"Rude Noises" : Homocore, unsettling the symbolic, and enjoying abjection

Abjection is not only a harmful way of being outside of culture. While scholars mobilize Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic concept of abjection in many different ways I argue that the process of abjection offers up the margins of culture as a potentially productive space. Reading the queer/punk fanzine Homocore through a method of tropological economy, I illustrate what anti-assimilation subcultures can do in their place on the edge of normative cultures. Ultimately, Homocore demonstrates that abjection, accompanied by the feeling of jouissance, can unsettle existing power relations. Instances of abjection can thus transform "the center" of normative cultures by destabilizing the Symbolic order upon which the center relies.