Queering the Popular Pitch

Sheila Whiteley, Jennifer Rycenga, Sheila Whiteley, Jennifer Rycenga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136093784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Queering the Popular Pitch is a new collection of 19 essays that situate queering within the discourse of sex and sexuality in relation to popular music. This investigation addresses the changing debates within gay, lesbian and queer discourse in relation to the dissemination of musical texts -performance, cultural production and sexual meaning - situating music within the broader patterns of culture that it both mirrors and actively reproduces.

The collection is divided into four parts:
queering borders

queer spaces

hidden histories

queer thoughts, mixed media.

Queering the Popular Pitch will appeal to students of popular music, Gay and Lesbian studies. With case studies and essays by leading popular music scholars it provides insightful discourse in a growing field of musicological research.

PART 1

Performing Lives, Hidden Histories

1

WHAT’S THAT SMELL?

Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives

JUDITH HALBERSTAM

QUEER TEMPORALITY

This chapter tracks the evolution and persistence of queer subcultural life and is drawn from a book-length study of the explosion of queer urban subcultures in the last decade in which my larger purpose is to examine how many queer communities experience and spend time in ways that are very different from their heterosexual counterparts. Queer uses of time and space develop in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction, and queer subcultures develop as alternatives to kinship-based notions of community. In my work on subcultures I explore the stretched-out adolescences of queer culture makers and I posit an “epistemology of youth” that disrupts conventional accounts of subculture, youth culture, adulthood, race, class, and maturity.¹ While I do not wish to posit a complete or absolute opposition between the projects of subcultural involvement and reproduction, this chapter does produce a polemic within which subcultural lives are the radical alternative to gay and lesbian families. Queer kinship itself has a complex relation to reproduction, cultural production, and assimilation, and I do not mean to write off the possibility of resistant models of reproductive kinship; however, my emphasis on subcultural involvement is staged as an alternative life narrative. Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities, I will argue, by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of the conventional forward-moving narratives of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.

An essay by Judith Butler in a volume dedicated to the work of Stuart Hall tackles the question of what kinds of agency can be read into forms of activity that tend to be associated with style. She asks, “[H]ow do we read the agency of the subject when its demand for cultural and psychic and political survival makes itself known as style?”² And, building on the work by Hall and others in the classic volume on subcultures Resistance through Rituals, Butler puts the concept of “ritual” into motion as a practice that can either reinforce or disrupt cultural norms. Liminal subjects—those who are excluded from “the norms that govern the recognizability of the human”—are sacrificed to maintain coherence within the category of the human, and for them, style is both the sign of their exclusion and the mode by which they survive nonetheless. The power of Butler’s work, here and elsewhere, lies in her ability to show how much has been excluded, rejected, abjected in the formation of human community and what toll those exclusions take upon particular subjects.

Punk has always been the stylized and ritualized language of the rejected, the perverse, and the willfully artifical; as Poly Styrene of Xray Spex sings, “I am a poseur and I don’t care!” Queer punk has surfaced in recent years as a potent critique of hetero- and homonormativity. Dyke punk in particular, by bands like Tribe 8 and The Haggard, inspires a reconsideration of the topic of subcultures in relation to queer cultural production and in opposition to notions of gay community. Subcultures provide a vital critique of the seemingly organic nature of “community,” and they make visible the forms of unbelonging and disconnection that are necessary to the creation of community. At a time when “gay and lesbian community” is used as a rallying cry for fairly conservative social projects aimed at assimilating gays and lesbians into the mainstream of the life of the nation and family, queer subcultures preserve the critique of heteronormativity that was always implicit in queer life. Community, generally speaking, is the term used to describe seemingly natural forms of congregation. As Sarah Thornton comments in her introduction to The Subcultures Reader, “Community tends to suggest a more permanent population, often aligned to a neighborhood, of which family is the key constituent part. Kinship would seem to be one of the main building blocks of community.”³ Subcultures, however, suggest transient, extrafamilial and oppositional modes of affiliation. The idea of community, writes Jean-Luc Nancy, emerges out of the Christian ritual of communion and expresses a sense of something that we once had that has now been lost, a connection that once was organic and life-giving that now is moribund and redundant. Nancy calls this the “lost community” and expresses suspicion about this “belated invention.” He writes, “What this community has ‘lost’—the immanence and the intimacy of a communion—is lost only in the sense that such a ‘loss’ is constitutive of ‘community’ itself.”⁴ Given, then, that quests for community are always nostalgic attempts to return to some fantasized moment of union and unity, the conservative embrace of “community” in all kinds of political projects is unmasked; this makes the reconsideration of subcultures all the more urgent.

