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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
215
nation, and poverty as aberrational formations, what Roderick Ferguson might call ‘‘normative compromises’’ that help ‘‘produce the normative itineraries of advanced capitalist and postcolonial sites.’’47 Screamers’ live performances, considered in relationship to the postcolonial, can be read as producing a type of outsider sexuality based in relationship to wars abroad. According to Cherie the Penguin, who in introducing Screamers shows, for example, ranted, ‘‘Cambodia was never this fun!’’48 Though meant as a taunt to audience members, this statement also displays a particular connection between a punk queerness (perhaps as a terror like war) and war itself. As a metaphor, this introduction forwards war as simultaneously distant (through the announcer’s sarcasm) and intimate (present in the bands’ performance), and, in that connection, Screamers are rendered as outsiders to a version of the national narrative through simultaneous dissociation and proximity. Likewise, if we imagine the Canterbury Apartments, with its heterogeneous population, as a postcolonial site of sorts, in that it holds refugees from US wars abroad, then we also access a reading of sexuality in the Canterbury and the L.A. punk scene in general that collocates the aberrational qualities often assigned to race (its queering through feminization) and those extant sexualities of empire such as the queering of bodies and also the assumed sexual availability and excess of bodies imagined through empire.49 Thus, the nonnormative aspects of sexuality narrated through stories of the Canterbury and its inhabitants reiterate what is non-normative about racial and imperial bodies in order to create modes of resistance. The specific convergence of race, gender, sexual, and national discourses that guided descriptions of the Canterbury Apartments was also evident in an early song from the Go-Go’s, variously known as ‘‘Luxury Living’’ or ‘‘Living at the Canterbury.’’50 A number of The members of The Go-Go’s counted themselves part of the Los Angeles punk scene, and resided and rehearsed in the basement of the Canterbury Apartments. This is how The Go-Go’s describe their own ‘‘shit-assing’’: Okay living in the city Whores outside a-posing Traffic noise a lullaby Skyscrapers better than blue skies We can do what we want We can say what we please We can be who we want Being poor’s okay by me Proud I don’t have no T.V.51
The vocals, pitched at a near scream throughout, communicate defiance, and the quick tempo, sloppy beat, and stark arrangement of major chords challenge listeners to keep up with the pace of the city, and speak to the disorienting feel and hard nature of their adopted neighborhood. The romanticization of poverty and resistance to commercial ‘‘conventional’’ culture that go hand in hand in descriptions of the Canterbury speak to a call to authenticity built on particularly urban proximity to racial and sexual others and a desire to describe the scene within the language of democratization and deviance. Because the space of the city in general, and the space of the Canterbury in particular, evoke people of color, immigrants, and difficult circumstances arising from