Queer Punk: Revolutionary Dress in a Reactionary Age
1. The Vibe Shift
This is an essay about fashion, not politics. But you can’t talk about clothing without placing it in the context of the culture that produces it. And this is about clothing as a language of queer expression, resilience, and joy in a time when those notions feel challenged.
Ask any of us: there’s something in the air these days. It’s a palpable shift in how it feels to be queer in the world.
For several decades, LGBTQ+ communities in the Western world have enjoyed a sense of relative progress. From the 1990’s onward, significant political wins in both the US and France granted LGBTQ+ individuals and families with rights to immigration, marriage, and parentality. These policies had the assimilating effect of legitimizing queer identities by reinforcing their ability to create capital in an economy structured on the nuclear family.
Meanwhile, in the cultural sphere, the representation of queer identities has become increasingly diverse and nuanced. (Listen, obviously, the bar was and remains on the floor). Ellen came out on her sitcom in the 1990’s, and less than a decade later, groundbreaking series like Queer as Folk and The L Word brought an admittedly narrow representation of queer relationships to straight audiences for the first time. By 2018, stars like Queer Eye’s Johnathan Van Ness made a person on television sporting both a beard and a dress not only acceptable, but even endearing or desirable to mainstream viewers.
In short, queer identities have become visible - and as a result, passive ignorance has transformed into active, reactionary violence. Since 2016, political policy in the US has been plagued by a fixation on regulating queer, and particularly trans-identities, out of public life. In France, far-right groups have co-opted homophobic arguments born in the US to label “wokist” identity politics as a chief existential threat to the stability of national unity.
And this brings us to the vibe shift. For every new Drag Race spinoff or Disney cartoon kiss, for every First (X) Elected to public office or openly gay man sitting on a Board, there’s an equally powerful reactionary pull backwards.
Most recently, with the political context in France and in the US, there’s been a measurable sense of increased insecurity and instability for queer people I know. There are more stares, catcalls in the street, even physical violence. It’s becoming more frequent, common, and normalized. Sometimes, it feels as though the world is calling for a return to invisibility, to slide into the norm or otherwise assimilate sufficiently and appropriately.
But here’s the beautiful thing: that’s not what I see happening. All around me, I see people boldly embracing queer visibility in ever-more creative, expressive ways. Younger people, of course, but not only - adults in our late 20’s, 30’s, 40’s out on the streets, in the office, at the bar, shirking norms of both age and gender by adopting codes of bold, visible queerness.
Fashion girls with mustaches, a self-identified trans-masc fag who doesn’t leave the house without layers of pink lace, DIY hormones, he/him dykes, combat boots and shaved heads in the board meeting.
The tighter the crackdown, the bolder it comes: queer dress can be read as a new kind of punk, with both clothing and the body as a site of political transgression. Unlike punk, it’s not about rising against, but rather despite - it’s the revolution of self-expression faced with a world of increasingly reactionary violence.
2. The Political Body
“Punk” itself has become synonymous with three successive notions: 1) a political movement, born in the UK in the 1970’s, rooted in working class discontent then propagated by bourgeois youth; 2) the resulting subculture and multi-modal aesthetic current; 3) a shorthand for a posture of defiance in the face of authority, rebellion against The Establishment, and rejection of historic power structures.
Punk aesthetics encompass an approach to visual culture that reflects all three of these notions. The challenge of normativity is suggested by the appropriation, even defiling, of signifiers of tradition (school uniforms, tartans). DIY and personalization places the locus of creation outside cultural moeurs and the fashion system itself. Globally, punk - and its infinite offshoots - is based on the intentional rejection of stylistic norms in response to dominant cultural modes.
Ironically, when we refer to capital-p Punk today, we imagine some of the most cohesive, distinct, and recognizable signifiers in modern dress. Punk is a commodified visual language, a pop culture archetype, and a wide semantic container for everything from combat boots to safety pins, chains, studs, leather, piercings, tattoos, mohawks, tartan, distressed clothing, and so on. And so forth.
Queer fashion, on the other hand, could not possibly be less cohesive. There are as many types of queer style as there are queer people. While a handful of signifiers (carabiners, wallet chains, handkerchiefs, etc.) have become sufficiently recognizable in mainstream culture to indicate homosexuality, there are far fewer cultural symbols for transness, asexuality, and other forms of queerness.
