Description
Book SynopsisPopular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative capacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make sense of identity and allows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arousing the political imagination. With an activist voice that is impassioned yet adherent to scholarly rigour,
Playing it Queer provides an original and compelling ethnographic account of the relationship between popular music, queer self-fashioning and (sub)cultural world-making.
This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant literatures on queer identity and political debates as well as popular music, identity and (sub)cultural style. Contextualised within a detailed history of queer sensibilities and creative practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club cultures, the author’s rich empirical studies of local performers and translocal scenes intimately capture the meaning and value of popular musics and (sub)cultural style in everyday queer lives.
Trade Review«This is an exemplary study of queer music-making. An engrossing read, it covers a range of topics many scholars in popular music, as well as queer and gender studies, will find eminently useful and insightful. [...] Taylor’s book provides us with an inspiring and invigorating model of scholarship, bringing together a range of concepts, terms and approaches to develop a rich and provocative theoretical matrix. This aligns very usefully with a methodology that is both reflexive as well as marked by a depth of participant observation that is admirable, giving the entire book a richness that comes through in Taylor’s theoretical musings as well as in the voices of all those involved in the study.» (Geoff Stahl, Media International Australia 148, 2013)
Table of ContentsContents: Gender and sexual identities – Queer and feminist theory – Popular music, identity, subcultures and scenes – Camp sensibility and queer aesthetics – Drag queens and kings, genderfuck and musical performance – Queercore and the ‘anti-gay’ politics of queer punk – Riot grrrl, riot dykes and feminist popular music-making – Mainstream gay scenes, queer and alternative scenes and style distinction – Locality, translocality and world-making – Music and the queer utopian imagination.
