Two weeks after the war began I donned my red Members Only jacket,
slicked back my skate punk hair and jumped in the car to drive across
the Bay. A fellow feminist and queer academic, Matt had invited me to
her appearance with the drag troupe The Disposable Boy Toys at a Queer
Alliance benefit in the City. Before the show she drew me backstage
through a wondrous sea of boys packing and binding: punk boys with
mohawks and sleeveless jean jackets, glitter boys in angel wings and
pink ties, and jock boys in backward baseball caps and smudges of facial
hair. I didn't need the MC Summer's Eve to tell me, as she did before
presenting the first act, "You may think you don.'t swing that way, but
you do." These boys were hot.
Between the effeminate nerds in glasses and natty slicksters in
three-piece suits, the larger political possibilities of drag
denaturalize the matching of binary gender to particular bodies and
present a range of femininities and masculinities. (I felt like a
teenaged girl, swooning over the prospects dancing across the stage.)
But drag can also highlight the acts of policing that non-gender
normative persons are subject to in their everyday lives, the demands
they face to perform the "appropriate" gender and the threats that
follow. What appears as performance in the theatrical space of the drag
show is a matter of off-stage survival for some. These tensions
dramatized in the drag show -- between the interior and the exterior of
the self, the privilege of mobility and violence of normalization, the
hierarchical spaces of disruption and danger-- can also be put to work at
other pressure points where social forces constrain the available
possibilities for being in the world.
As a drag troupe with a critical political consciousness, the
Disposable Boy Toys performed an anti-capitalism act and an anti-war act
(and these are simplifications of their "messages"), both featuring
vignettes of acts of policing. In the first, the Pledge of Allegiance
was recited by a small group standing at attention before the song
kicked in with heavy guitars and lyrics despairing the state of the
union. As two performers furiously lip-synced the verses, men in lab
coats adjusted the height of arms in salute, delivering scoldings and
slaps when a person failed to maintain the proper posture. In the
antiwar act, a police officer under the direction of a masked George W.
Bush gagged protesters (with duct tape) who mouthed the lyrics: "Hey
hey, U.S.A., how many kids did you kill today?" At the conclusion of the
song, one of the protesters held up a sign that read, "What are YOU
going to do about it?"
Watching these staged acts of civil disobedience, I thought about how the
accumulation of an array of effects -- the songs chosen, the voiceless gestures
translating agreement or dissent, the address to the viewer-- communicated
a particular critical position in relation to nationalism and
the state. The theatricalization of political rage is historically a vital
component of radical queer activism, and as a strategy of contestation
manifests other possibilities for a radical cultural politics.
In particular, these acts can pose a challenge to the short-circuiting
of the civic imagination and provide a critical mode to think
through the production of national affect or sentimentality. While drag
addresses the intimate levels of consciousness at which gender and sexuality
are lived and felt --as meaningful embodiment or violent regulation--
its theatrical mode can also be made to interrogate the
intimate levels of consciousness at which nationalism and democracy are
lived and felt. The anti-war acts suggests that political anger is not
sanctioned in the current climate. What modes of feeling are, and what
does this mean for realizing democracy?
In a national address George W. Bush reads out loud a letter from a
fourth grader offering her father up for war, and television cameras
capture U.S. soldiers inscribing the names of the World Trade Center
dead on bombs dropped over Iraq. Tri-colored banner headlines scream
"UNDER GOD" and full-color t.v. footage stream Senate members
reiterating their allegiance to "God and country" after the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals released their ruling on the necessary
separation of church and state. Newspapers and magazines print
photographs of tearful wives kissing husbands good-bye as carriers loom
on the horizon, and pundits of all sorts scold anti-war protesters for
undermining the social unity of the nation. Amassing at the heart of the
U.S. national imagination, these are not moments that are concerned with
gritty political dialogues and the democratic process. Instead,
democracy is conceived as a sentimental and moral category, above or
outside of the political. What emerges from these nationalizing
discourses is a romantic ideal of civic life --the nation as family--
that discourages participation in necessarily difficult dialogues about
politics and power.