Most of the real subtleties remain recognizable only amongst ourselves. In queer fashion, the meaning of a piece depends on who’s wearing it, with that, and who else is around them. That’s true for all fashion assemblages, but it’s especially true for a term that covers such a wide umbrella of identities. (That the armies of children should continue to wage their TikTok wars over the disputed borders between masc lesbians, snapback lesbians, and Hey Mamas).
But the nebulousness of queer fashion - and identities - doesn’t mean that clothing and bodies worn on queer bodies can’t be a site of, and even come to signify, transgression.
Of course, queer fashion isn’t styled in opposition to a single socio-political structure, the way punk is. But embodying queerness is undeniably a revolutionary act, especially in a world that increasingly sees us as a vague political threat. When walking down the street as a visibly gay or gender non-conforming person poses an inherent risk, there’s something fundamentally punk about the refusal to conform and the courage to refashion one’s very body.
You could also argue that certain stylistic principles of queer fashion are similar to those of the original Punk subculture of 1970’s Britain.
Early punk was characterized by an intentional stylistic “dramatization” of political and social unrest (1). Although queer style is not necessarily intentionally political, it is inherently political when garments are used to position the wearer outside of the boundaries of heteronormative social structures, and even more so when they reject binary signifiers altogether. Punk styling is rooted in “intentionally pairing of disparate styles” as a sort of semiotic middle-finger to dominant cultural structures (2). What is queer style if not, in part, the more-or-less purposeful challenge of sexual and gender normativity in dress?
Then there’s the question of challenging class structure. Obviously, there’s a lot to say about the bourgeoisification of queer style, and the social and cultural capital associated with free queer self-expression, and the appropriation of working class identities. And of course, you could say that punk was a bunch of middle class kids from decent neighborhoods.
Let’s focus less on the action, and more on the intention. For example, signifiers that we associate with WLW dress - Carhartt, overalls, chore coats, carabiners, flannel, etc. - have their roots in the blue collar labor performed by butch women for much of the 20th century. Today, these are used to signify anti-elitist or even anti-capitalist ideologies within WLW communities. More currently, the adoption of RealTree motifs and studded jeans can be seen as a reappropriation of conservative aesthetics by a community that is most often targeted by them.
Visually, both aesthetics are informed by a refusal of top-down dictats of beauty, “goodness,” propriety, and (obviously) gender norms. How many trendy haircuts have been launched on the heads of queer kids armed with a pair of scissors, a bottle of bleach, and a dream? How many fems got so fed up with being asked to think about their hair at all that they shaved it clean off, or inversely, stopped shaving their legs and armpits?
Finally, both queer and punk aesthetics have a paradoxical relationship with the fashion system, especially as it relates to production. Both more-or-less intentionally make use of visual cues that challenge meanings ascribed by the fashion system (then: tradition, history, magazines, mass media; now: megabrands, The Algorithm).
However, both are also 1) informed by the fashion system, and make use of pieces created within it; and 2) appropriated and commodified by that system. Much the same way that Vivienne Westwood was both a legitimate actor within the fashion system - responsible for the propagation, legitimacy, even market value of punk aesthetics - so too do designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and, more currently, Ludovic de Saint Sernin turn queer aesthetics into cultural commodities, and finally signifiers.
(Completely anecdotally, mainstream Fashion itself is created by an industry far queerer than we imagine. This goes far beyond the image of the bitchy fashion gay. For example, it is an open secret that an incredibly vast proportion of femme-presenting runway models - people whose actual, physical bodies are often the site of the most virulent debates about cis-heteronormativity in fashion - are neither cis or het).
3. Queer, as in Free
We’ve talked about the similarities between queer and punk styling, but I want to make an argument for a distinct aesthetic mode that’s emerging in parallel with - and not in response to - increasingly violent, anti-queer rhetoric.
Queer Punk: the look of the people they can’t figure out how to gender, those they gender incorrectly and pretend it’s not on purpose, high femmes in six inch heels, leather for buying lentils at Monoprix, the sticker for an estrogen plug in the bar bathroom, binders and packers, femboys, butch transbians, all the colors or none of the colors, mullets, painted nails, bright, bold, visibly queer bodies walking down the street, a fundamental refusal to conform to someone else’s authority about who, what, and how we should be.
