| Abstract [eng] |
American singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas (stage name Perfume Genius) centers his work around the experience of living in a queer body. His three latest albums Too Bright (2014), No Shape (2017) and Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (2020) focus on a journey from a point of dejection towards hope for a better future. The body in Perfume Genius' music is restricted by social norms and boundaries, the subject in the songs is not in the wrong body, he just does not feel at home with his body, and the three aforementioned albums are an attempt to reconcile that. The theoretical foundation of this thesis is queer theory and performance studies scholar José Muñoz's ideas about queer futurity and utopia. Gender and queer theorist Jack Halberstam's concepts of queer failure, queer spaces and time also complement Muñoz's concept of queer utopianism. In Too Bright, through the medium of queer gestures and exploration of queer and heteronormative spaces, Perfume Genius demonstrates the ways in which queer bodies can be oppressed: they fail to perform gender certainty and refuse the heteronormative models of success, and, as a result, are cast out as other, denied certain social and physical spaces, denied certain gestures. Hadreas also reclaims the power in slurs used against queer people, he boldly performs femininity and refuses to be put into binary limits of gender. On his next album, No Shape, Hadreas posits a shapeless, boundless existence as the solution to not feeling at home with his body. He imagines spaces where indulging in a bodiless existence, queer love or existence in any other body than your own are made possible. This attempt is consistent with Ernst Bloch's typology of abstract utopias, which, according to Muñoz, are insufficient to have any tangible effect, therefore, he bases his theory of queer utopia on Bloch's ideas around concrete utopias and hope. Perfume Genius arrives at a similar conclusion on his latest album Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. The turn to the "no-longer-conscious", especially the ephemeral, stands as evidence of queer lives and possibilities, and the singer accesses personal and collective memory for the purpose of envisioning a queerness that, according to Muñoz, is not yet here. Hadreas performs bold masculinity in the artwork of his latest album; physicality, desire and dance are what reaffirms his bodiliness, therefore Immediately is centered around movement and the physicality of the body, especially visually. The singer also emphasizes the importance of community—it is one thing to feel at home in your body, but entirely different to know how it fits with others'. Yet a sense of individuality remains throughout Perfume Genius' exploration of communal relations, consistent with Muñoz's version of collectiveness: the term "community", in his opinion, is too much of a hegemonic term, and "being singular plural" is the alternative way to imagine communal belonging. Hadreas does not find ultimate closure in being part of a community, but, seeing as it was missing in his music up until this point, postulates it as one of the elements of queerness to come. |
