In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

>> 101 5 Queer Relay Crossing Over In April 2006, at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, I ran into distinguished writer, artist, and cultural producer Sarah Schulman during the MIX-NY Queer Experimental Film and Video Festival. Schulman asked what had brought me to MIX, and I told her that I’d come to see a program of shorts that included writer-director Liza Johnson’s film Desert Motel (2005). As fieldworker and script supervisor, I had joined Johnson’s crew on Desert Motel to write about queer filmmaking at the interstices of industry and independent resources and aesthetics. “Ah,” said Schulman, “crossover dreaming .” It was an instructive response, one that left me feeling a little defensive on Johnson’s behalf and that quickly exposed my anxieties about a queerness defiled by markets and commerce. It equally exposed the alternative fantasy of a cultural milieu that answers only to queer sexual and political impulses. Weeks later, Schulman’s and my exchange had me thinking about formulations that resist that ideological split, a split that Schulman herself has had to negotiate as novelist, archivist, and playwright.1 In the queer case, crossover dreaming signifies a spatial and cultural polarity between a queer here that is pure and sequestered and thus makes outsiders want in and some denizens want out, and a nonqueer there, mixed, polluted, driven by capital and cultural normativity, both morally compromised and the target of recognition and success—a dream, after all, not conscription. Were I to recount my own history with the idea of crossover dreams, it would probably begin with Leon Ichaso’s film of the same title (1985, starring Rubén Blades) about making it as a Latino salsa performer in the AngloAmerican mainstream of popular music. But the polarities themselves evoke a centuries-long standoff between art and commerce, a standoff reinvested with moral import when the differences are not purely aesthetic (when are they ever purely aesthetic?) but mindfully political. This is certainly true in the queer case, even more so as the conscious, marketable presence of queer cultural forms displaces their coded or haunting one in the history of commercial cultural production. Such an effect—of crossover tension and 102 > 103 History says yes. The history, that is, of cultural producers like John Waters, Pedro Zamora, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the coming-and-going club circuit of drag kinging on both sides of the Atlantic, to name just a few examples whose knotty relations inside capital have long stood as a queer resource. Waters’s over-the-top melodramas of fem nuttiness at the crossroads of patriarchy, cult cinema, and the avant-garde (Hairspray [1988], Serial Mom [1994], A Dirty Shame [2004]); Zamora’s measured disidentifications on the world stage of MTV as a queer man of color with HIV; Basquiat ’s untempered attachment to and infusion of the pop-art world of Andy Warhol; and the figurative entry of subcultural kingyness into such apotheoses of commercial culture as Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) trouble the anxious version of crossover that signifies a move from good culture to bad capital.2 Taken together, such examples channel the critique not toward hanging on or selling out but instead toward relay, a different trajectory in imagining relations between subcultures and their dominant alternatives (Halberstam 2005, 110).3 While the critique of capital offers the language of market determination and appropriation, the subcategory of relay within commercial cultural production multiplies and redirects determination in favor of determinisms and other, more reciprocal forms of influence .4 It imagines a historical braid of changing production conditions and the hunger of commercial systems for subcultural energy and artistry. Relay refers to an ongoing, uneven process of cultural passing off, catching , and passing on, if not always among members of the same team. It is not assimilation, exactly, or hybridity or bricolage, although it shares with those ideas a mediating impulse and a lively aversion to hardened categories in cultural analysis. Instead, I intend relay to mark—in ways those terms do not—cultural-economic difference and relation, a particular (if movable) politics of recognition, and the materiality of practice, the idea that practice matters in nondominant cultural production. Such a formulation doesn’t protect subcultures from theft or suffering, nor reliably reward queer producers like Waters, Zamora, Basquiat, Schulman, or the finest of drag kings. Nor does it level the signifying fields of cultural production on the buying and bullying fields of neoliberalism. But it...

Share