Queer punx: young women in the Newcastle hardcore space

Abstract

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.

‘I Thought I'd Kill Myself When I Grew Up’: Queer Childhood Narratives in Kazakhstan

“…The narrative of the participant above features her finding her belonging in Kazakhstani punk subculture. The connection between queer and punk has been previously discussed in many studies, predominantly originating from the Global North (for example, Halberstam, 2003;Sharp & Nilan, 2015). Halberstam (2003) points out that punk can be seen as creating its own community through exclusion from and rejection of dominant societal norms.…”

DIY, fanzines and ecofeminism in the Global South: ‘This city is my sister’

“…If the hegemonic masculine view seeks man's pleasure, a queer view questions any expression taken as 'normal' and emphasises the transformability of identities. Sharp and Nilan (2015) analyse queer as an umbrella term for LGBTQI+ minorities to produce counter-spaces of existence and resistance. Thus, artistic interventions are made in the geographies and at the heart of the experiences of the disenfranchised and dispossessed to subvert homogenous stigmatising narratives and achieve new heights of decolonised social and spatial justice (Kilomba, 2020).…”

Punk is just a state of mind: Exploring what punk means to older punk women

“…In addition to scholarly work analysing punk and gender there has been a significant body of literature more recently which explores gender and sexuality within punk (Sharp, 2019; Sharp & Nilan, 2015, 2017). Despite this, there remains a lack of literature on ‘post-youth’ punk women, with research focusing predominantly on punk girls/women in their teenage years or twenties.…”