It’s not every day you see a slide of Gerard Way captioned with the word “cunttttt” at an academic conference. 

But EmoCon 2026, also called “A Conference … But It’s Midwest(ern) Emo,” was not your average scholastic event. Convened at Washington University this April, it was the first-ever academic conference devoted solely to emo studies. Around 70 attendees showed up in person while another 100 or so tuned in online, jumping from Zoom room to Zoom room to watch presentations with titles like “There’s No ‘I’ in Team: Agency and Individualism over Three Decades of Emo Music” and “I’m Not Okay-fabe: The Complex Position of Audience in My Chemical Romance’s ‘Long Live’ Tour.”

You can’t write titles like that without colorful PowerPoints to back them up.

Even through a laptop screen, the excitement was undeniable — especially as Steve Lamos, drummer for American Football and Associate Professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, delivered his opening keynote. His talk (about writing with instead of about the embodied experience of revisiting nostalgic music) felt like a call to be more mindful when re-engage with the music from our pasts. That’s a tall order, considering how effectively our nostalgia has already been commodified.

As an academic conference, EmoCon feels like an antidote to that kind of blind consumerism. Each of its presentations interrogated the genre’s influences and impact, illuminating the cultural, political, and societal context that made the movement so big in the first place. Appropriately enough, co-organizers Varun Chandrasekhar and Patrick Mitchell came up with the idea at another academic convention in Minneapolis in 2023, where Patrick was presenting a paper about misogyny in emo. A couple years later, when a funding opportunity emerged, Patrick sent Varun a text: “Hey, is this the year?” And thus, EmoCon was born.

I chatted with Varun and Patrick after the con to discuss how it went, why they want to start an emo scholars association, and how the genre has evolved over time.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and condensed for length.

You mentioned at EmoCon that there’s little scholarship on emo music. Why is that the case?

Varun: I think it’s a number of things. Emo is often viewed as sort of youthful, adolescent music, so you need some sort of nostalgia or fondness to really write about it. To a degree, you’re waiting for that generation of kids to mature and get to the point where they have PhDs and professorships. But I think the problem also reinforces itself: there is no emo studies scholarship, so I don’t know if you should write a dissertation about emo. Is there going to be enough literature? Would you get a job? 

In music studies and academia more broadly, I also think there’s a certain difficulty in talking about the normative hegemon, straight white men. To do so from a critical perspective elides some people at times: how do you talk about whiteness? How do you talk about straightness? How do you talk about masculinity? 

Patrick: The same kind of thing happened with riot grrrl. There was very little scholarship on riot grrrl in the ’90s, and then in the 2000s, there's all these dissertations because all the riot grrrls were finishing up their PhDs. 

It’s also difficult to theorize the current moment. I think now, with a little bit more distance from the 2000s, we can come back to it with a critical lens. But that doesn’t mean there wasn't any emo scholarship in the 2000s. Sarah F. Williams published an article on emo and masculinity in 2007, which means it was probably written by 2005, 2006, during the peak of the genre. 

You mentioned at EmoCon that you’re working on starting an emo scholars association. Why is it important to have something like that?

Varun: I think the reason it’s important to have something like this is because we had so many people come out. Another part of it, without any disrespect to the Punk Scholars Network (a big network for punk scholarship that’s primarily based in the U.K. but has a U.S. chapter) is that they don’t really care about emo that much. I could be putting words into their mouths, but I think they want to distance themselves. They want to be part of the subcultural as much as possible, whereas emo has this tension between being popular and punk — the “pop punk” of it all. 

There really isn’t even much work about MCR, and they are maybe the most popular band of the 2000s in the rock genre. The Strokes, Linkin Park, Foo Fighters maybe are bigger than them…

Patrick: You’re in the ’90s now. I mean, I 100% agree.

Varun: If scholars are all about the gaps in the literature, that seems like a pretty big one.

No kidding.

Patrick: In the two spheres of music studies, just to be super reductive, there's those who focus on popular music and those who focus on punk music or subcultural music. Emo has a foot in both camps, which I think has made it under-studied in punk music scholarship and under-studied in popular music scholarship. And there’s a gendered element, too, where there’s been a perceived “cringey” element to studying music with a very devoted female fan base. That’s led to the historic delegitimization of any music that women like. 

Speaking of MCR, we’re several waves into emo now, so it feels self-defeating to try and treat it as a static thing. Still, the bands most associated with emo are the ones that, if you brought them up somewhere like r/Emo, they’d tell you “That’s not emo.” So how do you define emo?

Varun: There’s an article by Matthew Carrillo-Vincent, “Wallflower Masculinities,” where he describes emo as a sort of double periphery. On one hand, it embodies this sort of normative masculinity of being an upper-middle class white kid in the suburbs, but it also embraces this sort of machismo of hardcore masculinity, like, “I'm gonna run into the pit, I'm gonna push someone around.” He defines emo as sort of the tension between these two — the ways in which that normative masculinity and that hardcore masculinity both critique and complement each other.

And then on top of that, I would think there's something to do with, like, the emo voice — that whiny, nasally quality. There's some relationship to the hardcore tradition, a sort of punk/, DIY ethos. But even there, you're starting to get really deep into “no true Scotsman.” 

