Maria Katharina Wiedlack Queer-Feminist Punk An Anti-Social History
zaglossus
1
2
Maria Katharina Wiedlack
Queer Feminist Punk An Anti-Social History
zaglossus
3
Veröffentlicht mit Unterstützung des Austrian Science Fund (FWF): PUB 241-V21
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.dnb.de. © Zaglossus e. U., Vienna, 2015 All rights reserved Copy editors: C. Joanna Sheldon, PhD; Michelle Mallasch, BA Cover illustration: Cristy C. Road Print: Prime Rate Kft., Budapest Printed in Hungary ISBN 978-3-902902-27-6 Zaglossus e. U. Vereinsgasse 33/12+25, 1020 Vienna, Austria E-Mail: info@zaglossus.eu www.zaglossus.eu
4
Contents 1. Introduction 1.1. Radically Queer 1.2. Anti-Social Queer Theory 1.3. The Culture(s) of Queer-Feminist Punk 1.4. The Meaning(s) of Queer-Feminist Punk 1.5. A Queer-Feminist Punk Reader’s Companion
2. “To Sir with Hate”: A Liminal History of Queer-Feminist Punk Rock 2.1. “Gay Punk Comes Out with a Vengeance”: The Provisional Location of an Origin 2.2. “Feminists We’re Calling You, Please Report to the Front Desk”: The New Wave of Queer Punk Feminism during the 1990s 2.3. “For Once, We Will Have the Final Say, [...] Cause They Know We’re Here to Stay”: The Queer-Feminist Punk Explosion 2.4. “After This in the USA They Say You’re Dead Anyway”: Queer-Feminist Punk Recurrences after 2000 2.5. “Punk May Not Be Dead, but It Is Queer ...”: Intersectional Approaches in Contemporary Queer-Feminist Punk Rock 2.6. “Don’t Put Me in a Box. I’ll Only Crush It”: Writing and Archiving a Movement 2.7. To Be Continued ...: A Preliminary Conclusion
3. “We’re Punk as Fuck and Fuck like Punks”: Punk Rock, Queerness, and the Death Drive
9 13 18 20 23 27
30 34 57 63 67 71 76 85
89
3.1. “Pseudo Intellectual Slut, You Went to School, Did You Learn How to Fuck?”: A Bricolage of Psychoanalytic Theories 91 3.2. Queer-Feminist Punk and Negativity 97 3.3. “Fantasies of Utopia Are What Get You Hooked on Punk in the First Place, Right?”: Queer-Feminist Punk Rock, Sociality and the Possibility of a Future 120 3.4. “So Fuck That Shit / We’re Sick of It”: Conclusion 143
5
4. “Challenge the System and Challenge Yourself”: Queer-Feminist Punk Rock’s Intersectional Politics and Anarchism 146 4.1. “Anarchy Is Freedom—People before Profit”: Queer-Feminist Punk Approaches to Capitalism 4.2. “Fuck the System / We Can Bring It Down”: Gay Assimilation, Capitalism and Institutions 4.3. “Rebels of Privilege”? Queer-Feminist Punk Hegemonies and Interventions 4.4. “Spit and Passion”: The Queer-Feminist Punk Version of Anarchism
149 180 188 190
5. “There’s a Dyke in the Pit”: The Feminist Politics of Queer-Feminist Punk Rock 193 5.1. “Not Gay as in Happy, but Queer as in Fuck You”: Dykecore and/as Feminism 5.2. “You’ll Find Your Place in the World, Girl, All You Gotta Do Is Stand Up and Fight Fire with Fire”: Queer Bonds and the Formation of a Movement 5.3. “Oh, I’m Just a Girl, All Pretty and Petite”: Queer-Feminist Punk Rock and Third-Wave Feminism 5.4. “Don’t You Stop, We Won’t Stop”: Conclusion
6. “A Race Riot Did Happen!”: Queer Punks of Color Raising Their Voices 6.1. “All We Have Now to Wait to See / Is Our Monochrome Reality”: Introduction 6.2. “Whitestraightboy Hegemony”: How Punk Became White 6.3. “Hey, Look Around, There’s So Much White”: Early Role Models 6.4. “This Fight Is Ours”: Queer Punks of Color Visibility within Queer-Feminist Punk Culture 6.5. “It Puts a Little Bit of Meaning into the Fun”: Punk, (B)orderlands, and Queer Decolonial Feminism 6.6. “Rise Up—No One Is Going to Save You”: Queer-Feminist Punks of Color and the Queer-Feminist Punk Revolution
6
195 238 256 263
266 266 272 282 292 305 322
7. “WE R LA FUCKEN RAZA SO DON’T EVEN FUCKEN DARE”: Anger and the Politics of Jouissance 326 7.1. “We Speak in a Language of Violence”: The Aesthetics of Anger 7.2. “Smile Bigger Until You Fucking Crack”: Anger, Jouissance and Screams 7.3. “Screaming Queens”: The Voice, the Body, and Meaning 7.4. “We’ll Start a Demonstration, or We’ll Create a Scene”: The Creativity in Negativity 7.5. Not Perfect, Passionate: Conclusion
8. “We’ve Got to Show Them We’re Worse than Queer”: Epilogue
330 342 348 355 361
364