We witness the shrinking of available political exchange as war
becomes the governing principle of the U.S. American foreign and
domestic policy, and popular discourse allows for limited discussion of
the military action in Iraq in not political but moral and emotional
terms. As a dominant media source and staging ground for national
sentimentality, the television news gives us the war as an orchestrated
melodrama of intense emotionalism and personal triumphs; the cable news
networks stream the headline "Saving Private Lynch," and there is no
doubt a docudrama in the making. As a cultural form, the melodrama
presents the war in the overdetermined and excessive gestures of
personal sacrifice and honor in order to frame the meaning of the war as
prepolitical. In particular, the war melodrama evades critical
historical and political frameworks to instead individualize
interpretations of global events and "manage" them as stories. Enacting
simple binaries of opposition (between savage and civilized, good and
evil, most notably) to bolster its claims, the melodrama seeks to
resolve uncertainty with recourse to the personal, the familial and a
moral authority assumed to transcend all political stances.
The belief that the nation provides a sentimental mode of social
unity that transcends the political has become a widespread, "common
sense" definition of democracy. And while the television news is perhaps
the most obvious example of the war melodrama, this phenomenon is not
limited to the media. Generated and regulated by a national
constellation of discourses and institutions, this (forcibly) consensual
space of the nation is emptied of debate, in which feeling
differently is a traitorous act. It takes multiple forms but always
as an antipolitical gesture that refuses disagreement or meaningful
contestation. There is nothing that is not ideological about this,
though it pretends to be innocent. For instance -- encouraged to
consider the military apparatus as something other than an
industrial-economic institution, as instead the folksy muster of "our
boys," the therapeutic language of troop support reduces the range of
acceptable terms and categories with which to discuss war to
nonpolitical and sentimental ones. And as an ethnocentric discourse
(inasmuch as it pits "our troops" against a foreign "other," out there),
it traffics in the active disavowal of the political and historical
conditions of the conflict and its implications for targeted
populations.
These popular discourses produce modes of feeling that constrain and
block the political process of functioning disagreement, contestation,
and dialogue. The frightening result is the sacralization of democracy
as the moral measure of the U.S. nation, residing outside of history or
politics, a thing to be safeguarded from popular use or
alternative interpretation. It is an exercise that assumes the
protection of democracy from its actual practice. And in these
sentimental moments of staged social unity, the state must seem
to care, even when injustices on all sides can be attributed to its
daily operation. It offers a narrow definition of democracy that is full
of erasures and excuses, translating into immigrant detentions, the USA
PATRIOT Act, deregulation and the dismantling of labor and environmental
protections, a dangerous unilateralist foreign policy, and the slashing
of domestic social programs . including billions from the Veterans
Affairs budget which pays out soldiers. benefits and other forms of
"support."
The chief social power of these sentimental discourses is in the
labor of socialization. That is, they tell us how to be citizens and how
to feel about the world. As political theorist Barbara Cruikshank
writes, "the citizen is an effect and an instrument of political power
rather than just a participant in politics," and there are a range of
dangers involved in expressing the "wrong" identifications and the
"wrong" feelings. Drag, of course, politicizes these dangers in terms of
gender, bodies and sexual desire. But if drag theatricalizes gender as
an effect and instrument of power, can it model a similar strategy for
thinking through the making of national subjects? And can we conceive of
a political cultural project able to appropriate the intimate, emotional
address into a demand for democratic potential?
____________________________
Boy Bands Against the War (BBAW) wants to save us from an abusive relationship.
Or more, they want us to save ourselves. A member of the San
Francisco-based drag troupe the Transformers, Jason Blue envisions BBAW
as a political network of boy band members united in their opposition
to the war and the Bush administration. In a letter sent to O-Town,
N. Snyc, Backstreet Boys and a slew of drag kings, Jason Blue
pitches for this coalition of cuties:
Dear Past or Present Boy Band Member,
The massive anti-war demonstrations that have
sprung up all over the world in the past few days have been amazing,
inspiring, empowering, and beautiful - except for the embarrassing and
shameful absence of boy bands. Boy Bands Against the War is the solution
to that problem: a coalition of past and present members of boy bands,
united in our commitment to global peace and global
justice.
The letter continues, "No one understands heartbreak like a boy bander.
