But just as with stage-gay, it could be argued that emo’s gender politics hold out a promise of progress or egalitarianism that they don’t really fulfill. 5 Emo’s politics are personal, and its performers tend to position themselves if not as feminist then at least as sympathetic to women, subject to the softer emotions of nostalgia, heartbreak and longing. The author explores this fully in a monograph, but in brief, emo emerges both as a reaction against and a development of the hyper-masculine, hyper-aggressive, capital-P political punk scene of the 1980s that shunned both technical precision and the expression of much emotion other than rage. It also extended to some of their frequent collaborators and fellow signees to the labels Fueled by Ramen and Decaydance, such as The Cab, Cobra Starship and The Academy Is…Įmo is short for emotional hardcore, and the genre’s relationship with both fandom and gender construction is very complex. Known by the portmanteau “bandom,” this fandom flourished on LiveJournal from about 2002 before graduating to Tumblr, and centered on the three bands fans liked to refer to as The Emo Holy Trinity (My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy and Panic!, abbreviated at the Disco to MCR, FOB and Panic). 4 Obviously this becomes more complicated when we apply it to the concept of stage-gay, which is a term invented by fans of emo and post-punk bands in the early 2000s. In the same volume, Emma Nordin suggests there are two sides to queerbaiting-one version has producers “hinting at yet denying queer content, and the other one has producers promising gay characters yet not delivering proper representation.” 3 Most of the authors in Brennan’s book are fairly clear that the deliberate intent of media producers is a key part of queerbaiting, as opposed to viewer interpretations of queerness or homoeroticism.
Emo bands are the natural case study here, as emo is an offshoot of hardcore and punk that sought to complicate the hegemonic masculinities dominating those genres, both in its musical and lyric content, and the public and paratextual performativity of its artists. Through an examination of stage-gay, the notorious practice of queer performativity on stage by straight performers in the emo music subculture, I investigate how a restrictive notion of “truth” in discussions of queerbaiting can actually close off the very possibilities of transformation and open-ended configurations of sexuality that Alexander Doty’s formulation of queerness promised. Applying the concept of queerbaiting to bands complicates these ideas, as the “truth” or “delivery” of queer representation lies not in a fictional text but the public persona of real performers. Joseph Brennan’s 2019 edited volume has greatly developed the concept of queerbaiting to include a range of meanings, from media industries’ pledges of allegiance to LGBT causes that are not delivered upon to courting queer viewers via paratexts that imply queer relationships that don’t exist in text. In 2015, this author attempted to define queerbaiting as a strategy by which writers and networks attempt to gain the patronage of queer viewers via the suggestion of queer relationships, before denying and laughing off the possibility. Queerbaiting is a fast-expanding topic in media and cultural studies.