8.1. “I Am Sickened by Your Money Lust / and All Your Fucked-Up Greed”: Queer-Feminist Punk Occupying the US 366 8.2. Queer-Feminist Punk Goes International 384 8.3. ”... A Cover By a Band That No Longer Supports the Message of Their Own Song”!?! 394
References
399
7
8
1. Introduction
This book presents a map and analysis of queer-feminist punk histories that are located in the US and Canada. It offers a very detailed description of people, bands, events, and their politics. Although the collection and analysis are definitely a good read for punk knowledge showoffs or anyone looking for inspiration to update hir personal countercultural collection, they are by no means exhaustive. This work is limited by my “outsider” status as a white European academic, as well as by my education and personal interests, and therefore should not be understood as universal or true for everyone. Hopefully, however, the book will appeal to queer-feminist punk “nerds,” academics and activists alike. It offers many insights into alternative strategies for queer-feminist political activism, and hints at alternative opportunities to regroup and bond, experience pleasure and fight against oppressive structures. In addition, chapter three in particular provides a good read for all academic dissidents who gain pleasure from losing themselves in hardcore psychoanalytic theory. Chapter three is not a must-read to understand the analysis of the queerfeminist punk material and of the social bonds created around and through queer-feminist punk. However, I encourage readers to follow me on my adventure through “the evil ways” of queer theory. There might not be a bright future awaiting the traveler at (death) the end of the journey, but there could be something unexpected or important in store. With this book I offer a historiography that starts in the mid1980s, highlighting Toronto’s queer-feminist punk dissidence as one origin. However, there might be different versions of queerfeminist punk’s emergence. It reflects my journey through tons 9
of queer-feminist punk lyrics, tunes, zines, academic articles and books, as well as the unforgettable impressions gathered during endless nights in the middle of (queer-feminist) mosh pits, and bits and pieces of firsthand information from discussions with musicians, organizers and activists. In other words, this historiography is highly subjective and aims to provoke dialogue—or better yet, have others tell their version of queer-feminist punk history. Queer-feminist punk has many beginnings, and although this book tells exciting punk stories, they are not the only ones. Moreover, the histories of queer-feminist punk are often entangled with other histories and movements that inhabit punk’s centers and margins, and leftist punk scenes and circles in general. Although this entanglement must be acknowledged and indeed highlighted, this book puts queer-feminist and anti-racist politics at the center of punk rock’s history. It focuses on the individual bands, musicians, writers and organizers, whose politics and productions usually reflect the margins of the punk culture they inhabit according to the punk literature. This book seeks to bring queer-feminist punks of color, riot grrrls and queercore, homocore or dykecore to the fore and map out their political and performative agendas, strategies and methods. Following contemporary queer-feminist anti-racist punk scholars like Fiona I. B. Ngô and Elizabeth A. Stinson (“Introduction: Threads and Omissions”), Mimi T. Nguyen (“Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival”) or Tavia Nyong’o (“Do You”), this book proposes that queer feminists and punks of color as well as the politics around racialization and non-normative genders, sexes, and sexualities have always been important parts of punk culture and that it is time to complicate the picture, rather than renarrate the straight punk history of white middleclassness, homophobia and racism again and again. By focusing on queer-feminist punks and queer-feminist punks of color within punk rock history, I also subsume many individuals and groups under the label queer-feminist punk that might use or reject different labels like queercore, homocore or dykecore, as well as riot grrrl or Afro-punk. Despite their different labels, and selfidentifications, as a whole the individual protagonists, scenes, as 10
