“…was only the second girl I interviewed during my research. Like me, she felt troubled about the male-dominated gender dynamics in the punk subculture, a subculture that portrays itself as being egalitarian, and even feminist, but is actually far from being either. Yet, like me, she had found that this same sub-culture gave her a place to be assertive and aggressive, to express herself in less “feminine” ways than other girls. It is this paradox that led me to this research: on the one hand, punk gave us both a place to protest all manner of constraints; on the other, the subculture put many of the same pressures on us as girls as did the mainstream culture we strove to oppose.”
“Punk girls struggle to construct their gender within the confines of a highly male-dominated and therefore “masculinist” context. The punk subculture highly valorises the norms of adolescent masculinity, celebrating displays of toughness, coolness, rebelliousness, and aggressiveness. Girls are present in the subculture, but the masculinity of its norms problematizes their participation. Thus, gender is problematic for punk girls in a way that it is not for punk guys, because punk girls must accommodate female gender within sub cultural identities that are deliberately coded as male.”
-Lauraine Leblanc. 1999. Pretty in Punk: Girl's gender resistance in a boy's subculture. Rutgers University Press
By Sarah Gill
