What's that Smell?

Abstract

This article is drawn from a book-length study of the explosion of queer urban subcultures in the last decade. My larger purpose is to examine how many queer communities experience and spend time in ways that are very different from their heterosexual counterparts. Queer uses of time and space develop in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality and reproduction, and queer subcultures develop as alternatives to kinship-based notions of community. In my work on subcultures, I explore the stretched out adolescences of queer culture-makers and posit an `epistemology of youth' that disrupts conventional accounts of subculture, youth culture, adulthood, race, class and maturity. This article charts new developments in the theories of subcultures and youth cultures and argues that we should look now at the forms of stylistic resistance embedded in queer subcultural worlds.