The ghost of Europe is shifting shape

Abstract

In recent debates about the social, political and cultural reasons for the rise of right-wing populism, the image of a supposedly “cosmopolitan elite” is employed to describe a “political caste” that has lost touch with the lower classes. According to this argument, too much focus has been put on minority and gender politics. Even within leftist debate, divisions between class and identity (here often equated with middle class) politics are common. The much-discussed crisis of political representation of the working classes is also a problem of their cultural representation. I combine queer (aesthetic) theory and cultural studies to trouble the powerful distinctions made between the (often precarious) lives of queer people, class and identity politics. In this chapter, different functions of anti-elite themes in articulations of class/identity politics within queer punk cultural productions since the 1990s are being discussed. To do so, the text focuses on two works in particular: songs by US punk band Tribe 8 and the Swedish film Folkbildningsterror (2014). Both productions relate to elitism in crucially different ways: By employing an aesthetics of provocation, Tribe 8 attack an intellectualised middle-class elite within (lesbian) feminist discourse in order to articulate a queer-feminist class politics. With its focus on precarious queer and trans lives, Folkbildningsterror drafts complex images of class identities and the future prospects of “common people”. Against the dismantling of the Swedish welfare state, the characters form unexpected alliances to create a new welfare society. Thus, the fiction of a necessarily middle-class, anti-worker focus of identity politics is undermined. The queer utopia drafted in Folkbildningsterror counters the logics of current right- and also, to some extent, left-wing populist rhetoric.