UC San Diego

The origins of queerness as a cultural idea are dispersed across cultural and scholarly origins. My goal with this dissertation is to bring into conversation how these two were brought into dialogue and how they continue to inform each other. In researching this topic I consult archival materials and conduct interviews with participants in Toronto’s queercore subculture, which began in the mid-80s and has continued, albeit in a modified form, until the present. I supplement this work with scholarship and auto-ethnography of my drag career as Sadie Pins in San Diego between 2018 and 2019. Though eclectic, the exchange between these two events brings out important etymological histories that enlighten contemporary debates in queer of colour critique concerning the multiple marginalizations queer black subjects experience from both a gay mainstream and a resistant queer culture. This dissertation unpacks queer community’s techniques of handling diversification and prods at the contemporary dialogue between academics and cultural workers in order to tease out new possibilities for future inquiry.