On New Year’s Eve in Japan, a cherished family tradition unfolds as loved ones gather around the television to watch the annual broadcast of Kōhaku Uta Gassen [New Year’s Songfest, hereafter Kōhaku]. Meanwhile, a dynamic kinship of queers, queens, and those in-between convene to stage their own version of this year-end extravaganza. Since its inception in 1951, Kōhaku has become deeply ingrained in Japanese culture, evolving into a national custom that prompts reflection of the past year through popular songs. Its parodical counterpart, Josō Kōhaku [Cross-Dressing Kōhaku], showcases queer interpretations of these songs, featuring impersonations of various popular musicians, from emerging J-pop stars to classic rock bands and enka singers. I frame these impressions as monomane – the Japanese art form of embodied mimicry. Drawing from fieldwork conducted at Jōso Kōhaku shows in Tokyo and Kyoto, I explore how monomane performances reconfigure popular songs as collective memories queered through affective excess (Muñoz 2009). By adopting this culturally specific concept, I examine the intricate interplay between parody, song, and the body, moving beyond EuroAmerican discourses on drag and performativity. My analysis is informed by the works of Mitsuhashi Junko (2008; 2022), who proposes an alternative framework to Western LGBTQIA+ paradigms using the term seibetsu ekkyōsha [gender border-crosser], which I translate as Trans*gresser. Through an examination of Trans*gressers’ monomane performances, I illustrate how they transcend boundaries of identity, ideology, and idolization, offering glimpses into a realm where conventional discourses on gender and sexuality become obsolete.

The Eurovision Song Contest is a televised musical spectacle that is often referred to as the “gay Olympics” for its campy nature and championing of global queer visibility (Baker, 2017). Songs from the Contest’s nearly 70-year history have long been embedded within the queer European cultural milieu and have soundtracked queer nightlife spaces and Pride events across Europe, allowing people to embody the Contest’s queer resonances. Drawing from fieldwork conducted at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden, I argue that nightlife events at and/or dedicated to Eurovision, particularly the Euroclub, effectively function as queer diasporic spaces, comprising those who travel across Europe’s literal and figurative borders in order to safely express their queer identities (Gopinath, 1996; Patton and Sánchez-Eppler, 2000). The Euroclub gives fans an opportunity to engage with Eurovision’s illusory, neoliberal ethos of a rainbow Europe (Ayoub & Paternotte, 2014), therefore embracing a sense of escapism from Eurovision’s fraught political realities. The Euroclub is also a space wherein certain national, class, gender, and racial identities become privileged over others, complicating the Contest’s insistence that Europe is “united by music.” Moreover, since Malmö is home to Scandinavia’s largest Palestinian refugee community, these tensions over identity and belonging were heightened amid protests against Israel’s participation in the Contest. Ultimately, considering the relationship between Eurovision and nightlife draws us toward an understanding of how diasporic and transnational sexual minorities engage Europeanness in real time through acts of collective musicking, begging the question: who gets to escape in these politically-charged spaces?

The immaterial traces that compose nightlife research are often fragments of memory that escape the archive’s pathological impulse towards presupposed truth, object(ivity), and fidelity to ethnography’s empiricist bends (Derrida 1995). Among trans women/femmes in Mexico, “de mujer” (women’s) tags the end of actions, objects, and sensations to reclaim transfemininity in the face of discrimination, femicide, and state violence. I contend that archivos de mujer (women’s archives) challenge ethnographic narratives that flatten transfemininity—as experience, collective affect, and theoretical gesture—into an object of study, thus rendering transfeminine political and musical social praxis static. Drawing from the sensorial, I argue that archivos de mujer open up rather than foreclose nightlife ethnography’s epistemological import. Methodologically driven by sensing excess, I offer a re-feeling of fieldwork conducted in Mexico City’s transcuir (trans and queer), anarchist, and warehouse scenes. These scenes highlight the minor, the discarded, and the forsaken from the ethnographic present by focusing on gossip, hangovers, and knockoffs sold in the undercommons of transfemininity. This reflexive work responds to concerns about the academic institutionalization of transfeminine creative practice and overall anarchist politics of my interlocutors by centering the forms of solidarity that transcuirs make for one another. Sensing excess in transcuir nightlife spaces, then, affords the necessary thinking otherwise on the peripheries of ethnography’s temporal form. With this paper I aim to demonstrate how archivos de mujer point to alternative and reflexive methods through radical forms of vulnerability, which in turn highlight my interlocutors’ agency and praxis.

Discussant following panel presentations.