"I don’t give a shit where I spit my phlegm" (Tribe 8). Rejection and Anger in Queer-Feminist Punk Rock

• Main Author: Maria Katharina Wiedlack
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage 2013-03-01
• Series: Transposition
• Subjects: anti-social theory; feminist theory; politics of negativity; queer negativity; activism; queer theory
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/transposition/280

This article focuses on queer-feminist punk, also known as queercore, homocore or dykecore. It presents some examples of punk rock performers and their cultural productions (Tribe 8, Agatha, Stag Bitten and others) to argue that these bands produce countercultural and alternative forms of queer politics and queer theory as well as feminist theory. Moreover, such queer politics are understood as a continuation of feminist movements and theory. Queer-feminist punk activists participate in a dialogue with other feminist and queer movements to build alliances and forms of solidarity to resists the – often racialized – misogyny of mainstream culture as well as countercultural environments. They combine feminist accounts with their specific punk philosophy of anti-social queerness or queer negativity. Analyzing lyrical content – its meanings, its rhetoric, or tone – it will be shown that queer-feminist punk music uses the term queer as anti-identitarian and anti-social. Their discourses on queerness parallel in interesting ways anti-relational queer theory, for example by Lee Edelman, who understands queerness as a negative force in sexuality that irritates a subject’s psychic coherence and is therefore unable to support social relations. To account for the decolonial and anti-racist aspects of queer-feminist punk rock anti-social queer theories will be combined and extended by works by the black feminists bell hooks and Audre Lorde. The black feminists’ theorization of anger allows for a thinking through of the anti-social and queer at the intersection of racialization. Moreover, focusing anger allows to analyze anti-social queer politics beyond the realm of symbolic meaning: to focus action, feelings, experience and the body.