I really like Amy’s prompt question regarding what we, as
the audience of a performance, are asked to forget or are led to disregard in
the process of consuming a spectacle. I
feel as though this question is particularly interesting when considering Auslander’s
essay on glam rock and queer performance.
Dorothy has already outlined some of the blind spots in Auslander’s
essay, and, hopefully, I can expand on these issues as well as offer a few
other suggestions and topics to consider when contextualizing the glam rock
subculture.
While Auslander’s essay is certainly an entertaining as well
as epochally illuminating analysis of the seventies’ glam rock, I’m afraid that
this essay leads us to assume that artists such as Bowie and Bolan were
effectively idiosyncratic and original in terms of their queer, gender-bending
performances. In part, the limited scope
of Auslander’s chapter on “glamography” is due to his insistence on a semiotic
and synchronic analysis of this musical era as opposed to the requisite diachroniety
of the historical and sociological analyses.
The latter doesn’t mean that semiotic analysis is useless or hopelessly synchronic; nonetheless,
in a poststructuralist sense, signs and symbols must be contextualized and
connected to a larger history of sign-creation and signification, which
would’ve made this chapter all the more fascinating. Otherwise, the analysis falls ill to the diseases
of ahistorical universalization and exemplification, wherein Bowie and Bolan
effectively (and undeservedly) become the paradigms of queer performance of the
twentieth century.
If Auslander were as indebted to the study of queer
subcultures as his essay purports, he would have more thoroughly elaborated on
the fact that the “glamor” and “glitter” of glam rock rests in a long,
transatlantic tradition of drag ball culture and queer underworld
counterculture. The topics of drag culture, dancehalls, and pantomime are
merely mentioned cursorily in Auslander’s essay (47-8), and, consequently, we
are led to believe, uncritically, that the gender-bending queerness of Bowie’s
make-up was, somehow, unique in its revelation of gender and sexual identity as
socially and discursively constructed (61).
And still, it isn’t as though Bowie’s or Bolan’s performances for a
largely white, heterosexist, and bourgeois culture necessarily demanded a
diachronic connection with the historical, underworld subcultures that led to
this glam rock phenomenon—that is, if their audiences were even aware of these
deviant subcultures in the first place.
As with most of these performances, the primary goal seems to be to épater le bourgeois, that is, to shock
or outrage the middle class into a state either of disgust or of enchantment by
the exotic, the freakish, the glamorously and chicly queer. In either case, distance between performer and spectator is established, and the spectacle ultimately becomes a commodity.
Furthermore, while I certainly agree with Auslander’s
attempt to classify glam rock’s performative aversion to the rigid, heteronormative
dichotomizations of gender and sexuality, I must question what role the
privileged and relative safety of the stage and of the status of celebrity
plays as we consider Bowie’s and Bolan’s performative queerness. First, both Bowie and Bolan owe their
ability to get on stage and perform in drag to a long history of queer and
transgendered subjects and drag performers, who had the shit kicked out of
them, day in and day out, for their non-normative gender and sartorial
performances and who, in spite of these attacks, continually left their
residences in their glam and glitter gowns to return to their underworld
stages. Second, Bowie and Bolan didn't have to face the same bodily risks and dangers of queer identity performances,
which leads me back to the issue of the relative safety of the stage and of
celebrity. Bowie and T. Rex performances
and concerts almost certainly had police or crowd control as well as personal, backstage bodyguards. Everyday queer subjects and
drag performers don’t have this protective luxury and must risk the corporeal
dangers of deviant, non-normative self-expression in a heterosexist, homophobic
society that would rather see them dead than strolling the streets in stilettos.
Accordingly, while glam rock’s queer performances reveal the social
constructed-ness of gender and sexuality, these bands’ performances offer enough
imaginary distance between the audience and the performer to provide Bowie and Bolan with enough physical
safety for their artistically perverse behavior.
I guess what I am getting at is the issue of whether glam rock's queer performances really made a difference in terms of everyday drag and queer identity performance--a question which Auslander doesn't exactly broach since he, too, seems to be hypnotized by glam rock's spectacularly queer performativity. On the one hand, their performances disgusted older generations with their perversity and, on the other hand, became a fetishized commodity for middle-class youths who sought rebellion against their stodgy parents. Clearly, the outrageous spectacles of glam rock offer an image of a world wherein gender and sexuality are unbound and infinite. Yet, at the same time, these performances might equally proffer, yet obscure, an image of a world wherein only celebrities and famous artists can enjoy (safely or without bodily risk or familial alienation/social castigation or legal persecution) the act of queer drag performance.