We know: it. s time to break up with George Bush." As an
organization in its infancy, local BBAW members (a.k.a. The
Transformers) have already performed their antiwar rendition of the
N. Snyc Top Ten break-up hit "Bye Bye Bye" at various venues. But as
a larger political project, Boy Bands Against the War speaks the
language of popular culture, the wish fulfillment of crushes and other
fantasies of identification with its stars. As black British theorist Stuart
Hall argues, "Popular culture is a theater of popular desires, a theater
of popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with
the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we
are represented, not only to the audiences out there, but to ourselves
for the first time." The boy band is a commercial phenomenon of
global proportions, a billion-dollar industry in and of themselves -- you can't
get much more "pop." But instead of dismissing popular culture (and its
audiences) for the fact of its non-innocence, what else can we
say about the character and range of any given commodity form's power
and possibility, and what pleasures it might afford?
The promises pop musicians offer to audiences ring with emotional
resonance because there is something utopian about their sentiments,
combined with the sheer power of their mass appeal. In particular, the
break-up song is both the end of illusion and the promise of a brighter
future. The self-imaginings of a stronger "me" in the aftermath of
deception is a standard tale in the break-up song; I don't know boy
bands, but I do know Christina Aguilera is a fighter. ( If it wasn't
for all that / you tried to do / I wouldn't know / just how capable / I
am to pull through / so I wanna say thank you / Cause it makes me that
much stronger / Makes me work a little bit harder / It makes me that
much wiser / So thanks for making me a fighter! ) The break-up
song is not just the realization that our horizon of potential is
limited within the confines of an especially bad relationship; it is
the affirmation that we deserve better than what we presently have.
The break-up song is never just bitter -- it is an avowal to realize a more
fulfilling existence, to find meaning in other relationships, to desire
other ways of being. So just as these songs (as commonplace and trite as
some of them seem) employ forms of support and pleasure in pursuit of
something other than a particular romance -- a relationship doomed to fail
because of lies, or a lack of communication, or inequality. BBAW employs
forms of support and pleasure in pursuit of something other than a
nationalist affect or uncritical patriotism.
This apparently trivial analogy is actually significant for the way
it uses the intimate address not to shrink but expand the range of
possibilities for the subject of betrayal to break away from what is safe,
from what is perhaps sentimental, to instead imagine a different, more
daring life. The individual initiating the (song) break with the deceptive
lover or boorish President struggles through a public declaration
of independence from the sanctioned space of romantic love or
national unity, where we are so often told to look for social fulfillment,
to demand a more equitable and accountable relationship. The
prescriptive nature of courtship and marriage (especially in light of
legislation privileging marriage for poor women and the continued delegitimization
of non-heternormative relationships), of proper citizenship
and patriotism, is challenged by this public performance of disenchantment.
In the right hands, the break-up song can become the space
in which the nationalization of sentimental feelings (as dominant metaphors
for subordinate citizenship to the state) is rejected in the song.
s revelation of its controlling violence.
While there is no word yet from the top-charting boy bands, the drag
kings are in it all the way. And of course, the queering of boy bands
(though perhaps not such a leap) is itself a critique of available and
"appropriate" masculinities and objects of desire. That a drag king
might position himself in the firmament of pop stars is to reevaluate
those norms of gender and desire, as well as our understanding of
fantasies of identification and what they mean for how we build new ways
of being in the world.
Channeling the utopian commodity image of the boy band, BBAW suggests
that self-fulfillment as a desiring subject can be found outside of the
bad relationship and in the collective hunger for democratic practice.
As such BBAW reimagines an ideal love as the pursuit of social justice:
"When the visions of war around you bring tears to your eyes, and all
that surrounds you are the government's secrets and lies, we'll be your
strength. We'll give you hope. Keeping your faith when it's gone. Our
love for the people of the world is like a river, peaceful and deep.
Baby, call on us tonight, because this we promise you: another world is
possible. And Boy Bands Against the War pledges to make it real."
While popular culture is never innocent, it is important.
