Queer-Feminist Punk Rock
2.1.3. Anti-Social Theory and/in Punk Rock
It needs to be emphasized again that the experience of homopho-bia and hatred against non-normative individuals and groups addressed in the concept of queer was the reason for queer ac-tivists and theorists to take up the term in the first place. When Queer Nation decided to use the term queer, they did so because it was “the most popular vernacular term of abuse for homosexu-als” (Dynes 191). For queer activists, using the term was “a way of reminding [queers] how [they] are perceived by the rest of the world” (Kaplan 36). Taking up the term queer was a provocation against assimilationist and identitarian gay and lesbian politics as well as activism against homophobia. The aim was not to win sup-port or approval through heteronormative hegemony or to fight for equal rights for an oppressed minority, but rather a rejection of a civil rights model of political activity (Duggan 16).
A decade after the initiation of an emancipatory use of the term queer, anti-social queer theory academics and activism echoed this initial motive by taking up psychoanalytic concepts of sexuality. Leo Bersani’s publication Homos in 1995 was crucial for the extensive corpus of work on anti-social queer theory that exists today. Following queer psychoanalytic approaches, Leo Bersani suggested in his book that sex in general and “homosex,”
in particular, need to be understood as communicative, anti-identitarian and destructive (cf. Bersani, Homos). Moreover, “the value of sexuality itself [...] is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it” (Bersani qtd. in Halberstam, “The Politics” 823). The theorist who most significantly influenced this discourse with his understanding of queer as a negative, anti-social term that goes beyond borders and disciplines is Lee Edelman in his book No Fu-ture: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman takes up Bersani’s psychoanalytic assertion that the sexual instinct is distinct from sexual desire. The sexual instinct is seen as a converging force towards destruction of the self, which is described as the death drive. Edelman argues that sexuality can only get “saved” from its self-destructing, irritating qualities and integrated into the sym-bolic order by attaching its meaning and purpose to reproduc-tion. One effect and certainly a consequence of this “rescue proj-ect” is that queerness according to this logic can only signify the opposite of creation and reproduction, “the place of the social or-der’s death drive” (Edelman, No Future 3). Interwoven with this ar-gument is the concept of “futurity” (ibid.). The future of society, which is the meaning and goal of every political action, accord-ing to Edelman, is always visualized through the imaginary “child”
(ibid.). Therefore, “the queer subject [...] has been bound episte-mologically to negativity, to nonsense, to antiproduction, to un-intelligibility [...]” (Halberstam, “The Politics” 823).
Though Edelman took the title of his book from the repertoire of early punk rock, he repudiates any correspondence between punk and his thesis, despite the insistence of his colleagues, like Halber-stam (“The Politics”; “The Anti-Social”) or Nyong’o (“Do You”) that queer was always a part of punk from the beginning. Moreover, he
ignores the existence of a relatively broad scene of queer punks today, who perform a negative, irritating, self-destructive, aggres-sive and paradoxical aesthetic. Although the examples present-ed here focus on sexual politics, it nepresent-eds to be emphasizpresent-ed again that queer-feminist punks focus on the connections between ho-mophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and discrimination on the grounds of categories like class. Moreover, they foregrounded ex-plicitly feminist politics, as the following collection of queer-femi-nist punk examples will show.
2.2. “Feminists We’re Calling You, Please Report to the Front Desk”:
59The New Wave of Queer Punk Feminism during the 1990s
Although queercore and homocore included feminist politics from the time the anti-patriarchy band Fifth Column and J.D.s came on the scene, I want to emphasize that around 1991 a new wave of radical feminism emerged within and outside the queer-core punk communities. The term for these decidedly radical fem-inist punk politics was riot grrrl. I will explain the femfem-inist politics as well as the connection between riot grrrl and other queer-feminist punk groups in chapter five in detail. However, I want to briefly analyze the connections between riot grrrl and queercore at this point to contextualize the sociopolitical structures and mi-cropolitics of the broader queer-feminist punk context during the 1990s. Moreover, the intersection between the two helps make sense of the specific punk politics at play and their use of terminol-ogy and labels. Young female-identified punks came up with the term riot grrrl during the 1990s as a reaction against the misogyny within hardcore punk scenes. Many self-identified riot grrrls, like Donna Dresch, for example, also used the term queercore as a
59 “Feminists we’re calling you, please report to the front desk” is a line from the song FYR by Le Tigre released on Mr. Lady records in 2001 (capitalization added).
self-referent. This does not mean that the two terms were inter-changeable, but the alternating use of both terms rather speaks to the refusal of queer-feminist punks to understand identity as stagnant or based on one single category. Self-identification as riot grrrl or queercore, I argue, needs to be understood in the con-text of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “strategic essential-ism,” “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously vis-ible political interest” (Spivak, “Subaltern Studies” 214).
