#this particular essay is the best one i've found re: trans kurt

[ashtrayfloors]

EPISODE TWO KURT’S BRAIN - INTERIOR

Kurt’s obsession with fashion went back a long way. It was part of a more general appreciation of beautiful and material things, which he’d had since he was a child.

Kurt suspected that this early aesthetic education was responsible for the direction of his own tastes. Things were beautiful to him in inverse proportion to their accessibility: a logic which struck him as childish for its fetishisation of impotence. But the 90s were about not growing up. The pages of the music and celebrity magazines that didn’t have Kurt’s face on them were filled with images of manufactured adolescence: teeny bopper twinks dressed in virginal white, A-listers doused with slime in studios resembling kindergartens, and an ageing parade of actors fresh out of high school drag.

He might seem like a kid to an industry obsessed with youth and its prophecies, but he was a grown up with a kid of his own. Even in earlier relationships he’d wanted the house with the picket fence. Tobi Vail used to say it was because of his parents’ divorce; they’d get into screaming arguments about his attachment to what she called the ‘bourgeois and patriarchal trap of success’. Kurt was hurt, but he did agree that he wanted these things as signs that he had made it. Not to the American dream that Vail despised him for, but to some indefinable sense of a future, and this was the only one he could imagine.

Such feelings were deeply unfashionable, and got in the way of the punk recklessness that had first attracted Vail, and which she held at arms’ length, an accessory to complete her image. Not that he minded them not interrogating these desires together. Kurt couldn’t put it more eloquently than this, but it felt both good and bad to dangle from her arm. To be used the way a man might use a beautiful woman. No one had read any Judith Butler yet, so Kurt could only say: Tobi’s riot grrl feminism made him feel like a woman, but it also made him know he wasn’t one. He was part of a group of people who obstructed people like Tobi, who’s desires stood in the way of her liberation. These wants stood for his involvement in patriarchy; women only wanted these things because men wanted them for them.

But Kurt didn’t care, he dreamed of being turned into an image, into an adornment for the grrls, the gyrls, the gworls of the future. He dreamt that his name would become a secret call passed between women in chokers at parties in lofts and warehouses in metropolitan areas of the United States. He dreamt of a teenage starlet gaining fame in a tv show where she wore his dirty bob for an audience too young to remember his music. He dreamt of the expansion of the internet and forums on which users would share photos of him and argue about what he wore and what he said.

He didn’t tell anyone these dreams. Unlike the house and family, these were just for him.

—Francis Whorrall-Campbell, from "[Digital Poetics 4.7] A Fragment on Kurt Cobain’s Transgender Ideas from ‘In Utero’" (The Hythe)

#quotations #francis whorral campbell #kurt cobain #alternative history #trans stuff #recently read #i was reading up on the 'was kurt a trans girl' 'controversy' recently #and like honestly i can see why people say he was #or if not a trans woman then nonbinary #what's weird to me is people getting so angry that anyone suggests it as a possibility #because like obviously we don't know for sure #and we never will #but how does someone headcanoning kurdt as transfem hurt anyone? #it does not! #also i can 1000% guarantee that if kurt were still alive - even if he was not trans/not out as trans - there is no way he would be upset #about people speculating about it #he'd probably be flattered! #ne way #this particular essay is the best one i've found re: trans kurt