Punk Identities, Punk Utopias (Book)

Global Punk and Media

This new volume in the acclaimed Global Punk series extends the critical enquiry to reflect broader social, political and technological concerns impacting punk scenes around the world, with international contributors, ranging through topics from digital technology and new media to gender, ethnicity, identity and representation. 50 b/w photographs.

Category: Music
Series: Global Punk

Edition

Punk Identities, Punk Utopias: Global Punk and Media seeks to unpack and illuminate punk as a trajectory of ‘timelesness…as a set of diverse but confluent values and appropriations’ that have both reflected and informed an increasingly complex, indefinable social, political and economic setting. Whereas the first two volumes in the series were broadly focused on local punk ‘scenes’ in a disparate range of countries and regions around the world, Punk Identities, Punk Utopias extends that critical enquiry to reflect broader social, political and technological concerns impacting punk scenes around the world, from digital technology and new media to gender, ethnicity, identity and representation. This new volume therefore draws upon the interdisciplinary areas of cultural studies, musicology and social sciences to present an edited text on the notion of identities, ideologies and cultural discourse surrounding contemporary global punk scenes. It is hoped that the books in the Global Punk series will add to the academic discussion of contemporary popular culture, particularly in relation to punk and the critical understanding of transnational and cross-cultural dialogue.

Punk is a global phenomenon and the Global Punk series aims to reflect contemporary scenes around the world since the millennium. Punk and its subsequent variants, from hardcore to post-punk, have always crossed borders and become assimilated within countercultural practices with local, national and regional variations.

Produced in collaboration between the Punk Scholars Network and Intellect Books, the Global Punk book series focuses on the development of contemporary global punk (c. 2000 onwards), reflecting upon its origins, aesthetics, identity, legacy, membership and circulation. Critical approaches draw upon the interdisciplinary areas of (among others) cultural studies, art and design, sociology, musicology and social sciences in order to develop a broad and inclusive picture of punk and punk-inspired subcultural developments around the globe. The series adopts an essentially analytical perspective, raising questions about the dissemination of punk scenes and subcultures and their form, structure and contemporary cultural significance in the daily lives of an increasing number of people around the world.

This book has a genuine crossover appealed. It will be a key resource for established academics, postdoctoral researchers and Ph.D. students, as well as being suitable for adoption as an undergraduate student textbook. Suitable courses will include those in the fields of popular music, youth culture, sociology, urban/cultural geography, political history, heritage studies, media and cultural studies.

Matt Grimes is a senior lecturer and researcher in music industries and radio at Birmingham City University’s School of Media.

Russ Bestley is reader in graphic design at London College of Communication.

Mike Dines is a lecturer of music at Middlesex University.

Alastair Gordon is a senior lecturer of media and communication at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Paula Guerra is professor of sociology at the University of Porto.

 

Introduction

 Russ Bestley, Mike Dines, Matt Grimes and Paula Guerra

 

  1. From Belfast with love: The women and female presenting punks of Northern Ireland and  

      their ‘subculture’

      Francis Stewart

  1. The power of memory: Gender inequality among the Berlin psychobilly scene

      Matthew D. Newsom

  1. Trans-Punk: DIY identities and new modes of subjectivity

      Gareth Schott 

  1. Brazilian riot grrrls: History, reflections and feminist empowerment in girls

      rock camps

      Gabriela Cleveston Gelain and Mike Dines

  1. Not just Riot Grrrls! Punk rock feminism in the Philippines

      Monica Schoop

6.   Not just boys’ fun: Punks, pariah femininities, and challenges to gender hegemony

      Steve Moog

  1. Say a spell: Summoning the ghosts of post-punk Melbourne

      Donna McRae and Alexia Kannas

  1. Keeping Japanese punk film (A)LIVE: Shôzin Fukui’s concert-screening hybridity and

       Japanese live house culture

       Mark Player

  1. ‘Back from the Grave’: Retro style and cultural memory in the Tokyo garage rock scene

      José Neglia

  1. The punks, the web, local concerns and global appeal: Cultural hybridity in Turkish

          hardcore punk

      Lyndon C. S. Way and Dylan Wallace

  1. Love at first sip? When Finnish hardcore punk met alcohol

        Lasse Ullvén

  1. Punk is punk but by no means punk: Definition, genre evasion and the quest for an

          authentic voice in contemporary Russia

          Yngvar Bordewich Steinholt    

 

'An excellent collection of articles that contribute to this growing range of new perspectives on punk around the globe. The collection engages with some of the more contemporary and urgent social and political issues researched through a lens of punk counter culture, offering new insights into the ways in which punk endures as a platform for empowering marginal and marginalized identities. The articles in this volume offer some new interpretations of how punk subculture intersects with more nuanced questions about gender, feminism, ethnicity and specific national scenes and examines, in some instances, how these emergent perspectives are represented in new media and digital technology. [...] Punk Identities, Punk Utopias: Global Punk and Media offers readers an opportunity to reconsider and re-frame punk as a discourse with surprisingly wide reaching applications.'

Anita Raghunath, Punk & Post-Punk

‘This timely addition to the continually growing punk corpus reveals how punk identities are negotiated in a variety of social, economic and cultural realities. It examines how punk paradoxically changes and stays the same. It shows local solutions to global punk issues and provides both sociological and scientific methods and approaches to critically work on, with and through the complexities of punk, in all its manifestations.’

Dr Giacomo Botta, University of Helsinki, Finland

The essays in this volume offer some new interpretations of how punk subculture intersects with more specific and nuanced questions about gender, feminism, ethnicity and specific national punk scenes. This chimes with an important undercurrent in contemporary punk studies: namely the growing realisation that, far from being able to define punk or indeed summarise its legacy in a neat way, punk as a discourse is increasingly useful as a ‘elastic’ term that presents researchers from many disciplinary fields with an analytical framework that is challenging, interesting and adaptable.’

Dr Anita Raghunath, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

‘Where punk has been about challenging political and cultural fascism on the outside, this book challenges punk itself, diving directly into critical debates around gender identity and inclusion, the maintenance of toxic masculinity and the need to constantly critically re-evaluate the relationship between DIY cultural performance and technology. This is the kind of punk reader we need today. Richly woven with intricate histories that help us make sense of where we have been as we desperately work towards where we need to go. Read deeply, share widely, and cite often.’

michael b macdonald, MacEwan University, Canada
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