THE BALLAD OF A LADYMAN

Sleater-Kinney’s anthem “Ballad of a Ladyman” describes the allure of subcultural life for the ladyman, the freak who wants to “rock with the tough girls.” The band layers Corin Tucker’s shrill but tuneful vocals over the discordant and forceful guitar playing of Carrie Brownstein and the hard rhythm of Janet Weiss’s percussion. This is a beat that takes no prisoners and makes no concessions to the “boys who are fearful of getting an earful.” And while Sleater-Kinney are most often folded into histories of the “riot grrrl” phenomenon and girl punk, they must also be placed within a new wave of dyke subcultures. When taken separately, riot dyke bands, drag kings, and queer slam poets all seem to represent a queer edge in a larger cultural phenomenon. When considered together, they add up to a fierce and lively queer subculture that needs to be reckoned with on its own terms. This chapter tracks the significant differences between the ladymen who rock and roll and drag up and slam their way toward new queer futures and the punk rockers of an earlier generation of subcultural activity. My tour of dyke subcultures takes in riot dyke punk by bands like Sleater-Kinney, The Butchies, Le Tigre, Tribe 8, The Haggard, and Bitch and Animal; drag kings like Dred and drag king boy-band parody group Backdoor Boys; and slam poets like Alix Olson and StaceyAnn Chin. Queer subcultures are related to old school subcultures like punk, but they also carve out new territory for a consideration of the overlap of gender, generation, class, race, community, and sexuality in relation to minority cultural production.

I have long been interested in and part of various subcultural groups. As a young person I remember well the experience of finding punk rock in the middle of a typically horrible grammar school experience in England in the 1970s. I plunged into punk rock music, clothing, and rebellion precisely because it gave me a language with which to reject not only the high cultural texts in the classroom but also the homophobia and sexism outside it. I tried singing in a punk band called Penny Black and the Stamps for a brief two-week period, thinking that my utter lack of musical ability would serve me well finally. But, alas, even punk divas scream in key and my rebel yells were not mellifluous enough to launch my singing career. Instead of singing, I collected records, went to shows, dyed my hair, and fashioned outfits from safety pins and bondage pants. And so I learned at an early age that even if you cannot be in the band, participation at multiple levels is what subculture offers. I found myself reminiscing over my punk past when I began researching drag king cultures for a collaborative project with photographer Del LaGrace Volcano. Through my new subcultural involvement I began to see some specific features of queer subculture as opposed to a larger historical subculture like punk rock.

After finishing my drag king book in 1999, I received calls every few months from TV stations wanting me to put them in touch with drag kings for talk shows and news shows. Most of these shows would invite the kings on to parade around with some drag queens in front of a studio audience. At the end of the show, the audience would vote on whether each king or queen was really a man orreally a woman. A few of the kings managed to circumvent the either/or format and offer up a more complex gendered self; and so, Black drag king Dred took off her moustache to reveal a “woman’s” face but then took off her wig to reveal a bald pate. The audience was confused and horrified by the spectacle of indeterminacy. Josh Gamson, in Freaks Talk Back, has written about the potential for talk shows to allow the “crazies” and “queers” to talk back, but most of the time when drag kings appeared in mass public venues, the host did all the talking.⁵ Drag kings also made an appearance in HBO’s Sex and the City and on MTV’s True Life. On every occasion that drag kings appeared on “straight” TV they were deployed as an entertaining backdrop against which heterosexual desire was showcased and celebrated. As someone who has tirelessly promoted drag kings, as individual performers and as a subculture, I found the whole process of watching the mass culture’s flirtation with drag kings depressing and disheartening; but it did clarify for me what my stakes might be in promoting them: after watching drag kings try to go prime time, I remain committed to archiving and celebrating and analyzing queer subcultures before they are dismissed by mass culture or before they simply disappear from lack of exposure or what we might call “subcultural fatigue”—namely, the phenomenon of burnout among subcultural producers.

