Since punk emerged in the 1970s as a music genre and subculture it has gained significant academic attention. Punk as a concept now alludes to specific places or scenes, and has been established as a general anti-establishment attitude, as well as an anti-consumerist disposition, with a need to do-it-yourself (DIY). Drawing upon ethnographic and interview data from the east coast of Australia, this article analyses struggles that occur within punk spaces where women and queer identifying punks negotiate historically established male dominance. Punk scenes have the general illusio of being resistant to dominant norms and practices, which is attractive to individuals who feel like outsiders. Yet through symbolic violence, systematic oppression can be perpetrated against those who do not invoke idealised forms of masculinity or femininity. Using the affective transference of gendered norms in punk spaces, we find struggles that are often homogenised in punk research which attends critically to subcultural themes of collectivism and resistance. By unpacking these themes, this article puts forth the concepts of reflexive complicity – where men and women reproduce inequality in punk spaces – and defiance labour – moments of overt challenge to symbolic violence within punk spaces and scenes.
This article investigates the 'becoming' of queer female punx in the contemporary hardcore scene in a regional Australian city. Twelve young women aged 20-30 years were interviewed about their experiences of queer identity. They emphasized their involvement in the music scene as a key catalyst for the development of a queer punk identity even though the local hardcore scene is male-dominated and homosocial. We find that these young female queer punx assert their identity through collectively summoning and synthesizing the counternormative resources of both queer and punk Do It Yourself (DIY) to configure the space of hardcore differently. Our findings confirm the durability of a playful, subversive punk ethos in constituting challenges to the normative.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.