2 comments:
Cody, this is a really good critique of Auslander's chapter from the perspective of queer studies, especially when you call attention to how Auslander seems to be ignoring the diachroneity of glamour and drag performances in his discussion of glam rock. (Here is perhaps where Dorothy's mentioning of The Cockettes seems apropos, although they were contemporary to the early glam rock of 1971). I like your comments questioning mainstream audience knowledge of underground drag culture and the glam rockers' goal of shocking them with a possibly outrageous performance of deviance.
As much as I enjoyed your opening three paragraphs, I wondered whether I had understood Amy's question in a different way. Rather than asking what Auslander ignores in this chapter, it seemed to me the question is asking what consumers of glam rock performances/spectacles are being asked to forget or not notice, which strikes me as something very different from the way you seem to have interpreted and responded to the question. That is, until I reached your fourth paragraph, and everything came together.
I loved the fourth paragraph. Here we see clearly that the audience is allowed to consume gender-bending performances on stage and TV -- in other words, what you have identified diachronically as deviant underground behavior is suddenly in 1971-6, with the advent of glam rock's mainstream pop culture acceptance, something that can be consumed as a commodity. Thus, to directly answer Amy's question, the audience as consumer forgets or doesn't notice the violent history of drag queens when watching the glam rock performance. Auslander also talks about how the audiences of these glam rock shows were actually able to participate in the glam rock fashion by dressing up to imitate their idols and adopt the glam rock fashions themselves. This is another instance in which the consumer-participant must forget/not-notice the longer history of drag/glamour within queer culture. They are relatively free to wear their costumes after work while going to a concert because at that time (post-1969) in Britain glam rock was accepted as a legitimate form, as a legitimate subculture, thanks to the national dialogue and legalization of homosexuality, as well as the mainstream media legitimization of the form of glam rock. The popularity of glam rock in Britain is an example of a hegemonic culture appropriating and absorbing a subculture. As you've noted in your post, what's forgotten are the underground origins, the political struggles, and the blood that preceded and made possible glam rock's adoption of its forms. Without the deviancy associated with androgyny and drag, glam rock would not have had the cultural and imaginative potency to be counter-cultural to the rock culture of the 1960s.
Yes, the first three paragraphs are a bit roundabout in there connection to Amy's prompt question. Part of this is due to the fact that I wrote this post while still formulating my thoughts and criticisms, so I failed to articulate why I was criticizing Auslander's methodology or, rather, the various blind spots in his methodology and how this is relative to this problem of spectacles leading us to ignore something.
In part, I find Auslander's essay to be comparable in perspective to an spectator at a Bowie or T. Rex concert. That is, there seems to be a lack of sociohistorical and sociopolitical engagement with the subject matter--i.e. the topics of queer subjects and identities--for the reason of uncritically consuming a commodified spectacle--i.e. glam rock. Just like a fan at a glam shows isn't present for reasons of active protest for queer rights, Auslander equally doesn't question the historical and political implications of his subject matter. Rather, Auslander's methodological turn to queer theory seems an issue of prescription to what is fashionable and most progressive, just as a fan at a Bowie concert is there to consume and be entertained by the fashionably hip and new and provocative. Auslander isn't REALLY trying to add something new to queer theory or the study of queer subcultures; instead, he merely adopts the theories of Butler and Halberstam, evoking them as the main authorities of queer theory and, consequently, applying a generic reading of drag performance and gender identity to glam rock.
As such, I see a connection between Auslander's insincere methodology and the issue of glam rock as a commodified spectacle. As a commodity, glam rock doesn't demand any politico-historical engagement from its spectators. Ultimately, this becomes an issue of the fact that the fans of this musical genre are not sociopolitically or economically invested in these spectacles--their everyday survival doesn't hinge on these events. As a counter example, I will reference Harlem's drag ball scene as presented in the documentary "Paris in Burning." The queer subjects and drag performers of these events were wholly invested--socially, politically, economically--in these balls. They would spend weeks designing and creating an outfit, or stealing one, in order for a few minutes of stage performance. What is more, the drag balls didn't present a strict dichotomization between performer and spectator; everyone was a spectator and a performer at the same time during these events. Thus, these weren't commodified spectacles to be consumed by a phantasmatically distanced audience. For many of the habitué, these balls became a means of survival, especially as they developed drag "houses" and queer families to supplant the traditional, biological families that had disowned them.
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