Between its intense affect and ubiquitous presence, it is a critical
arena for the struggle over the popular imagination and hegemony. After
all, it can make tenable the nationalization of sentimental feelings and
contain the available possibilities for transgression and social
transformation; it can also the imaginative space where we remake
ourselves as desiring, desirable subjects, as queer superheroes and
transnational pop stars. The break-up song is hardly inherently
subversive; but as such, BBAW offers both a critique of the limitations
of popular culture and an appropriation of its pleasures. As queer
theorist Wahneema Lubiano argues, "It might well be that taking
popular culture seriously could teach us something about form, about
aesthetics and about the development of pleasure in politics." The use
of self-theatricalization and star fantasies in the BBAW project stages
and reclaims what has been made queer about democratic desire in the
current political climate. And that fucking rules.
_______________________
After the benefit I drove to Iraya's house, where she gave me some
lip-gloss and applied sweeps of green eye shadow to her own lids while
standing on the toilet. The car loaded with crates of LPs, CDs, and a
six-foot keyboard, we picked up Jesse and Reginald and a keyboard stand
and headed to the bar for Co-ed Magnetic, the queer discotheque offering
"nasti new wave," "trashi rock," "hott hip-hop" and free admission to
those who brought their anti-war protest citations.
We danced to the best mixes ever (how long has it been since I've
heard, "Boom, boom, boom, let's go back to my room," let alone, "Two of
Hearts" by Stacey Q?) as loops of found footage screened behind us, a
hypnotic blend of spliced scenes from '70s porn, B-movies, concert
films, multipled, quartered, and overlaid with Atari game graphics. Just
after midnight Gary (a.k.a. D.M. Feelings) donned a black wig, shorts
(tied with a chiffon sash) and a rare Frankie Goes to Hollywood t-shirt
with a doctored photograph of Ronald Reagan, a bullethole square in the
middle of his forehead. Only Frankie can stop me now!, the shirt
read, and I pondered for a moment what it would be like had Frankie been
able to do so. The small dance floor cleared, he became "Bibi,"
lip-syncing to "The Professionals" from Ladies and Gentlemen, the
Fabulous Stains as the "Bargain Bins" (a handful of us waving our
arms in the air and shaking our fine asses) acted as his Greek chorus:
Does this country mean that much to you? Not me not me not me!
The political project of "materializing
democracy" is multifaceted. I need poststructuralist political theory,
drag troupes and club nights with antiwar admission policies to sustain
me in this continuing state of emergency. (As Matt said, "For some
persons and populations, this level of state surveillance and social
discipline is not new.") This sort of performative political theory is
as vital as arguments concerning the nuances of social policy or
collective organizing for structural reform. While these difficult
political dialogues and decisions require a different sort of
commitment, when these dialogues and decisions are blocked by cultural
practices that manage and contain discourses about democracy, we need to
examine how and why.
The staging of forbidden feelings of queer desire, critical rage, or
democratic disappointment is a critical counterpoint to the
naturalization of hierarchies of "right" feelings, "right" ways of
being. The violence of national normativity that is, among other things,
gendered and sexualized, is here laid bare like a lover's deception, or
a state's violence against its subjects. These are crucial projects that
get at how ideology operates at the intimate levels of consciousness,
feeling, and body, how fantasies and nightmares about who are imagine
ourselves to be are produced at the junctures of power. They
force us to reimagine how democracy is lived and felt, how it is
translated into personal effects and collective desires, and for what
purpose. And it means we recognize that these other cultural forms so
often dismissed as trivial and sentimental --the break-up song, for
instance, or celebrity crushes (I love you, Susan Sarandon!)-- can
be politically powerful, if only we could teach everyone the right
moves.
_________________________
As always, too much left unsaid. This column was inspired by the
following: Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural
Politics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson; The Disposable Boy
Toys; Co-ed Magnetic and the . 80s stylings of DJs D.M. Feelings,
Bodystocking and Passé; the S.F. Transformers and Boy Bands Against
the War (boybandsagainstwar@riseup.net); and Leto Atreides II from
Scifi. s Children of Dune miniseries (troutskin is freaking
hot). The only "good" thing about
the current political crisis is that I. ve been affirmed in my celebrity
crushes, whom are all anti-war. You can tell me about your boy band
(Flock of Seagulls, perhaps?) or celebrity crushes at: Mimi Nguyen / POB
11906 / Berkeley, CA 94712-2906 / slander13@mindspring.com
.