We’ve talked about pop punk and the tension between its commercial success and subcultural roots. Especially this year, I’ve seen discussions about whether certain pop punk bands are doing enough to meet the political moment. I’m thinking, for example, about the discourse around Green Day’s Super Bowl performance in February. What’s your take on the social contract between these bands and their fans? Are they living up to it?

Patrick: I’m thinking of [Sellout author and music journalist] Dan Ozzi’s closing keynote, when he spoke about these three consequential bands for him and for emo. When Jawbreaker sold out, there was more of a direct financial relationship between fans and the band. Fans felt like there were investors in the group, so when the bands did something that they didn't agree with, they felt that was some sort of sin against the fan base.

But Ozzi also talked about how today, when a punk band gets a Taco Bell deal, fans don't care. They're happy that the group is making money off of the system that they're also critiquing. I would also love for you to hear Varun talk about his top line from the article that he published last year.

Varun: I also think it depends on what is considered rebellious — what is considered “against the man.” There’s been this turn in scholarship toward “affect theory,” which argues that feelings themselves are borne out of political situations. To feel a specific way is political, and to channel those feelings into an aesthetic object is then, inherently, a political act. 

Obviously, the argument against it is, “Yeah, but politics are politics.” At the end of the day, there is skin in the game, and how you feel is oftentimes immaterial to that. Still, even at its most politically charged or most apolitical, the feeling of “something is wrong” animates a lot of the discussions in both pop punk and emo. I tend to believe that that in itself is, if not political, at least the first step towards a true politick. 

I can see that.

Varun: You know, it’s interesting. I saw recently that the emo band Dikembe, a fourth wave revival band that I really like, gave an interview where they were talking about how, about a year and a half ago, somebody reached out and said, “Hey, there's this candidate. He's a city councilman in New York and wants to come to your show.” They go meet him. He's a nice guy. And then a couple of months later, they realize, “Oh, it's Zohran Mamdani.” 

First off, insane pull by Zohran. I did not know he would like Dikembe. But this idea where I can totally understand Zohran Mamdani listening to MCR saying, “man, the world kind of sucks,” and also now being like, the forefront of like, this American, like, Democratic Socialist, progressive left. Is that a product of feelings, or is it a product of politick? And to what extent are they overlapped?

That Zohran. He always makes me proud to be a New Yorker. To go a bit deeper, how would you describe emo's evolving relationship with politics? I think a lot of casual observers probably think it’s pretty myopic and self centered, but as many of the EmoCon talks addressed, politics, and especially 9/11, loom really large. 

Patrick: I think there's a more direct line being drawn now, especially with the contextualization of 9/11. The culture war was incredibly crucial to the Bush Administration selling the necessity of the invasion of Iraq. Quickly, the conversation moved away from, “Well, we don't want another attack on military centers and urban centers,” to, “Well, they're coming for your suburbs.” 

It was like this Cold War-esque fear that re-established the idea of the American way of life: the suburban, white nuclear family is this ideal that needs to be protected. Emo, in a lot of ways, poked that balloon. 

One of the more salient things that emo does, or did, politically, was critique this idea that the suburbs were an ideal place to live, and that the nuclear family is this ideal social network. Suburban culture is incredibly socially isolating. It rewards assimilation, and when one does not assimilate, they are ostracized and seen as a problem child or a troubled youth. So I think with hindsight, we can see that emo was making a political gesture.

Varun: Even normativity is, itself, inherently political. Like, if this is a misogynistic worldview built out of a patriarchal society, that is political. There is no art that doesn't have any politics to it. Recently, you've started seeing, perhaps for obvious reasons, a more politicized, angry base. Hot Mulligan was saying “fuck ICE” at, like, every show on their most recent tour. 

I think a lot of what is animating the fourth wave is an example of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” which she defines as an attachment that you know will cause you suffering. In this case, there’s attachment to the phantom nature of the good life — this idea that if you go to college, you marry young, you have a good job, you work hard, you'll see your wealth continuously increase. In the wake of things like the war on terror, the decline of healthcare, the student loan industry, you get this feeling that the world doesn't really add up to anything in the way that it used to. If you are really upset about this, then it's actually animated by some deeply political concerns. That’s what I get into in my article.

Looking back on your first EmoCon, and as you work on planning the next one, what makes you most proud of what you’ve achieved?

Patrick: It was just such an awesome weekend. Before the conference, Varun was like, “This is going to be the busiest day of our lives.” And it was. I couldn't really enjoy it in the moment, but on the drive back, it was all hitting me — not only from an academic perspective, the incredible caliber of work, but also the community that we made. Selfishly, I wish I could have talked to Steve Lamos and Dan Ozzi more, but they were just so friendly to everyone. There was just something poetic, too, about ending EmoCon with Varun’s band playing two hours of emo hits and everyone singing along. It was really a cinematic moment that encapsulated how beautiful it all was: 70 strangers who had never met before, all bonding over their commitment to academic work and also the love of the music and the study of the music.

Varun: The academy, for a number of reasons, can be a sort of hostile place where even though community building is a thing, it's always running up against a sort of scarcity of resources. And similarly, this sort of emo, DIY aesthetic is often a direct challenge to that sort of anti-communalism and hyper-individualism. A lot of what we were really trying to do is create a space in the academy that loves you the way emo loves you — to do justice to this music that means so much to people.

Want to read more about EmoCon 2026? Check out the Emo(Con) diaries, published by Swim Into the Sound.