SIN WESTWOOD

Sutures: Tracing Threads of Queer Identity and Community in Emo

“That world was utter bullshit to me now. Those bands had done it their way, and now it was time for me to do it mine.”
Laura Jane Grace (2016, p.46)

Sutures is a 12-track conceptual album in which I adopt aesthetic and musical signifiers of emo to build a narrative of transmasculine becoming. ‘Emo’ is a nebulous term: whilst describing a subculture more than a singularly definable musical genre, throughout this text I will use it to refer to the array of associated subgenres – namely pop-punk, post-hardcore, punk-rock, screamo and emo-pop – that have directly influenced the creation of this work. The primary influence of emo on Sutures is lyrical, given that arguably, “it is lyrical rather than stylistic homogeneity that has defined what has been labelled as emo over the course of the past 20 years” (de Boise 2014, p. 231). Aesthetics, persona formation and artist lore are bolstered by the visual accompaniment to these lyrics – a fanzine comprised of personal photography and illustrations, a nod to the DIY assemblage methodologies shaping the project. By effectively appropriating emo signifiers to accommodate an experience I never saw reflected in the genre(s) as a teenage fan, I argue that practice can be enriched and expanded by the ‘hybrid’ perspective of the fan/artist.

Finding my own place in a ‘scene’ has been a particularly meaningful outcome of this research, and I greatly value the extension of my practice into a wider social context. My considerations of scale, visibility, and artist responsibility through the lens of the fan-artist has created new depth to the work I produce. This project resembles an initiation: an introduction to a genre and its tools. In my ongoing sound practice, I look forward to continuing to test new parameters for emo, and to further developing my artistic identity within a collective. In Sutures, we (my collaborators and I) signal our queerness alongside and within our subcultural collective knowledge, the work designed to reach others ‘like us’; knowing that history has rarely shown us those reflective surfaces in art or public figures. The act of creating and archiving together honours the hidden histories and unknown futures of emo that we align ourselves with. Play and fictionalised scale (‘fake it til you make it’) are the modes through which our own lineage is written. In channelling the ‘ghosts’ of a concealed past, of missed opportunity, through experimentation, we lay foundations for a future of our own design – “the queer art of failure […] quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being” (Halberstam 2011, p.88)