As the talk show phenomenon vividly illustrates, mainstream culture within postmodernism should be defined as the process by which subcultures are both recognized and absorbed, mostly for the profit of large media conglomerates. In other words, when TV stations show an interest in a dyke subculture like drag kings, this is cause for both celebration and concern: on the one hand, the mainstream recognition and acknowledgment of a subculture has the potential to alter the contours of dominant culture (think here of the small inroads into popular notions of sex, gender, and race made by the regular presence of Black drag queen RuPaul on cable TV); but, on the other hand, most of the interest directed by mainstream media at subcultures is voyeuristic and predatory. The subculture might appear on TV eventually as an illustration of the strange and perverse, or else it will be summarily robbed of its salient features and subcultural form: drag, for example, will be lifted without its subcultural producers, drag queens or kings. In an essay that tracks the results of precisely this process, Marco Becquer and Jose Gatti examine the contradictory effects of the sudden visibility of Harlem drag balls and their drag practices. In their analysis of the co-optation of gay vogueing by Madonna’s hit single “Vogue” and by Jennie Livingston’s acclaimed independent film Paris Is Burning, Becquer and Gatti show how the counterhegemonic knowledge articulated in vogueing meets with “the violence of the universal.” Becquer and Gatti write of Madonna’s video and Livingston’s film, “Both partake in the production of newness, a process which purports to keep us up-to-date as it continually adds on novelties to a relational system that absorbs them; both contain vogueing beneath the pluralist umbrella of hipness.”⁶ And so, while the queens in Paris Is Burning expressed a desire for precisely the kind of fame and fortune that did eventually accrue to vogueing, the fame went to director Jennie Livingston and the fortune went to Madonna. The subculture itself, the gay Black and Puerto Rican children of the houses of Chanel, Extravaganza, and LaBeija, disappeared back into the world of sex work, HIV, and queer glamour, and within five years of the release ofParis Is Burning, five of the queens in the film were dead.⁷

The mainstream absorption of vogueing highlights the uneven exchange between dominant culture scavengers and subcultural artists: subcultural artists often seek out mainstream attention for their performances and productions in the hopes of gaining financial assistance for future endeavors. Subcultural activity is, of course, rarely profitable, and always costly for the producers, and it can be very short-lived without the necessary cash infusions (in the words of Sleater-Kinney, “This music gig doesn’t pay that good, but the fans are alright”). Some subcul- tural producers turn the subculture itself into a source of revenue and, as Angela McRobbie comments, “Subcultures are often ways of creating job opportunities as more traditional careers disappear.”⁸ So while the subcultural producers hope for cash and a little exposure, the dominant culture scavengers are usually looking for a story and hoping for that brush with the “new” and the “hip” described so well by Becquer and Gatti. In my experiences working with drag kings, however, I found that while big media reached their “hipness quota” quickly with the addition of a few well-placed drag kings, in return, they almost never paid for drag king services; when they did pay, it was always a pittance. Obviously the payback for the subcultural participants cannot come in the form of material benefits; what seems more useful, then, in this exchange between mainstream attention and subcultural product, would be to use the encounter to force some kind of recognition upon audiences that what is appealing about mainstream culture may very well come from subcultures that they do not even know exist or that they have repudiated.

As George Lipsitz’s work has shown in relation to ethnic minority cultures, cultural producers often function as organic intellectuals, in a Gramscian sense; as such, minority artists can produce what Lipsitz terms “a historical bloc” or a...