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Queercore: The distinct identities of subculture
College Literature, Feb 1997 by Michael du Plessis, Kathleen Chapman
Ingestion and incorporation, key tropes of The Lizard Club, work as structural devices: "Famous Last Words," the last chapter of the novel, consists, Abbott discloses, of "a pastiche of last lines from 101 of my favorite books" (155). Homosaurians are characterized by their habit of swallowing humans whole, thus, Count Lesard, homosaurian and supposed associate of Rimbaud, devours that other mythical count, the Comte de Lautreamont (78). This ubiquitous incorporation- "A cannibalistic society has no unconscious" (87)-does not ultimately aim at unsettling the distinction between subcultural inside and outside; rather, it becomes a figure for the subcultural practice of bricolage, which, as Clarke stresses, depends for its work of "transformation and re-signification" (178) on pre-existing systems of commodities and signs. Likewise, a counterpublic can only appear in relation to an already existent public sphere. Abbott swells the inside by sucking all of the outside (fragments of mainstream gay culture, the avant-garde, the history of rock and roll, the "real world") into it. He stretches what Grossberg calls the "bubble" of rock to its extremes.
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Like Abbott, Danielle Willis uses tropes of monstrous incorporation in her subcultural bricolage, and she draws extensively on goth subculture, a postpunk amalgamation of glamour, horror, and melancholy. In her short story, "The Gift of Neptune," a female vampire falls in love with a moribund mermaid and rescues her from the freak show in which they have been imprisoned (Dogs In Lingerie 17-22); her poem, "Kicking Omewenne," is an elegy for her relationship with the transgender goth singer, Omewenne Grimstone (who also appears as a character in Abbott's novel!), and has as its refrain, "monsters always cry over their dinners" (74), a suitably goth image of lachrymose, ravenous monstrosity. While mermaids, vampires, and even Gilles de Rais (74), occur as figures of a hyperbolic queerness and insatiable bricolage, Willis still situates herself as the jaded insider who can demystify what she has previously mythified. "Monsters are supposed to cry over their dinners/ and you and I want so desperately to be monsters/ and not just a couple of exCatholic suburban kids/ with the right kind of hair and bone structure to carry off the clothes and the ghoul makeup" (75), she declares at the end of "Kicking Omewenne." The subcultural insider expects both the shocked incomprehension of the "straight" (lesbian or gay or heterosexual) outsider as well as the shared recognition of the rules of the game by other insiders who will "get" the queer address; indeed, part of the fun is to imagine the mute misunderstanding of the outside. "They say/ They say/ They say/ They say I'm strange and I wish I were," Willis writes in the poem "Pigbaby" (13, another monster!). Abbott justifies his use of documentary in conjunction with fantasy by stating: "Everybody's autobiography is fantastic, the more so the more detail that's provided" (Lizard Club 15). Willis, like Abbott, produces a detailed record of one subcultural scene-the intersection of goths, transsexuals, bisexuals, and sex workers-and does so in the register of fantasy to make a queer autoethnography.
