The title of Judith Halberstam's article that was my additional reading is funny, because in my first annotated bibliography i utilized the article "Ten Reasons Capitalists Want Your to Wear Deodorant," and attempted to articulate a connection between queer and embracing one's funk. The subcultural lifestyle is not sterilized or deodorized, or overly invested with commercial beauty and all the polluting products that accompany the heteronormative beauty ideals.
Queer uses of time and space do not have the end goal of maturity, adulthood, or procreation within sight, and therefore queers are able to reside in the temporality of subcultural participation as long as desired. Queer time allows us to redefine adulthood. While the capitalist project with it's many arms (universities, prison-industrial complex, ect.) push bodies not only into intelligible subjectivities; but also into particular brandings (lawyer, welder, ect.) In Hetero time one becomes a product of how they are going to make money. Halberstam offers a definition of of queer as an outcome of temporality, life scheduling, and eccentric economic practices." Looking at queer as more than just a sexual minority, but a way of living. I feel like the temporality and life scheduling parts were well fleshed out in the essay, but i was hoping for a larger discussion of the eccentric economic practices. While queer's resistance to the purchasable trappings of heteronormative domesticity are pretty anti-capitalist, I would like to look at was in which queers can work to actually dismantling the capitalist economy. While the punk D.I.Y. culture has been liberating for a lot of people, queers often find themselves trapped as unwitting cogs in the system, because queers have to pay rent too, and alternatives like squatting or community gardening are policed. Property rights often outweigh human rights according to the law, and the social order. Even if escape from capitalism is possible, uninterrupted by the patriarchal state, for individuals in a subcultural context, the structures of capitalism and globalization are devastating places, and oppressing bodies where ever possible and profitable. In fact there seems to be some necessary pessimism within the articulation of queer economic practices.
"The mainstream absorption of vogueing highlights the uneven exchange between dominant culture scavengers and subcultural artists: subcultural artists often seek out mainstream attention for their performances and productions in the hopes of gaining financial assistance for future endeavors. Subcultural activity is, of course, rarely profitable, always costly for the producers and it can be very short lived without the necessary cash infusions (in the words of Sleater-Kinney: "This music gig doesn't pay that good, but the fans are alright....")" I would like to think that we can imagine a queer economy that is far more radical than turning our beautiful subculture itself into a style marketable for capitalist consumption. Perhaps an anarchistic gift economy that replenishes rather than exploits queer cultural production. The third section of the article "Subcultures: The Queer Dance Mix," discusses the need to study and record queer subcultures and makes a strong case for a collaborative theorizing on how to articulate, so as not to diminish into historical obsecurity, the products of queer time and queer spaces in order to write a queer history. Is Judith Halberstam saying here, as Emma Goldman famously had "If I can't dance-I don't want to be part of you revolution" ?
In our discussion of this article in class Sara troubled my notion of the privlidge of academia, and began to break down the distinction between theorists and subcultural producers. Judith Halberstam also articulates this destabilization:
"...In subcultures where academics might labor side by side with artists, the "historical bloc" can easily describe an alliance between the minority academic and the minority subcultural producer. Where such alliances exist academics can and some should participate in the ongoing project of recording queer culture and interpreting it and circulating a sense of its multiplicity and sophistication."
