When I grow up, I want to be nothing at all : opacity, friction, refusal, and third-wave emo performances of nonbinary

Emo is a capacious and porous term, simultaneously referring to a rock music subgenre, a set of aesthetic practices, a series of affects, a much-maligned community, and all the intersections in between. Third-wave emo, its most mainstream iteration, is particularly marked by its relation to performances of gendered failure. This article attends to the work of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, two of third-wave emo’s most commercially successful bands, and how they engage in performances of nonbinary. Through embracing the frictions produced by failure, maladjustment, opacity, ambiguity, and refusal, this article argues that My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy stage a nonbinarity otherwise, one that circulates through circuits of shared recognition, but is not reducible to or exceeds shared identity. Staging nonbinary as such thus rehearses what Marquis Bey describes as nonbinary’s ‘different kind of encounter’ (2021) in service of materializing different, expansive modes of liveability in the face of gendered hegemony.