The central ethos of punk is rebellion, even anger. Queer Punk’s ethos is one of disregard, insolence, cheekiness - play and joy at its very best.
It’s not another axis of identity politics. In a political context that seeks to codify and regulate queer bodies, queer punk refuses definition. Instead, the reduction of queer being and selfhood to any fixed identity may be rejected. It also rejects individualism in favor of community and co-constructed identity. It finds meaning in the endless ether of discovery and expression.
In this sense, queer punk is in a constant state of creation and reimagination. Its aesthetics are born from the being and doing of queer personhood. Garments - and bodies themselves - are a tool for not just the expression, but the agentic fashioning (forgive me!) of the queer being.
I say queer beings and not queer selves because queer punk expression is forever being shaped in relationship to those around us. A masc dyke is as a masc dyke does. The semiotics of a garment are not just context dependent, but body dependent, posture dependent, person you’re dating dependent, community dependent. We express ourselves through and against each other, but we also learn from each other. We dress like our exes, we cut each other’s hair, one man gently gives another his very first shot of testosterone.
Queer punk aesthetics are also informed by garments themselves. As tools in the action of queerness, they offer distinct affordances and constraints to their wearers. The semiotics of “traditional” punk are so highly codified because the garments that signify punk also afford, or suggest the affordance, of highly-specific subcultural behaviors. These action possibilities are rooted both in the materiality of objects themselves, and the cultural context in which they are placed. Combat boots are for dancing in chaotic concert vanues, studs and spikes suggest self-protection, safety pins and torn clothing permit DIY fabrication by amateur designers.
Similarly, the visual culture of queer punk is shaped by the materiality of garments. Combat boots or platform heels change the gait of the wearer, giving one a looping strut or a powerful walk. Carabiners, chains, and leather aren’t just for self-protection, but for active work and indeed sexuality, the ability to do and be with greater agency. Highly textural, structured pieces - or voluminous pieces - take up physical space in the public sphere and draw attention to the body, allowing the wearer to perform an active reshaping of the physical self.
In Queer Punk, the nexus between bodies and garments is a site of play and experimentation. If clothing tells a cultural story, then the body typically describes the genre (forgive me again!) of that narrative. Queer punk pushes back against these automatisms. A person who’s had top surgery might wear a corset or bra, intentionally recreating the illusion of female-coded secondary sex characteristics. Some trans women who wear high heels may be challenging the notion that feminine bodies are smaller, dainty, or demure.
And of course, the body itself is a site of transgression. It takes up the tattoos and piercings of “traditional” punk as a form of self-fashioning; pushes the boundaries of “acceptable” hair styles. But it also extends to the transformation of the physical self through hormone treatments, surgeries, packers/binders/implants, strap-ons, and any infinite number of modifications. Some of these modifications are highly codified and medically regulated, but often they are DIY: conducted at home, purchased on the Internet, and guided by friends and communities.
And while, for some queer people, the objective of these modifications is to attain a “normative” ideal - which in no way undercuts the act of modification itself as fundamentally transgressive - for others, it’s about the liberation of finding deeply personal ideals for the body. In other words, queer punk extends notions of “DIY” and personalization of the gendered body itself - a femme-presenting and identifying person having top surgery; taking a low dose of hormones to raise or lower the voice, or change certain facial features; otherwise customizing one’s body as one’s own.
4. Euphoria
In writing this essay, I asked a trans-masc friend for his take on all this. Our styles couldn’t be more different. I wear a lot of black hoodies, and he wears more color and texture at once than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s all very Collina Strada femboy. We share a running joke that it’s because of our clothes that people call me “Sir” all the time, while he’s constantly misgendered, despite having a mustache.
When we spoke, he told me that it sometimes felt unfair - that he’d had the courage to come out, had paid extensive medical bills out of pocket, and undertaken a complicated legal process just to be called “Ma’am” because of a pink t-shirt.
“But it’s more important to be myself than to be a trans man,” he told me. After dressing “like a skater” early in his transition, he’d returned to his femme style, and began to dress “for and like himself.” He said all this gave him a sense of peace that he wasn’t willing to compromise in exchange for being “read” the right way on the street.
This, to me, is the essence of queer punk: liberation. But queer punk cannot only exist in the confines of spaces where that kind of liberation is possible. As my friend put it, he wouldn’t be wearing a pink t-shirt to his upcoming appointment to change his legal status.