well as their artistic and political discourses, share important politics and strategies. Accordingly, I argue that queer-feminist punk countercultures belong to or form a political movement and that their productions—lyrics, writing, sound and performances— should be seen as a form of queer-feminist activism and agency. Furthermore, I propose that queer-feminist punk countercultural agents do not only engage with queer and feminist politics, as well as with academic theory, but also produce queer-feminist political theory—a more or less coherent set of ideas to analyze, explain and counter oppressive social structures in addition to explicit open violence and oppression. The focus on queer-feminist anti-racist punk politics within punk rock is not only an attempt to rewrite punk and riot grrrl history but, to use the words of Ngô and Stinson (170), also an attempt to “expand the places where we find valuable knowledge, to re-imagine who counts as an intellectual producer, and to work across genres.” My use of the term queer-feminist politics—rather than queer politics—is inspired by the tradition of many activists around the world who call attention to the still prevalent sexism, misogyny and inequality in mainstream cultures, including queer movements, by foregrounding the feminist aspects of their queer politics. More recently, similar politics have found their way into academic writing, for example, through the work of Mimi Marinucci,1 José Muñoz,2 Judith Jack Halberstam,3 and others. Such activist and academic approaches conceptualize queer politics as a continuation of feminist movements and theory rather than as a revolutionary 1 2
3
Feminism is Queer: The Intimate Connection between Queer and Feminist Theory. London: Zed Books, 2010. In particular, the books Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009) by José Muñoz are from a decidedly feminist and queer perspective. Halberstam explains her feminist take on queer theory strongly in her books, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005) and The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
11
break with them. Furthermore, they seek a dialogue between lesbian and gay movements, second-wave feminists and the diverse range of queer movements to build alliances and different forms of solidarity. My examples of queer-feminist punk rock activists also seek to find alliances with different groups of queer, feminist and decolonial thinkers and activists. These groups and their allies understand the usefulness of queer, feminist and decolonizing politics, activist strategies and social analysis against the racialized discrimination, misogyny, homophobia, ableism and transphobia of mainstream culture as well as the countercultural environments of punk rock and queer scenes. They combine feminist and decolonial accounts with their specific punk philosophy of anti-social queerness or queer negativity. By analyzing lyrical content, writing, music, sound, performances and countercultural settings in general, I provide examples of queer-feminist anti-social accounts of punk music (e.g., expressions of negativity and anger) and argue that queer-feminist punk rock as such can be understood as a politics of negativity. Relating such queer-feminist punk negativity to academic concepts and scholarly work, I show how punk rock is capable of negotiating and communicating academic queer-feminist theoretical positions in a non-academic setting. Moreover, I argue that queer-feminist punk not only negotiates, translates and appropriates academic approaches, but also produces similar negative and repoliticized queer-feminist theories without any direct inspiration from academic discourses. Taking queer-feminist punk countercultural discourses seriously, I furthermore argue that queer-feminist punk communities accomplish what academic queer theory following the “anti-social turn”4 often does not achieve: They transform their radically antisocial queer positions into (models for) livable activism. Moreover, they form social bonds through queer negativity that exceed normative forms of relationality.
4
12
Halberstam, “The Anti-Social.”