Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making

Popular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative capacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make sense of identity and allows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arousing the political imagination. With an activist voice that is impassioned yet adherent to scholarly rigour, Playing it Queer provides an original and compelling ethnographic account of the relationship between popular music, queer self-fashioning and (sub)cultural world-making.
This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant literatures on queer identity and political debates as well as popular music, identity and (sub)cultural style. Contextualised within a detailed history of queer sensibilities and creative practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club cultures, the author’s rich empirical studies of local performers and translocal scenes intimately capture the meaning and value of popular musics and (sub)cultural style in everyday queer lives.

Jodie Taylor received her PhD in Musicology from Griffith University, Australia. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cultural Sociology at the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research (2009–12), and is currently a Research Fellow at the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre. She has published numerous articles on aspects of queer culture, popular music and ethnography and is currently co-editing three anthologies on erotic cultures, festivalisation and mainstream music.