We’ve talked a lot about Punk as it’s been commodified in the popular consciousness some fifty years after its inception. But, of course, not every punk rocker was wearing studs, tartan, and a mohawk haircut. For every iD street style shot of a kid in ripped jeans, there were thousands of more “real” punk kids going to shows in Harrington jackets and loafers. Their dress and visual culture doesn’t read Punk, but these were the people who actively brought punk into being.
In this sense, punk exists “somewhere outside the binary between the spectacular and the ordinary.” (3) To pretend that punk exists only in the realm of the visible and the spectacular is to undercut the very real contributions of those who are indistinguishable from the mainstream.
Similarly, queer punk exists in the space outside of the binary. It’s as real for those of us who are flagrantly visible as it is for those of us who are passing, closeted, or choose to dress in a more normative style - whether for safety, social reasons, or simple personal preference. Like punk, our courage to exist in the world is an inherent criticism of systems of power. Perhaps most importantly, it carries a similar sense of joy, and of pride - reclaiming what we’re given, fags, dykes and queers all of us.
_Acknowledgements
When I write, it’s important to me to tell only the stories that I feel like I have a right to share. In that sense, I want to disclose that this piece has a strong bias for WLW experiences. I’m also writing from my perspective as a queer person working in a creative industry in a major Western city. I look forward, always, to hearing others' ways of being in the world.
Also, obviously, I owe every single word of this to my queer family.
_Works Cited
(1, 2) Ansah, C. (2020). Look: An examination of the clothing and clothing assemblages of the Washington DC punk scene.
Rosato, A. (2022). Vivienne Westwood and the Socio-Political Nature of Punk.
Prithipaul, D. (2020). Clothing fantasies: A case study analysis into the recontextualization and translation of subcultural style.
(3) Weiner, N. (2018). ‘Put on your boots and Harrington!’: The ordinariness of 1970s UK punk dress. Punk & Post-Punk, 7(2), 181-202.
Queer Punk: Revolutionary Dress in a Reactionary Age
1. The Vibe Shift
This is an essay about fashion, not politics. But you can’t talk about clothing without placing it in the context of the culture that produces it. And this is about clothing as a language of queer expression, resilience, and joy in a time when those notions feel challenged.
Ask any of us: there’s something in the air these days. It’s a palpable shift in how it feels to be queer in the world.
For several decades, LGBTQ+ communities in the Western world have enjoyed a sense of relative progress. From the 1990’s onward, significant political wins in both the US and France granted LGBTQ+ individuals and families with rights to immigration, marriage, and parentality. These policies had the assimilating effect of legitimizing queer identities by reinforcing their ability to create capital in an economy structured on the nuclear family.
Meanwhile, in the cultural sphere, the representation of queer identities has become increasingly diverse and nuanced. (Listen, obviously, the bar was and remains on the floor). Ellen came out on her sitcom in the 1990’s, and less than a decade later, groundbreaking series like Queer as Folk and The L Word brought an admittedly narrow representation of queer relationships to straight audiences for the first time. By 2018, stars like Queer Eye’s Johnathan Van Ness made a person on television sporting both a beard and a dress not only acceptable, but even endearing or desirable to mainstream viewers.
In short, queer identities have become visible - and as a result, passive ignorance has transformed into active, reactionary violence. Since 2016, political policy in the US has been plagued by a fixation on regulating queer, and particularly trans-identities, out of public life. In France, far-right groups have co-opted homophobic arguments born in the US to label “wokist” identity politics as a chief existential threat to the stability of national unity.
And this brings us to the vibe shift. For every new Drag Race spinoff or Disney cartoon kiss, for every First (X) Elected to public office or openly gay man sitting on a Board, there’s an equally powerful reactionary pull backwards.
Most recently, with the political context in France and in the US, there’s been a measurable sense of increased insecurity and instability for queer people I know. There are more stares, catcalls in the street, even physical violence. It’s becoming more frequent, common, and normalized. Sometimes, it feels as though the world is calling for a return to invisibility, to slide into the norm or otherwise assimilate sufficiently and appropriately.
But here’s the beautiful thing: that’s not what I see happening. All around me, I see people boldly embracing queer visibility in ever-more creative, expressive ways. Younger people, of course, but not only - adults in our late 20’s, 30’s, 40’s out on the streets, in the office, at the bar, shirking norms of both age and gender by adopting codes of bold, visible queerness.
