punk

Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture
by Lauraine Leblanc
New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
2008

from p2 (this comes as part of the story of how the author was expelled from high school for dressing as a punk): "Even more distinctly, I remember how I felt: bewildered, frustrated, angry, powerless. It was like a bad anxiety dream, the kind where you talk or scream but no sound comes out. Of course, in reality, I was talking out loud. But still no one heard me."

from p4: "It seemed at the time that everyone had a theory about who I was, what I was doing, and what I was declaring, and people often "shared" these with me, in a most unpleasant and confrontational manner. No one ever asked me, or really listened to what I was saying. I was dying (dyeing?) to tell people what was on my mind. My adoption of the punk style was an attempt at communicating what I thought and felt about nuclear war, sex, religion, language, politics, racism, classism, or any other topic, but no one wanted to hear it. I was a fifteen-year-old girl challenging the entire world on a number of fronts, but no one cared to listen."

from p44: "Given the complexity and ambiguity of the stylistic minutiae of punk style and politics, its meanings varied with each reading; whereas experienced punks could decipher the message, the uninitiated may have received quite an unintended impression."

from pp46-47: "However, the success of early female punk performers' attempts to desexualize the clothes they wore in such a parodic fashion is debatable. Whereas punk women intended to present these garments in such a way as to discredit their effect as fetishistic, sexually titillating items, the overriding cultural view of women as sex objects may have worked at cross-purposes with their intent... While striving to counter stereotypes of women in rock, punk women were repeatedly described as sluts, perverts, whores, and junkies by those outside the subculture."

from p54: "This punk anarchism was not based primarilyupon textual sources, but rather on a grassroots interpretation of antiauthoritarianism and personal responsibility. Punk anarchism stressed not revolution, but education towards liberation, primarily through personal choice and responsibility, leading to an ethic of individualism."

These quotes, taken together, reveal an interesting problem. On the one hand, there is the proseletyzing tendency of punk: they intend to make others see the error of their ways (the error of being bound by socially acceptable horizons of possibility, standards of _____, etc.). They do this through parody of many of these standards. But somehow nobody gets the joke! In other words, this is just another example of how very difficult it is to change people's worldviews, their ways of seeing the world.

Alternatively, one can take punk's aims to be different. It doesn't aim to convert everyone - just those who have ears that listen and eyes that see. And for those people it provides another, more supportive world than the mainstream. It gives them a place where there are others like them.

(You can see many parallels to all this in Revolutionary Road, in which the neighbors, rather than being shocked into seeing their world / worldview differently by the Wheelers' unusual plan, dismiss it as variously crazy, immature, impractical, etc.)