Queer Aesthetics

122N Lecture Discussion: Recent Queer Media: “Masculinization” and “Feminization” beyond Binaries

Zebra Katz, “Ima Read” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo4Sqt2Bmag): I see this work as using queer music video in the interest of a claim of epistemological valuation and transformation. If being on the, let's say, “street” or “urban” side of raced, sexed, gendered, classed knowledge structures means that your claims of knowledge are not considered properly “epistemological”. Meanwhile, the force or violence of “official” knowledge production appears as “neutral” classroom presentation or library classification schemes. This video proposes specifically Black verbal, musical, rhythmic, choreographic modes of “street” knowledge as being expressive of what it means to know the self and to know the world as a queer person or woman of color. Further, setting this vocal, music, rhythm, and dance in a classroom and library, with (sexy) “prep school” teachers and evil dancing twins who appear as black but with white masks, suggests that “unofficial” knowledge (of race, sex, gender, class) in fact as having all the epistemological force of “official knowledge,” or at least of standing in for it. As if that weren't enough, the video also additionally suggests that “unofficial” knowledge has the power to destabilize and re-format the way that (what turns out to be overtly) artificial “official” knowledge is produced, through systems of presentation and classification that are exclusionary and disciplinary rather than neutrally “knowing.” Tables are turned, values are transvalued, queer desire transforms the site of racial and class exclusion into a site of sexed, gendered, raced knowing: “taking that b* to college” indeed.

Mykki Blanco, “Wavvy” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sokeAMDm7mk): “getting wavvy” here means not simply getting “high” (the drugs appear to be drugstore pain relievers), but getting “elevated” by transforming economic precarity (the street) into a site (the club) where wealth is destroyed in a ritual of inclusion, body positivity, and highly variegated sex, gender, raced expression. “Getting wavvy” seems, then, to be a practice of “queering,” here, of transforming social relations such that same-sex sexual desire is crucial in transforming social relations. Gender becomes non-binary; race becomes multiplex; bodies are non-normative, but sexy in their capacity to express sexed, gendered personhood.

Haley Kyoko, “Feelings” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV-_Yuc228s): “feelings” here follow the queer version of a Hollywood horror film, set to a joyous declaration of love. It's a re-take on Michale Jackson's Thriller video which is through-composed from start to finish as a choreographic work, as if out of a Hollywood musical. Here, though, the sensation of fear and foreboding that arise when a group of “queer freaks” pull up to a ghostly gas station where a young woman is getting gas quickly give way to a girl-meets-girl dance routine where Hayley Kyoko wins over her heart's desire by declaring her feelings. Kyoko's production, direction, vocals, music, and choreography all suggest the inevitability, joyousness, and innocence of women-centered desire – especially striking given she is a woman of color and that her object of desire here is ambiguously raced. Here, queer feeling transforms Hollywood and music video genres that have often been coded as queer, that is, having been produced to be interpreted as queer without saying as much, so that the video simply recoups and insists on queer desire as central, normative, but also, crucially, transformative. Normativity here is more important here in relation to “expression” than to a regime of “repression,” which is more familiar in relation to queer figuration. That Kyoko, a child of Hollywood, insists here on the expressive powers of lesbian desire in a work that she stars in and produces as a career-making move in the service of her development as an artist, too, suggests Alla Nazimova's star turn in her own Hollywood production of Salomé (1922) almost 100 years before.

Perfume Genius, “Hood” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOpkr8uNWpk): Here, Perfume

Genius' Mike Hadreas and now deceased gay porn star Arpad Miklos appear in relation to a certain kind of ambivalence that, presumably, is to be expected, even to be embraced and embodied, with the expression of queer sexuality, sensuality, and vulnerability. As the lyrics intone, “You will never call me baby if you knew me true.” And as we hear the song play out, we see scenes of intimacy between a “butch” daddy figure “grooming” an increasingly feminized, and “wifely,” “boy.” Is this intimacy imagined, or impossible, or hypothetical? Part of the hypothetical, apparently, is the acknowledgment, and embracement, that queer intimacy – if it can be achieved – may well appear as monstrous to some, and these two embrace that possibility. Along with the expressive and transformative powers of queer desire is, still, the risk of inviting repression, policing, and phobic violence. Here, ambivalence has to do with two possibilities embraced: vulnerability and exposure of intimate “feelings” which we saw in Kyoko's work, along with appearing at the same time, contradictorily, as aggressive, monstrous, and dangerous, as a result of taking the risk of being vulnerable. This ambivalence being embraced, however, means that feminization and masculinization are seen as processes, involuntary and voluntary, and entangled with one another, rather than “assignments” of normative bodily identity that a single body has to identify in terms of exclusively. Masculinization and feminization as entangled processes suggests in itself a transformed context for queer desire and sociality, and especially in relation to, rather than exclusive of, expressions of race, ability, class.

Dorian Electra, “Man to Man” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3K6_89Ee4U): a recent work that is being hailed as “ending toxic masculinity” is of course an entry in the larger canon of queer audiovisual works that has long presented queer practices of looking (like “doubling”) in relation to non-binary gender and same-sex object choice, self-naming, and open-ended narrative or rhetorical composition that proceeds on the basis of gesture, illusion, decoration, or ambivalence (rather than on “linear” plot development and clear narrative conclusion). Here, masculine femininities and feminine masculinities emphasize gender as non-binary, not oppositional, not arranged on a spectrum from one to the other, and rather as mutually invested or engaged or otherwise cycling together in open-ended process. Here, transmasculine appearance engages with masculine gay figuration in a distinctly transformed notion of how “men” are to relate to other “men”; the key transformation in transformed masculine relationality seems to be that “violence” becomes rather a question of affording intimacy amidst differently embodied masculinity, rather than a question of bodily violation perpetuated by one masculine body against another that produces corporeal, psychological, or spiritual damage.

Throughout all of these works, and across them, in terms of all of the differences they embrace, we see a larger conversation in which queerity of color, gender nonconformance, and same sex desire are all in dialogue in terms of how queer desire can become productive of non-violent modes of sex-gender coreporeality where gender is not organized in terms of opposition and where same-sex desire is key to expressive, transformative power, even as “norm,” rather than in terms of repression, censorship, or enforced silence. This, apparently, is today's queer scene, at least in its online music video expression.

We observed historical dialogs at work in, say, Looking for Langston viewed alongside Tongues Untied, and in the context of “new queer cinema” of the 1980s and 1990s generally (with Barbara Hammer and Cheryl Dunye). We concentrated on these films to find a poetic dialogue happening between them: thus, while LFL looking backward to ask about the desire for queer history, TU looked forward to insist on a future for queer desire. These films asked crucial questions not simply in the articulation of queer self-knowledge, but also in the face of the HIV/AIDS pandemic that was then decimating queer communities and communities of color. Now, queer music video, putting problems of historical memory and futural desire on display, seem to be acting out that conversation both within specific music videos and across them. Masculinities and femininities are in play even as modes of racialization are interrogated and resisted – Pasolini's “problematic figure” now a historical agent in the

popular, commercial form of the music promotional clip.