Fashion girls with mustaches, a self-identified trans-masc fag who doesn’t leave the house without layers of pink lace, DIY hormones, he/him dykes, combat boots and shaved heads in the board meeting.
The tighter the crackdown, the bolder it comes: queer dress can be read as a new kind of punk, with both clothing and the body as a site of political transgression. Unlike punk, it’s not about rising against, but rather despite - it’s the revolution of self-expression faced with a world of increasingly reactionary violence.
2. The Political Body
“Punk” itself has become synonymous with three successive notions: 1) a political movement, born in the UK in the 1970’s, rooted in working class discontent then propagated by bourgeois youth; 2) the resulting subculture and multi-modal aesthetic current; 3) a shorthand for a posture of defiance in the face of authority, rebellion against The Establishment, and rejection of historic power structures.
Punk aesthetics encompass an approach to visual culture that reflects all three of these notions. The challenge of normativity is suggested by the appropriation, even defiling, of signifiers of tradition (school uniforms, tartans). DIY and personalization places the locus of creation outside cultural moeurs and the fashion system itself. Globally, punk - and its infinite offshoots - is based on the intentional rejection of stylistic norms in response to dominant cultural modes.
Ironically, when we refer to capital-p Punk today, we imagine some of the most cohesive, distinct, and recognizable signifiers in modern dress. Punk is a commodified visual language, a pop culture archetype, and a wide semantic container for everything from combat boots to safety pins, chains, studs, leather, piercings, tattoos, mohawks, tartan, distressed clothing, and so on. And so forth.
Queer fashion, on the other hand, could not possibly be less cohesive. There are as many types of queer style as there are queer people. While a handful of signifiers (carabiners, wallet chains, handkerchiefs, etc.) have become sufficiently recognizable in mainstream culture to indicate homosexuality, there are far fewer cultural symbols for transness, asexuality, and other forms of queerness.
Most of the real subtleties remain recognizable only amongst ourselves. In queer fashion, the meaning of a piece depends on who’s wearing it, with that, and who else is around them. That’s true for all fashion assemblages, but it’s especially true for a term that covers such a wide umbrella of identities. (That the armies of children should continue to wage their TikTok wars over the disputed borders between masc lesbians, snapback lesbians, and Hey Mamas).
But the nebulousness of queer fashion - and identities - doesn’t mean that clothing and bodies worn on queer bodies can’t be a site of, and even come to signify, transgression.
Of course, queer fashion isn’t styled in opposition to a single socio-political structure, the way punk is. But embodying queerness is undeniably a revolutionary act, especially in a world that increasingly sees us as a vague political threat. When walking down the street as a visibly gay or gender non-conforming person poses an inherent risk, there’s something fundamentally punk about the refusal to conform and the courage to refashion one’s very body.
You could also argue that certain stylistic principles of queer fashion are similar to those of the original Punk subculture of 1970’s Britain.
Early punk was characterized by an intentional stylistic “dramatization” of political and social unrest (1). Although queer style is not necessarily intentionally political, it is inherently political when garments are used to position the wearer outside of the boundaries of heteronormative social structures, and even more so when they reject binary signifiers altogether. Punk styling is rooted in “intentionally pairing of disparate styles” as a sort of semiotic middle-finger to dominant cultural structures (2). What is queer style if not, in part, the more-or-less purposeful challenge of sexual and gender normativity in dress?
Then there’s the question of challenging class structure. Obviously, there’s a lot to say about the bourgeoisification of queer style, and the social and cultural capital associated with free queer self-expression, and the appropriation of working class identities. And of course, you could say that punk was a bunch of middle class kids from decent neighborhoods.
Let’s focus less on the action, and more on the intention. For example, signifiers that we associate with WLW dress - Carhartt, overalls, chore coats, carabiners, flannel, etc. - have their roots in the blue collar labor performed by butch women for much of the 20th century. Today, these are used to signify anti-elitist or even anti-capitalist ideologies within WLW communities. More currently, the adoption of RealTree motifs and studded jeans can be seen as a reappropriation of conservative aesthetics by a community that is most often targeted by them.