Musicians like Gina Young60 explain their use of the labels queercore and riot grrrl as a form of self-empowerment. “[I]f I don’t take the power of definition into my own hands, other people will do it for me,” Young emphasizes. “They then have the power to as-sume I’m a lesbian and comment on it in a derogatory way, or to assume I’m straight because heteronormativity prevails, and then silence [me] repeatedly and violently. I won’t give away the power to define myself” (qtd. in Ciminelli and Knox 119). The political con-text that provided the background for use of the particular term riot grrrl were national debates around abortion that provoked a new wave of feminist actions, as Sara Marcus (73) emphasizes in her analysis of the emergence of the term riot grrrl. The Supreme Court had decided to continue “banning federally funded clinics from discussing abortion” (S. Marcus 73) in May 1991 and thou-sands rallied at the pro-choice March for Women’s Lives in April 1992. Bill Clinton’s candidacy for president and his decidedly pro-choice campaign fueled the media debates around women’s rights. Queer-feminist punks discussed these topics extensively.61 They understood misogyny and homophobia as structurally cre-ated and made a connection between national politics and their
60 Gina Young, Kathi Ko, Tracy Dicktracy and Kelly Addison started the queer-feminist band Gina Young and the Bent in New York in 2002.
61 Cf. Kaia Wilson qtd. in Ciminelli and Knox 182. Wilson, who played in Team Dresch and later in The Butchies, is another very significant exam-ple of a person transgressing the boundaries of political labels. Wilson is best known for riot grrrl politics, despite the fact that her politics were always radically queer. One of those examples is the Butchies’ recent NC Pride show at The Pinhook in Durham, NC, where they performed with local bands like Pink Flag in September 2011.
personal experiences in the early 1990s. Misogyny and homopho-bia within the mainstream as well as punk communities made them angry and they started to look for places where they could articulate their dissatisfaction (S. Marcus 78). A good example of intersectional, angry queer-feminist punk writing that makes the connection between national politics and structural oppression that influences her own experience is Anna Joy Springer’s62 most recent publication, in which she documents some of her personal letters from the year 1992:
[T]his [is a] fucked-up country. I don’t care about Clin-ton and all his promises. He’s a benign smiling self-seek-ing wannabe patriarch, which may be even worse than being an outright disgusting creep like Bush. I want to move someplace where everyone gets to go to the doc-tor when they’re hurt and everyone gets to go to school and where the people think art is important. (Springer 87)
Springer connects national politics, from the president to the wel-fare system and the education complex, to social structures and the struggles of everyday life.
Coming back to the intersection between queer and riot grrrl politics, I want to emphasize Donna Dresch’s key role in queer-feminist punk rock as a whole. Dresch was very significant for the emergence and especially the dissemination of the term queer-core and riot grrrl in San Francisco and later in Olympia, Wash-ington, and Portland, Oregon. She started publishing the queer-feminist punk zine Chainsaw in the late 1980s and created an independent record label with the same name in 1991. Chainsaw
62 Springer used to be lead singer and songwriter for the influential punk band Blatz that came out of the 924 Gilman Street Project in Berkeley, CA. Her records were released on Lookout! alongside other queer-fem-inist bands like The Yeastie Girlz. She also participated in the bands The Gr’ups and Cypher in the Snow. Today she works as associate professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego.
Records produced bands like Heavens to Betsy, Excuse Seven-teen and The Need, who became popular as riot grrrls. In addi-tion, Chainsaw produced records by bands like Sleater-Kinney and Third Sex that were most influential in queer communities.
Moreover, Dresch’s own musical punk politics, although definitely feminist, were also outspokenly queer. Team Dresch’s lyrics deal predominantly with the topics of coming out, lesbian relation-ships and societal homophobia. Dresch also played in G.B. Jones’
queer-feminist band Fifth Column, as well as in Screaming Trees, Dinosaur Jr., and Dangermouse, before she grouped with Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson to form Team Dresch.
