Fuck Yeah! Queercore

I am now leaving. If anyone wants to co-mod, let him know.

:/

There is another mod, but I think he may have forgotten that he has posting access.

TL;DR is: I'm looking for someone to replace me in running this, or it shuts down (well, there's the other mod who hasn't posted - so it'll still be up, but possibly no posts will ever happen again).

I created this blog almost a year ago (September 14, I think) and I'm getting pretty tired of running it. My relationship with queercore (and "radical queer" culture in general) has become more and more awkward and troubled over time (I'm not going to go into detail, but it's disability-related, I'm Autistic and I severely underestimated the effect that that has on my life. You can blame the conflation of my behavior with the way my mind works, my being "indistinguishable from my peers" - which I'm sure as fuck not - doesn't change my wiring, and I didn't recognize that until this year) to the point that I've moved away from really engaging in it.

I was basically trying to be a nondisabled queer person, but being disabled modifies my experience of being queer to the point where it's all quite awkward. I stopped making my zine (Dildo Machine) after the second issue because I realized it wasn't any good, that it was so awkward because I was approaching it from an angle that was incredibly unnatural to me - I was trying to make it from a perspective that was not mine, and is alien to my own.

Nowadays I'm much happier in the disability rights movement, and doing things related to that, and while I'm not giving up on queercore and queer politics or anything (I'm likely to do stuff about it from a disabled perspective, like Nomy Lamm seems to), I can't really relate to it in the same way as most people / the way I was basically pretending to.

— Eric

ETA: I lied, I did go into detail. :P

(Canada being where queercore began)

Also:

(I should say that though LaBruce has been indispensable in bringing radical sexual codes and queer desire to a larger audience, albeit with mixed results, his never changing on-screen persona has been known to inspire tedium in a grassroots suspicious of the kind of self-aggrandizement and over-exposure he cultivates.)

Gays against Gaga: A note from a reader

kennethfrank:

somedayimightdie:

I doubt you’ll accept this post but really, this is too much. Lady Gaga is said to be a gay superstar not because she is said to be gay, but because she represents them. And for you to be turning down support from someone with such a big name is fucking stupid. Consider this: even if you don’t like her music, even if you don’t like her, she is trying to tell everyone to accept you through music that everyone has heard, meaning this message is global. If you don’t want her help, then you obviously aren’t in as much of need of support then you make yourself out to be. It’s disgusting and filthy that you people would reject a woman who puts her work and money and time into being a voice, and your going to oppress her? That makes you worse than homophobes, and I’m speaking as a gay American. So please, if you don’t want her help, don’t announce it to the world. Fuck the owner of this blog. Fuck you.

About 1/3 of our inbox is stuff like this.   Equating our expression of dissenting views with a kind of treason and telling us basically to shut up.   

Well, no, she doesn’t represent all of us, even if you may feel she represents you.  No, dissenting voices and thoughtful critical voices aren’t oppression—in fact, queer culture desperately needs to get over its aversion to autocriticism if we have any hope of building an effective movement.  And no, we are not going to shut up.  Sorry.

With that out of the way, I want to reflect briefly on the significance of this reader’s erroneous understanding of “oppression”.  See, oppression is, of course, rooted in unjust exercise of power.  You can only be oppressed by people who have power or authority.  Citizens like us, armed only with our words and ideas—we couldn’t “oppress” a multimillionaire pop star with the backing of multinational corporations if we tried, any more than we could oppress Kim Jung Il.  Obviously.  

But Lady Gaga doesn’t really want you to think about the mechanics of power.  She doesn’t want you to think about the way the culture industry sells you different flavors of superficial commodified rebellion, both pro-gay and anti-gay (e.g. Odd Future) while leaving the overall unequal distribution of power largely unquestioned—never addressing the corporate hypercapitalist ruling class that undergirds misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, militarism, and poverty.  She teaches her little monsters to redefine oppression as “someone having a different idea than you and saying it out loud and you having unpleasant feelings as a result”.  If it points out contradictions or unpleasant realities or creates a speedbump on the road to you “rejoicing your truth” it must be stamped out like a cigarette butt under your stiletto.

In Gaga’s world, oppression isn’t about power, but about “haters” who are being “a drag”.  But, she promises that if we march lockstep in gleeful consumption, together we can look forward to an empowered future free of oppression.  

This is a dangerous lie.

taking a break from the usual fare to reblog this