This article explores the potentials and perils of reading queerness in relation to cultural products, performances, and places outside the site of the theory’s genesis. Beginning with an examination of audiovisual and discursive transgressions in the works of post-Soviet Ukrainian band Kamon!!!, putatively “stylistic” elements are shown as intimately related to a political sociocultural realm. This move to the political, and to queer politics, necessitates an interrogation of the politics of queerness, and the risks of intellectual colonialism that perpetuates cultural hierarchies and stereotypes (the “backward,” pragmatic East versus the fluid, utopian West). Approaching queer theory through the lens of performativity—a textual assimilation which “queers” the other—the dynamics of musical notation and transcription are engaged in order to highlight the possible asymmetries engendered via transcultural queering, suggesting that only through mutually transformative dialog can queerness fulfill its liberatory potential.