this was pretty good!! i’m naturally skeptical about academic analysis of queercore, but Nault’s acknowledgement (and perhaps shared feeling) of that fear made this a lot more enjoyable for me. while i don’t think i really learned a /lot/ due to my previous knowledge and love of queercore, there were a few things new to me, and i really appreciated Nault’s explicit inclusion of fat, disability, and race politics, as well as discussion of transness as influential to even early queercore. my main critique is that this book doesn’t feel like it has a set purpose. at the end, Nault writes that he wants it to give readers what queercore artists gave to him. an academia-entrenched book doesn’t feel like the right medium for that to me. the book discusses history and places in a relatively accessible way, but also brings in Foucault, Freud, and complex ideas about sex and assimilation that don’t seem super accessible in the way that, imo, queercore should be. as someone already familiar with queer academia, i did feel like i was the right audience for this, but it didn’t do for me what queercore did for Nault — bc /queercore/ did for me what queercore did for him!

but also, because of the serious lack of scholarship around queercore, this was very much appreciated by me personally