The transnational queer underground is a project, which wants your voices to be heard. The private is political and everybody can write and create. We all should have the possibility to help shaping the world that surrounds us.

That is why I’m looking for your participation:

You want to interview a local musician/artist?
Write a concert/record/book/film review?
Let me know what and where.

You are organizing an event in you city and want more people to know about it?
Send an announcement.

You want to contribute pictures/drawings/illustrations to the articles?
Send them!

Also I would hate for this to be just an eurocentric page. I know that the situation for people that don’t fit into the heteronormative mainstream society is harder in some places than in others and people can’t always show their preferred way of life in public - wherever they are. But this is why writing for a transnational webmagazine might be a good way of letting more people in other parts of the world know about the situation in your area. There are many ways to contribute and I’m happy about any suggestion!

And please don’t hesitate, because you haven’t published anything before or you think that your english is not perfect. Don’t ever let anybody tell you there’s something you can’t do. You will get more confidence once you’ve started.

!!!LOOKING FOR CONTRIBUTIONS!!!
read more here

BODY LANGUAGE – Whats queer about queer Pop?

BODY LANGUAGE – Whats queer about queer Pop?

November 7, 2010 · by admin · in events

From the 11th to the 13th of November there is going to be a very interesting festival on queer pop culture at Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin, that I’m really looking forward to.
Starting on Thursday with a performance by Terre Thaemlitz and some more performances among others by Anat Ben David on saturday, a concert by MEN on friday and lot’s of interesting panels and films, I’m quite sure this is something nobody in Berlin should miss.
This is what the curators Tim Stüttgen and Christoph Gurk say:

“Pop has always been able to integrate the codes and secret languages of so-called minorities into mainstream. Ever since the glorious time of glam rock, forms to express rebellion against a normative order of gender have become interwoven in this dynamics. The legendary rise of Lady Gaga is a particularly powerful example of how smoothly single elements of dissident body politics can be transformed into a symbolic resource for the mythology of universal enlightenment and infinite self-determination. For three days “Body Language”, the third edition of the series “Life Is Live”, will explore the question if queer role models are capable of expressing criticism about sexual normalization in the medium of pop culture, without at the same time giving up the claim for a change. What exactly is happening when gestures serving the self-understanding of subcultures meet pop culture’s universal mechanisms of appropriation? Can this encounter be told as the story of an appropriation that happens over and over again? Which are the constructive perspectives of queer interventions into pop culture?”

You can download the german program here.

Performances, lectures and concerts by and with
ANAT BEN DAVID, PAULINE BOUDRY, KEREN CYTTER, DEL LAGRACE VOLCANO, CRAZY BITCH IN A CAVE, JUBA KALAMKA, BETTINA KÖSTER, MARIA & THE MIRRORS, MARY OCHER, MEN, CHRISTINA NEMEC, JOHANNES PAUL RAETHER, TERRE THAEMLITZ, MARGARITA TSOMOU, WARBEAR plus films and more.

Tags: anat ben david, body language, christoph gurk, deep dickollective, del lagrace volcano, hebbel am ufer, men, Pauline Boudry, queer pop, terre thaemlitz, tim stüttgen, warbear

Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply.

← Introducing… Kumbia Queers

Interview with Khaela Maricich of The Blow →

The “transnational queer underground” emerged as a reference to the “international pop underground”, a convention initiated by Calvin Johnston (K Records/Portland/USA) in 1991 to take a stand against the sell-out of the music industry and also laid the foundation for the riot grrrl movement. In 2009 I was doing a lot of research on issues related to queer music for an article I was writing at that time and thought that the information I collected might be useful to some other people as well.

The articles that are posted here are mostly related to music, since that is my main topic, but as more and more people participate and help shaping the transnational queer underground I hope we will soon be able to offer a broader range of subjects. And I am always looking for people who would like to contribute something, either on a regular basis or just once. Go to the [PARTICIPATION] section to find out more.

Besides articles you can also find some basic information here. In the category [BANDS] there is a list of queer musicians, with links to their websites, so you can find out more about them. In the category [ARTISTS] you can find links to some visual artists. There are also a lot of queer [FILM FESTIVALS] worth checking out. [QUEER VENUES] offers you a list of places to go to in different cities around the world, recommended by people from those areas. In the [TEXTS] section you can find some links to (scientific) publications that are available on the internet. Finally there is a page called [LINKS] which I will have to work on in the near future to get a better structure.

There are a few things that are very important to me.
The history of queers has been widely neclected in the past and is still underrepresented in the present. So this is a small approach towards changing that.
The term queer, as used on this page, should be seen as a description for people or a group of people who do not act conforming to heteronormative rules and/or feel uncomfortable with categories implemented through a heteronormative society. This also means that there should be no references to biologisms, because they are constructed by society. There is nothing inherent about being a girl or a boy and you shouldn’t even have to define as either of these two, so there really is no need in reinforcing these categories here. And I see this the same way when it comes to sexual orientation, RACE, ethnicity or even nation states. We should question these categories and help deconstructing, instead of reproducing them.