Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture by Curran Nault (review)

It’s been thirty years since the emergence of Riot Grrrl. In the early 1990s, this cultural movement, led by young women, created a new wave of feminist punk politics in the United States and beyond. As early as 1997, Mary Celeste Kearney pointed to erased connections between Riot Grrrl and several other movements, including queercore, in mainstream media’s reporting on this phenomenon.¹ Queercore emerged a few years earlier and in fact inspired the zines and music of Riot Grrrl groups. This close relationship to Riot Grrrl makes it all the more peculiar that scholarship on queercore has been so spotty to date. Various authors have published essays on aspects of queer punk culture.² In 2015, Maria Katharina Wiedlack was the first author to systematically examine the history of North American queer-feminist punk scenes since the 1980s.³ Yet a comprehensive scholarly account of queercore itself has remained pending.

In Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture, Curran Nault resolves this problem.⁴ The author examines key queercore texts produced during the subculture’s peak phase between 1985 and 2006. Approaching them from a media studies perspective makes this especially exciting. Queercore productions, as Nault reminds readers, come in many shapes: “zines, music, films, live events, writings, visual and performance art.”⁵ This is also true for punk culture in general. Yet research on punk media has tended to overemphasize the role of music and zines. Nault, in contrast, puts a strong emphasis on visual culture and includes the often overlooked realm of film in his study, thereby expanding the way we think about punk culture. His treatment of queercore as a transmedia movement is the first systematic engagement with its complexly structured aesthetics.

The impact of queer subcultures on not only Riot Grrrl but also punk movements in general has been remarkable. Yet in many official accounts of punk history, queer contributions are still hard to find. In his book’s first chapter, Nault rewrites punk genealogies, bringing the long history of queer artists within punk culture to the fore and illuminating the important foundations they laid for queercore’s emergence. The author takes readers back to 1970s punk hubs New York, London, and Los Angeles and to selected queer artists in each locale. He focuses on trans punk legend Jayne County and her role in the scene around Andy Warhol’s Factory; butch musician Phranc, whose experimental bands Nervous Gender and Catholic Discipline were among the most interesting in the early LA punk scene; as well as London filmmaker Derek Jarman, creator of the queer punk classic Jubilee (1978). Although it certainly was not an epicenter for the emergence of punk culture, Nault includes Baltimore, too, and with it, the important impact of local film-maker John Waters, and Waters’s icon, Divine, on queer and punk aesthetics. Nault is interested in these artists as connectors between the worlds of queer and punk culture and treats them as “switch points” with many different people revolving around them. By doing so, he lays out the many overlaps between gay liberation movements and queer and punk subcultures and their interwoven histories.⁶

The author also situates queercore’s development in the historical context of the 1980s and 1990s in North America. In the 1980s, parts of gay and lesbian movements embarked on an assimilationist course. The HIV/ AIDS crisis, the Reagan regime, the immense cultural, political, and sexual backlash to the feminist and gay rights movements of the 1970s, and also the angry new queer politics that developed in response, all frame Nault’s understanding of the queercore movement’s emergent cultural strategies. Through the first chapter’s historical framing, Nault deepens his account of the recurring tropes he identifies as queercore’s defining features. The three following chapters are organized conceptually. In each of them, the author concentrates on one aspect that he considers central: explicit sexual representations, confrontational tactics, and shockingly subversive body politics. [End Page 215...