The fact that most of the early queer-feminist punks—riot grrrls and queercore identified—were well-connected and very mobile meant that these individuals transported the political at-mosphere from places like Washington, DC to politically more quiet areas like Olympia, WA, or Berkeley, CA.63 Moreover, with-in this widespread network of politically with-interested punks, other outraged people, like LaBruce and Jones in Canada, found punks willing to engage in discussions and punk politics. These discus-sions took place through meetings like festivals, workshops or concerts, but also through lyrics and, most importantly, in zine writings, which were distributed through mail. Frequently, police and national security investigations, or customs regulations, es-pecially in the case of mail orders between Canada and the US, complicated these distributions as numerous issues of Homo-core, J.D.s and autobiographical writings report.64 The public’s increased interest in riot grrrl feminism and similar movements drew attention to the possibilities of DIY music as a means of fem-inist and queer political activism and the different riot grrrl-iden-tified groups provided spaces and distribution to queer-feminist punks. I want to emphasize again that for some parts of the early 1990s riot grrrl and queercore not only emerged from the same spaces but were actually mostly one and the same movement.
63 See Ginoli; Ciminelli and Knox; S. Marcus.
64 See Ginoli.
Jody Bleyle, for example, expressed this view saying that “[i]n the
’90s queercore and riot grrrl scenes were so intertwined,” and that riot grrrl was really “a very strong part of where queercore came from” (qtd. in Ciminelli and Knox 142). Bleyle’s bandmate Donna Dresch, for example, was not only playing in queercore bands and releasing riot grrrl albums but also working with Jon Ginoli from Pansy Division at the record store Rough Trade (Ginoli 17). Gino-li’s bandmate Chris Freeman was friends with Lynn Breedlove (ibid. 44), and most riot grrrl and queercore bands shared stages or hosted each other in their hometowns. One of the most im-portant distributors of queer-feminist punk knowledge and the best-connected person today is Matt Wobensmith. When Woben-smith came to San Francisco in 1991, he started participating in Jennings’ Homocore zine and continued to connect queer-femi-nist punk bands and ideas through his own zine project Outpunk.
Again, the role that zines like Outpunk played at that time in terms of connecting people and bands from all over the US and beyond cannot be overestimated. Wobensmith’s declared aim was to pro-vide documentation about the fluid and steadily growing scene (Wobensmith, Outpunk 6), especially its politics. “It became an at-tempt to define what the whole queercore scene was politically,”
he recalls in an interview (Ciminelli and Knox 15). He continued this effort not only by donating material to The Fales Library’s The Riot Grrrl Collection but also by running Goteblüd, a vintage and back issue zine archive in San Francisco. With his column in Maxi-mumrocknroll, he introduced queer-feminist punk to a broad-er audience, while addressing homophobia and sexism in punk communities. Besides his writing, Wobensmith provided an addi-tional support network for queer musicians with his record label Outpunk, which released songs and albums by a variety of queer-feminist bands and riot grrrls like Fifth Column, Bikini Kill, Lucy Stoners, 7 Year Bitch, Tribe 8, Pansy Division, Sister George, God is My Co-Pilot, Sta-Prest and Mukilteo Fairies, among others. In 1998, he started another queer label called a.c.r.o.n.y.m., which released various queer musicians from dance, rock and electronic as well
as punk and homo-hop65 (Ciminelli and Knox 16). He continues to release independent publications, with the most recent one be-ing a vinyl 7-inch sbe-ingle featurbe-ing members of queercore bands like Limp Wrist and Needles in collaboration with the comic zine Wuvable Oaf.
It is important to point out again that this short historical over-view of queercore productions and protagonists is by no means an exhaustive list. Bands, artists, zinsters, fans and locations, which can be subsumed under queer-feminist punk, were not only numerous, but their attempts were sometimes too brief or simply not documented. The collection I provide must therefore not be mistaken as an absolute representation of the most impor-tant protagonists and cultural productions. Sister Double Happi-ness, an all-gay band (Ciminelli and Knox 59), was another one of the many early queercore trailblazers who influenced hundreds of queer-feminist punks. Larry-bob Roberts has been enriching San Francisco’s queer-feminist punk scenes with his zine project Holy Titclamps from May 1989 until today. Another Bay Area in-fluence was Glue, with singer Sean “De Lear, known as Sean Dee, [who] is [still] one of the enduring fixtures of the L.A. nightlife scene going back to the 1980s and 1990s” (Hernandez). In Aus-tin, Texas, dyke-centered feminist punk rock music was made by Gretchen Phillips, Laurie Freelove and Kathy Korniloff through their band Two Nice Girls from 1985 to 1992 (Phillips). In 1995, DJ Miss Guy formed the Toilet Böys in New York City and they are still performing today. And Mike Bullshits irritated the broader punk scene with his gay-centered Maximumrocknroll column during the 1980s (Ciminelli and Knox 89).
65 Homo-hop: queer hip-hop.