Quer-Feminist Punk: An Anti-Social History

This book provides a historic overview over queer-feminist punk productions, protagonists and scenes from the mid-1980s until 2012. It is the first collection and history of its sort that accounts for the diversity of queer-feminist punk productions, artistic forms and politics. The book not only gives a historical overview of the genre and offers a revision of the existing scientific literature on queer-feminist punk, it also offers a detailed analysis of lyrical content, sound, performances as well as social forms. The works core argument is that queer-feminist punk produces alternative forms of queer-feminist politics as well as theory. Politics of queer-feminist punkalthough unique through their specific combination of punk and queer-feminist strategiesneed to be understood as a continuation of and as being in alliances with other queer and feminist movements. The emerging intersectional queer-feminist punk discourses are assemblages of different feminist and queer accounts and punk philosophies. They center sexuality, more precisely queerness, as an analytical category as well as a point of departure for agency. This queerness is signified as negative, anti-identitarian and anti-social. Interestingly, such queerness parallels anti-relational queer theory, for example by Lee Edelman and other psychoanalytically informed queer theorists. Anti-relational and anti-social queer theory, like queer-feminist punk theory, understands queerness as a negative force in sexuality that irritates a subjects psychic coherence. However, academic theory, in contrast to countercultural theory, argues that queerness as a negative force is unable to support social relations and can never be used for political actions. To account for the political aspects of queer-feminist punk, countercultural protagonists draw on feminist and especially black feminist theorists like bell hooks and Audre Lorde. These feminists theorizations allow for a thinking through of the anti-social and queer at the intersection of racialization. Equally drawing on feminist, black feminist and (queer) people of color theories to analyze queer-feminist punk allows to account for anti- social queer politics beyond the realm of symbolic meaning, to focus action, feelings, experience and the body, and thereby explain the new and exciting forms of sociality at play.