TOW #26 - Serving Goffman by PWR BTTM

                Ben ‘Bean’ Hopkins and Liv Bruce are the singers, guitarists, songwriters, and drummers to the garage punk band PWR BTTM. They met in college at a party for their school’s queer association and immediately hit it off. They bonded over their love of punk music and overall queerness. In 2015, the band came out with an album titled, Ugly Cherries. All of the songs written on this album are about Ben and Liv’s personal struggles with their own gender-identities and a few about their sexualities.

                Ben identifies as queer male. He uses he/him/his pronouns and sometimes dresses in really cheap drag during their shows. Liv identifies as genderqueer. They use they/them/their pronouns and has been taking estrogen for a little over a year. The song ‘Serving Goffman’ on their album Ugly Cherries, was written around the time Liv first started identifying as genderqueer. Liv titled the song after Erving Goffman, a sociologist and author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he theorizes that when an individual comes in contact with another person they will try and control the impression that the other person will form by either altering their appearance or their manner. The song very heavily refers to gender expression, ‘I held my breath in a suit and tie/Because I didn’t know I could fightback/I want to put the whole world in drag/But I’m starting to realize it’s already like that’.

                Though Liv primarily wrote this song about themself, they didn’t want their experience to be the main message that their fans got from the song. In an interview Liv commented on the meaning of the song saying, “It was like, I don’t know what I am, but it’s not what people are calling me. It’s not what people are seeing me as. It’s not the way I’m presenting myself every day. I didn’t know what was going on with my gender, and I didn’t feel like I could until I did some kind of change”. Liv wanted this song to inspire the band’s listeners to not be afraid to question their gender-identity and then experiment with pronouns and style until they found what felt right.

                As someone who is currently going through a gender-identity journey, I can say that I’m constantly feeling like maybe I shouldn’t be questioning myself , maybe this is just a phase I’m going through but when I hear this song, it reminds me that it’s okay that I’m question myself and who am I.