The Death of Subculture: Abstracted Digital Embodiments of Desire

Abstract

The internet has become the primary method for connecting people, sharing information and exchanging cultural content on both a global and local level, with Queer digital publics attempting to capture the plurality and temporality of subcultural Queer life. This paper, however, will focus on the limitations and boundaries of these Queer digital publics, and the ways in which they contribute to and produce globalized homonationalism, transhistorical narratives and erode local identities, in attempt to create a universalized Queer identity and an imagined liberation. These manufactured nationalist formations inscribe and validate subjecthood through the engendering, absorption, erasure and disenfranchisement of racial-others to whom are typically farthest from whiteness, leading to the seeming retreatment of local and regional memories and subcultures. Using metaphorical archives and the concept of myth, mythos, ands mythologies, I will argue that Queer mythos is generated thought the assemblages of collective ownership and the binding between metaphorical archives and memory markets and will examine how these myths develop through different digital mediums. Additionally, this paper will consider the ways in which ephemera and aesthetics, through fashion, can construct cultural canon, memory production, and the global circulation of desire. New digital traditions could show the West how little we actually know about Queer life and subcultures, supporting comprehensive coverage for those who do not associate with Queerness but experience ideality relevant to where they may exist.