Thesis (M.A.)--Queensland University of Technology, 2004. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Mar. 4, 2006). Includes bibliographical references (p. 92-99) and filmography (p. 100). Also issued as a print manuscript. Print manuscript contains illustrations omitted from online version.

Fault Lines positions a theory of gay male subjectivity as it relates to the Queer skinhead and its dissemination in gay male pornography. In narrating the transformation of the original skinhead as a subcultural youth type to its present re-signification as a fetish and sexual identity within gay male subculture, Fault Lines reveals a tripartite problem of fetishism, sadomasochism and fascism. Through an analysis of Bruce LaBruce's film Skin Gang / Skin Flick (1999) these problems are contextualised within a discourse of gay male pornography, broadening the investigation to consider how problems of masculinity, violence and race manifest within a distinctly gay male sexual imaginary. Examining the representational function of the Queer skinhead, Fault Lines seeks to speculate on how notions of a gay male subject and subjectivity can be established at the intersection of an aesthetic, political and social experience.

This dissertation examines the historical contexts, major themes, and archival practices of queercore, an anti-normative queer and punk subculture comprised of music, zines, film, art, literature and new media that was instigated in 1985 by Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones in Toronto, Ontario. Via their fanzine J.D.s., LaBruce and Jones declared “civil war” on the punk and gay and lesbian mainstreams and conjured queercore as a multimedia subculture situated in pointed opposition to the homophobia of mainline punk and the lifeless sexual politics and assimilationist tendencies of dominant gay and lesbian society. In the pages that follow, I engage wider histories of radical queer politics and punk aesthetics and values to reveal the generative and long-standing symbiosis between these two energies – a symbiosis that informs queercore, but that also extends beyond its temporal and material boundaries. Through close analysis of queercore films (e.g. No Skin Off My Ass, The Lollipop Generation, The Living End, By Hook or By Crook), music (e.g., Pansy Division, Tribe 8, Beth Ditto/The Gossip, Nomy Lamm) and zines (e.g., J.D.s, SCAB, Bimbox, Bamboo Girl, i’m so fucking beautiful), I establish queercore’s primary themes: explicit sexuality (the use of risky, erotic queer punk images and performances to undermine heteronormativity and confront accepted notions of gay and punk identity); imagined violence (the deployment of a threatened, as opposed to actualized, violence in the hopes of frightening and, thus, destabilizing powerful white, bourgeois, heterosexual masculinity); and bodily difference (the circulation of affirmative representations of marginalized queer bodies, and specifically those that are fat, disabled and/or gender non-normative). Finally, I conclude with an exploration of the institutions and individuals currently involved in queercore archival efforts, thus placing my project within a crucial lineage of subcultural preservation. Taken as a whole, this study asserts that queercore articulates and disseminates a set of alternative identities, aesthetics, politics and representations for queer folks to occupy and engage within social space, providing a dynamic anti-normative, anti-corporate, D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) alternative to a consumer-capitalist hetero- and homo-normative mainstream. / text