Visually, both aesthetics are informed by a refusal of top-down dictats of beauty, “goodness,” propriety, and (obviously) gender norms. How many trendy haircuts have been launched on the heads of queer kids armed with a pair of scissors, a bottle of bleach, and a dream? How many fems got so fed up with being asked to think about their hair at all that they shaved it clean off, or inversely, stopped shaving their legs and armpits?
Finally, both queer and punk aesthetics have a paradoxical relationship with the fashion system, especially as it relates to production. Both more-or-less intentionally make use of visual cues that challenge meanings ascribed by the fashion system (then: tradition, history, magazines, mass media; now: megabrands, The Algorithm).
However, both are also 1) informed by the fashion system, and make use of pieces created within it; and 2) appropriated and commodified by that system. Much the same way that Vivienne Westwood was both a legitimate actor within the fashion system - responsible for the propagation, legitimacy, even market value of punk aesthetics - so too do designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and, more currently, Ludovic de Saint Sernin turn queer aesthetics into cultural commodities, and finally signifiers.
(Completely anecdotally, mainstream Fashion itself is created by an industry far queerer than we imagine. This goes far beyond the image of the bitchy fashion gay. For example, it is an open secret that an incredibly vast proportion of femme-presenting runway models - people whose actual, physical bodies are often the site of the most virulent debates about cis-heteronormativity in fashion - are neither cis or het).
(Completely anecdotally, mainstream Fashion itself is created by an industry far queerer than we imagine. This goes far beyond the image of the bitchy fashion gay. For example, it is an open secret that an incredibly vast proportion of femme-presenting runway models - people whose actual, physical bodies are often the site of the most virulent debates about cis-heteronormativity in fashion - are neither cis or het).
3. Queer, as in Free
We’ve talked about the similarities between queer and punk styling, but I want to make an argument for a distinct aesthetic mode that’s emerging in parallel with - and not in response to - increasingly violent, anti-queer rhetoric.
Queer Punk: the look of the people they can’t figure out how to gender, those they gender incorrectly and pretend it’s not on purpose, high femmes in six inch heels, leather for buying lentils at Monoprix, the sticker for an estrogen plug in the bar bathroom, binders and packers, femboys, butch transbians, all the colors or none of the colors, mullets, painted nails, bright, bold, visibly queer bodies walking down the street, a fundamental refusal to conform to someone else’s authority about who, what, and how we should be.
The central ethos of punk is rebellion, even anger. Queer Punk’s ethos is one of disregard, insolence, cheekiness - play and joy at its very best.
It’s not another axis of identity politics. In a political context that seeks to codify and regulate queer bodies, queer punk refuses definition. Instead, the reduction of queer being and selfhood to any fixed identity may be rejected. It also rejects individualism in favor of community and co-constructed identity. It finds meaning in the endless ether of discovery and expression.
In this sense, queer punk is in a constant state of creation and reimagination. Its aesthetics are born from the being and doing of queer personhood. Garments - and bodies themselves - are a tool for not just the expression, but the agentic fashioning (forgive me!) of the queer being.
I say queer beings and not queer selves because queer punk expression is forever being shaped in relationship to those around us. A masc dyke is as a masc dyke does. The semiotics of a garment are not just context dependent, but body dependent, posture dependent, person you’re dating dependent, community dependent. We express ourselves through and against each other, but we also learn from each other. We dress like our exes, we cut each other’s hair, one man gently gives another his very first shot of testosterone.
Queer punk aesthetics are also informed by garments themselves. As tools in the action of queerness, they offer distinct affordances and constraints to their wearers. The semiotics of “traditional” punk are so highly codified because the garments that signify punk also afford, or suggest the affordance, of highly-specific subcultural behaviors. These action possibilities are rooted both in the materiality of objects themselves, and the cultural context in which they are placed. Combat boots are for dancing in chaotic concert vanues, studs and spikes suggest self-protection, safety pins and torn clothing permit DIY fabrication by amateur designers.
Similarly, the visual culture of queer punk is shaped by the materiality of garments. Combat boots or platform heels change the gait of the wearer, giving one a looping strut or a powerful walk. Carabiners, chains, and leather aren’t just for self-protection, but for active work and indeed sexuality, the ability to do and be with greater agency. Highly textural, structured pieces - or voluminous pieces - take up physical space in the public sphere and draw attention to the body, allowing the wearer to perform an active reshaping of the physical self.
