Queer music studies is in fashion again. Scholarship in this niche research area appears to be undergoing a global turn towards the out-closeting of queer practices beyond North America and Western Europe. The latest publications on this topic include those by Anna Morcom (Reference Morcom2013) on the livelihood of Indian kothi dancers and Moshe Morad (Reference Morad2014) on the gay ambiente scene in Havana, Cuba. Jodie Taylor's latest book on the subcultural scene in Brisbane joins this gamut of geographical, musical and sexual assemblages. Her primary question concerns how the correlations between the musical and the sexual aspects of individual and social identities are being played out within queer contexts. As a cultural sociologist, she argues that ‘Western popular musics’ are being used by gays, lesbians and trans ‘to express their gender and sexual differences, empower and transform themselves, form queer social alliances and mobilise social protest’ (p. 3).

Set against the outstanding work of Stan Hawkins (Reference Hawkins2002), Freya Jarman (Reference Jarmen2011) and Judith Peraino (Reference Peraino2005), what Taylor's interdisciplinary thesis contributes to current scholarship is less of the ‘scavenger’ rigour promised in the Introduction – ‘participation observation in hundreds of local and international queer events’ and ‘hundreds of in situ ethnographic conversations’ (p. 4) – but more of what the late Sheila Whiteley has identified in her endorsement on the back cover as ‘the production and maintenance of queer social relations’. This observation is particularly stark, especially with how the author situates her empirical information against the political turmoil and institutional consolidation of queer activisms in France, Germany, the UK and the United States over the course of the 20th century. Despite it being, in Taylor's own words, a ‘rather long flight from Australia’ (p. 199), Europe continues to produce and maintain a socio-musical influence over its diaspora residing in the South Pacific. Perceived as a part of a global genealogy, the musical styles and rhetorics delineated by Taylor – genderfuck, queercore, riot grrrl, etc. – represent a form of translocal aesthetics, or what I call a trans-aesthetics between an epistemological centre and an appropriating periphery.

Taylor's exposition of the queer movement's historical and political trajectories is comprehensive, and her strategy to situate three Brisbanian bands within the framework of a translocal scenescape instead of a subcultural community is empirically and historically informed. However, this approach towards interpreting music's role in representing and signalling campiness or rebellion becomes Eurocentric, and readers would have to make their own connections as to how the subversive genres of drag, punk and reggae travelled materially and virtually to Brisbane. Greater significance could be placed on the history and politics of the local Brisbanian queer scene, which includes stellar acts ranging from the New Romantic trio Zhian and the MegaMen in the 1980s to the alternative country folk group Kristy Apps and the Shotgun Shirleys performing nationwide and to suburbanites alike today.

By organising the book's contents into two chapters of theoretical histories, followed by six chapters of representative praxis, Taylor's ethnographic interviews in the latter half seem to mirror a musical history that occurred elsewhere. Based on the discourse of settler colonialism, the artistry of the Brisbanian musicians becomes compromised as a ‘replay’ of queer European politics. Otherwise, Taylor has furnished us with meticulous semiotic analyses of the vulgar and grotesque lyrics and images produced by a queer punk band, the creative programming of Anglophone songs covered by cross-dressing and lip-syncing artistes, as well as the collective esprit de corps of an all-lesbian and all-white reggae ensemble. What appear more peculiar and poignant than the homonormative narratives are the occasional discords and misjudgements among the band members. Two instances of audiences walking out on the Twang Gang and Anal Traffic for being heteronormative (p. 107) and paedophilic (p. 145), respectively, afford readers the opportunity to think sociologically and theoretically about the reception and appreciation of what Harris Berger (Reference Berger2010) calls expressive stances.

Stance might then be a more relevant concept than Will Straw's ‘interactive’ scene (Reference Straw2014), because the musical aesthetics the Brisbanian queers used to identify as well as differentiate themselves could be systematically classified. Sociopolitical analyses, such as those on Chinese rock and Turkish arabesk by Andrew Jones (Reference Jones1992) and Martin Stokes (Reference Stokes1992), respectively, have revealed musical genre and political ideology to be metonymic. That is, they demonstrate what Richard Middleton (Reference Middleton1990) has deemed as structural homologies. The rich interview data amassed by Taylor would be sociologically effective for the purpose of discerning the political stance, queer or otherwise, of these Brisbanian musicians. For example, the agency of ‘an Indigenous woman’ doing drag in the Twang Gang (p. 105) or Bertha Control's composition of an original song entitled ‘Reconciliation’ that condemns the invasion of Sahul by the British on 26 January 1788 (p. 169) could open up points of discussion around postcolonial attitudes towards Australian aboriginal trans-aesthetics.

Finally, Taylor's picturesque descriptions of queer Brisbane and Berlin in the penultimate chapter ought to be introduced much earlier in the book. This would provide readers unfamiliar with the mainstream and underground club cultures in Brisbane or Berlin (or for that matter London or Paris) a clearer sense of the scene. Urban dwellers from these cities on the other hand might feel an internalised form of reverse exoticism of an otherwise everyday phenomenon, given that Taylor's informants about this ‘curious city’ are mostly Australian or Anglophone expatriates. At times the book seems to make essentialist associations – Brazilian drug user, Russian bouncers, South Asian businessman, Latina@ impersonator of Frida Kahlo, and Turkish migrants (pp. 204, 207, 212–13) – which are not helpful and may border on unconscious racism. As the Alice Goffman controversy reminds us, the contention that ethnography can sometimes expose more of our habitus as ethnographers than the cultural practices in the field seems to gain veracity. Here lie the fortes and limits of this monograph written from an ‘insider’ perspective; that readers who are ‘outsiders’ – and that is the majority of us – will need to negotiate these intimate revelations of queer musicking lives with a critical empathy.