”. Warner goes on to say that he finds the position of gay marriage advocates to be highly problematic, as they “still pretend that marriage is just a private choice, or a personal right, as though participating in this institution has no consequence for others” (cited in Jagose, 2000, para. 8).

These new individualistic and bourgeois neoliberal sexual politics that privilege certain kinds of same-sex relations are termed homonormativity. In Lisa Duggan’s critique of neoliberalism, The Twilight of Equality? (2003), she outlines homonormativity as: a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a semimobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption (p. 50).

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Radical queer activists argue against the homogenisation of gay identity and the acceptance of liberal gains within the private, consumer sphere.

Queers must remain resistant to such normalising effects, argues gay shame activist Mattilda (aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore), because assimilation is leading to the increasing marginalisation of queers and potentially may result in the erasure of certain forms of queer culture: 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. (Bernstein 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, performance – 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, Muñoz (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 performances are disidentificatory in that they not only seek to dismantle majoritarian cultures; rather, argues Muñoz, they also use “majoritarian culture as raw material to make a new world” (p. 196). By using performance as a performative strategy to tear down and then queerly rebuild the world, Muñoz suggests that these disidentificatory performances 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 experience, 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

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become not so much categories to be occupied, owned, protected or rejected, but spaces to be navigated, revisited, revised and elided on a moment-to-moment basis” (Giffney, 2009, pp. 6–7). Queer navigations, challenges, troubling actions and disidentificatory performances take many forms and pervade multiple genres of cultural expression. Looking through the lens of music and performance, this will become increasingly evident in the second part of this book, where we will explore queer cultural histories, practices and people who are in conflict with and attempt to calve an existence beyond both straight and gay social norms and mainstream cultural conventions. In the next chapter, however, we shall turn to thinking about music production and consumption as a resource for doing queer identity work and as a catalyst for queer scenebuilding and world-making.