The Queerness of Industrial Music

This article explores how queerness and industrial music work through each other in often contradictory and uneasy ways. This radical complementarity invites some of the most promising qualities of their statuses as antinormative manifestations of sexuality and sound. By bringing together queerness and industrial music, this article shows a necessary connection with queerness that is worth emphasizing in industrial’s cultural history. At stake is how queer sites of the auditory become detectable in antagonistic rather than complementary sonic qualities and, in turn, reorient queerness and industrial as politically palpable sonic aesthetics of antiassimilationist sexual expression.