Queercore: The distinct identities of subculture

As the term "queer" moved from counter-public to public sphere, it may have shed some of the distinction through which it was articulated, but this process also allowed many disenfranchised groups to stake their claims in a "queer" public sphere. Unlike Warner, for whom anybody can be "queer," and unlike the open yet limited invitation issued by Garbage, several constituencies, notably transsexuals, transgender people, and bisexuals, have been able to render themselves distinct and visible through the use of "queer." In the transsexual `zine Gendertrash, transsexuals state: "We're just as queer as dykes and fags maybe even more so." Activists and cultural workers of color such as Lani Ka'ahumanu, Cherrie Moraga and Elias Farajaje-Jones have situated "queer" within a politics of multiculture in the U.S. Despite its limitations, this appeal to multiculturalism establishes a "chain of equivalences" among and between identities that Kobena Mercer, following Chantal Mouffe, sees as fundamental to radical democracy.7

This is not to reify the term "queer," but to recognize that it, like any other signifier, can be resituated in specific contexts to open new possibilities for identification, alliance, and action. All too often, the stories of the formation of subcultures and specific communities are lost because they are not recorded by institutions (such as the academy) that reproduce the public sphere. Here we have tried to recall some stories about "queer," but this is by no means the last word. We await the invention, rediscovery, and assertion of many others.

"It is in the future that we must see our history," the narrator states near the end of The Lizard Club (158). Abbott's final paragraphs echo our concerns: "A story like this can have no happy ending. . .or can it? . . . Matter of fact, I think this was the youngest we ever felt. It was our best time but we couldn't find a single mention in the press of this turning point in our lives" (158-59, first ellipsis Abbott's). We share the narrator's sense of urgency and fear of not finding any record of fundamental shifts in our societies. Lisa Duggan points to the difficulties early work on reconstructing a gay and lesbian history faced since few documents exist that detail transgender, bisexual, lesbian and/or gay existence; it is therefore vital that all of us who work in transgender, bisexual, lesbian and/or gay studies become "archivists of deviance." We imagine future histories still to be written: accounts of transsexual resistance, of the poor, of youth cultures in specific regions, of bisexual existence outside urban areas, of older lesbians and gay men, of those surviving with HIV as the U.S. health care system continues to suffer attacks by an increasingly vicious government. All these stories remain to be recorded.

ENDNOTES

1 Here we draw on Jirgen Habermas's concept of the public sphere, articulated in Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 14-26. We are also taking into account the various critiques and refinements of Habermas in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere. We derive "counter-public sphere from Negt and Kluge, especially their elaboration of the concept in Public Sphere and Experience 54-91. We are also relying on Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production 30, for an account of how shifts in position in a field of cultural production affect all the possible positions.