In Queer Punk, the nexus between bodies and garments is a site of play and experimentation. If clothing tells a cultural story, then the body typically describes the genre (forgive me again!) of that narrative. Queer punk pushes back against these automatisms. A person who’s had top surgery might wear a corset or bra, intentionally recreating the illusion of female-coded secondary sex characteristics. Some trans women who wear high heels may be challenging the notion that feminine bodies are smaller, dainty, or demure.
And of course, the body itself is a site of transgression. It takes up the tattoos and piercings of “traditional” punk as a form of self-fashioning; pushes the boundaries of “acceptable” hair styles. But it also extends to the transformation of the physical self through hormone treatments, surgeries, packers/binders/implants, strap-ons, and any infinite number of modifications. Some of these modifications are highly codified and medically regulated, but often they are DIY: conducted at home, purchased on the Internet, and guided by friends and communities.
And while, for some queer people, the objective of these modifications is to attain a “normative” ideal - which in no way undercuts the act of modification itself as fundamentally transgressive - for others, it’s about the liberation of finding deeply personal ideals for the body. In other words, queer punk extends notions of “DIY” and personalization of the gendered body itself - a femme-presenting and identifying person having top surgery; taking a low dose of hormones to raise or lower the voice, or change certain facial features; otherwise customizing one’s body as one’s own.
4. Euphoria
In writing this essay, I asked a trans-masc friend for his take on all this. Our styles couldn’t be more different. I wear a lot of black hoodies, and he wears more color and texture at once than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s all very Collina Strada femboy. We share a running joke that it’s because of our clothes that people call me “Sir” all the time, while he’s constantly misgendered, despite having a mustache.
When we spoke, he told me that it sometimes felt unfair - that he’d had the courage to come out, had paid extensive medical bills out of pocket, and undertaken a complicated legal process just to be called “Ma’am” because of a pink t-shirt.
“But it’s more important to be myself than to be a trans man,” he told me. After dressing “like a skater” early in his transition, he’d returned to his femme style, and began to dress “for and like himself.” He said all this gave him a sense of peace that he wasn’t willing to compromise in exchange for being “read” the right way on the street.
This, to me, is the essence of queer punk: liberation. But queer punk cannot only exist in the confines of spaces where that kind of liberation is possible. As my friend put it, he wouldn’t be wearing a pink t-shirt to his upcoming appointment to change his legal status.
We’ve talked a lot about Punk as it’s been commodified in the popular consciousness some fifty years after its inception. But, of course, not every punk rocker was wearing studs, tartan, and a mohawk haircut. For every iD street style shot of a kid in ripped jeans, there were thousands of more “real” punk kids going to shows in Harrington jackets and loafers. Their dress and visual culture doesn’t read Punk, but these were the people who actively brought punk into being.
In this sense, punk exists “somewhere outside the binary between the spectacular and the ordinary.” (3) To pretend that punk exists only in the realm of the visible and the spectacular is to undercut the very real contributions of those who are indistinguishable from the mainstream.
Similarly, queer punk exists in the space outside of the binary. It’s as real for those of us who are flagrantly visible as it is for those of us who are passing, closeted, or choose to dress in a more normative style - whether for safety, social reasons, or simple personal preference. Like punk, our courage to exist in the world is an inherent criticism of systems of power. Perhaps most importantly, it carries a similar sense of joy, and of pride - reclaiming what we’re given, fags, dykes and queers all of us.
_Acknowledgements
When I write, it’s important to me to tell only the stories that I feel like I have a right to share. In that sense, I want to disclose that this piece has a strong bias for WLW experiences. I’m also writing from my perspective as a queer person working in a creative industry in a major Western city. I look forward, always, to hearing others' ways of being in the world.
Also, obviously, I owe every single word of this to my queer family.
_Works Cited
(1, 2) Ansah, C. (2020). Look: An examination of the clothing and clothing assemblages of the Washington DC punk scene.
Rosato, A. (2022). Vivienne Westwood and the Socio-Political Nature of Punk.
Prithipaul, D. (2020). Clothing fantasies: A case study analysis into the recontextualization and translation of subcultural style.
(3) Weiner, N. (2018). ‘Put on your boots and Harrington!’: The ordinariness of 1970s UK punk dress. Punk & Post-Punk, 7(2), 181-202.