‘Refusing to Be a Man’: Gender, feminism and queer identity in the punk culture

Abstract Since its inception, transgressing heteronormative preconceptions of gender and sexuality a reaction to the prevalent ‘rock machismo’ of the 1970s, has been an important part of punk’s subversive repertoire. A number of first-wave punk artists deliberately blurred gender boundaries and toyed with signifiers pertaining to nonmainstream gender identities and sexual ‘perversion’ (consider, in this context, the common use of BDSM paraphernalia in early punk’s iconography). These transgressions had profound implications. As music journalist Lucy O’Brien puts it, ‘To find fresh meanings as a woman it was necessary to overturn the pastel shades of post-60s femininity and make an overt statement on a newly emerging, more aggressive understanding of female sexuality. Punk provided the perfect opportunity’. In the early 1990s, the feminist US punk rock group Bikini Kill, who spearheaded the riot grrrl movement, presented an assertive, unapologetic view of femininity, feminism and female sexuality, aggressively challenging male dominance in the punk milieu, where they were met sometimes with acceptance, sometimes with suspicion, and sometimes with open hostility. These developments notwithstanding, the anarchist periodical Rolling Thunder observes that ‘The average punk show is more dominated by patriarchy than a college class room’, and the transgender punk activist Alyssa Kai states, ‘[…] in reality, men run the scene, men are the scene, and men always have been and probably always will be at the center of the scene’. In other words, there is a gaping discrepancy within punk culture between egalitarian expectations, some of which verge on utopianism, and reality. ‘I think to anyone who is already slightly involved in punk and hardcore, it goes without saying that there is sexism in it’, says punk fan Lucy Hodges. Quite the same is true for homophobia.