Punk and Its Afterlives (Volume 31) (Social Text)

This issue follows the punk movement’s lingering aftereffects, investigating its unruly profligacy of meanings within music and popular culture and outside and beyond genre. The contributors track punk’s affect and aesthetics across media and geography from the 1970s to the present, seeking to disrupt conventional linear narratives of punk’s development. This collection participates in a growing body of literature focusing on the stories and creative articulations of punk by women, people of color, and queer individuals. The contributors reconsider the presence of masculinity in emo; posit a queer minstrelsy underlying the homophobia in 1980s hardcore punk; analyze the “shadow feminism” within the screams of Rhoda Dakar, Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, and Janelle Monáe; and confront the relationship of faith, feminism, and aesthetics in Pussy Riot’s work. Other essays offer a realignment of punk’s Los Angeles–New York–London axis by investigating South Tejas punk bands and disentangling punk’s thorny connections to ska, dub, dubstep, and pop.

Jayna Brown is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University. Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.