The diaspora queers back: reflections on rebetology and zine-making

Abstract

This autoethnographic text details the author’s reflections on his own positionality and process in researching and publishing a zine in the emerging and contested field of queer rebetology. By using the archive as a means for scholarly and creative interventions in the Greek urban music genre of rebetika, the author draws attention to the process of erasure that has occurred in discourses surrounding the genre’s queer exponents, sites of performance and subcultures. The author’s position as a second-generation Greek-Australian in exploring these histories is framed as a “queering back” to the dominant discourses produced in Greece by local researchers and writers. It is argued that this distance to Greece “proper” allows the author the privilege and vantage point from which to explore the queer elements of a music genre that has now become entangled in the normative, nationalist and homophobic discourses of the modern Greek nation-state.