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Haunted by the Spirit of 77: Punk Studies and the Persistence of Politics
Michelle Phillipov
The contemporary punk scene(s) are today comprised of an enormous spectrum of musical, subcultural, institutional and political practices, many of them only tangentially linked to one another by historical and geographical antecedents. Yet despite some attempts to acknowledge and explore this musical and subcultural diversity, academic accounts of the movement have remained largely unchanged since the advent of punk scholarship in the late 1970s. While frequently structured as a rejection of earlier approaches, punk scholars since the 1980s have continued to reiterate many of the same assumptions which characterized the initial work in the eld: assumptions about resistance, subversion and political radicalism. Punk, remarks Roger Sabin (1999, p. 2) in a recent anthology on the movement, is a notoriously amorphous concept to dene. Acknowledging the unresolvedness of certain debates about punkwhether it originated in the United Kingdom or the United States, for example, or whether it died in 1979 or continues to live on in a variety of current musical trajectorieshe ultimately settles on the following working denition:
At a very basic level, we can say that punk was/is a subculture best characterized as part youth rebellion, part artistic statement. It had its high point from 1976 to 1979, and was most visible in Britain and America. It had its primary manifestation in musicand specically in the disaffected rock and roll bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. (Sabin, 1999, p. 2)

Interestingly, although punk may have its primary manifestation in music, Sabin denes it primarily as youth rebellion and artistic statement rather than musical genre. That is, while punk remains a clearly identiable musical styleone characterized by high energy, three-chord compositions featuring stiff rhythm sections, overamplied guitar and harsh, almost characterless vocals (Savage, 1991, p. 295)Sabins anthology approaches it more as a social and cultural movement than a musical one. In fact, the essays in the volume frequently sidestep the question of music altogether in favour of explorations of punks inuence on lm, literature, comics, and everyday behaviour. Punk Rock: So What? is conceived as a radical
Michelle Phillipov is a PhD candidate in the discipline of English at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Correspondence to: Michelle Phillipov, English DP105, School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Adelaide SA 5005, Australia. E-mail: michelle.phillipov@adelaide.edu.au
ISSN 1030-4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online)/06/030383-11 q 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10304310600814326

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departure from orthodox punk scholarship (which focuses primarily on music and fashion) towards a more comprehensive location of punk in cultural history. The wide variety of media explored in the one volume is certainly uncommon to punk scholarship, but an approach which situates punk primarily as a cultural movement rather than as a musical genre has more in common with existing orthodoxies than Sabin and others acknowledge. In fact, their focus on the cultural and political impact (Sabin, 1999, p. 5) of the movement rather than on the textures of punk as music has been the characteristic approach of most punk scholars, especially those working broadly under the banner of cultural studies. In much of this work, punks musical conventions are rmly anchored to questions of politics: that is, punk is often approached principally as an expression of youth rebellion and disenfranchisement, rather than as music per se (cf. Savage, 1991, p. xvii). However, understanding punk primarily in cultural or political terms rather than in musical ones means that questions of musical pleasure often tend to be treated as merely subsidiary to wider political investmentsand, in some cases, effaced altogether. For the purposes of this paper, I am not concerned with delineating the nuances of the various punk scenes or moments in terms of era, subgenre, or geographical location. While such differences clearly do existAmerican punk, for example, had a more suburban focus and incorporated a more self-consciously pop sensibility than its British counterpart (see Osgerby, 1999)and despite a profusion of punk subgenres and postpunk trajectories (including hardcore, grunge, riot grrrl and Oi, among others), I am generally less interested in demarcating what might really count as punk than I am with what the scholarly literature has counted as punk, and, in turn, with what the placement of these generic parameters reveals about the assumptions of this body of scholarship. Much of the early literature on British punk focused explicitly on the political dimensions of working-class youth culture. Prior to punk, popular music had rarely been a matter of theoretical concern, but within a few months of its public emergence in 1977 virtually every radical commentator in Britain agreed that punk was a Good Thing (Frith, 1980/1997). Punk was a watershed of sorts in that it seemed to transform popular music, raising new questions about audience, commodity production and musical meaning: it seemed to be different from previous mass musics in terms of how it was made and how it was used and how it meant [emphaisis in original] (Frith, 1980/1997, p. 167). Punks musical amateurism seemed to promote an egalitarian, non-hierarchical social structure. It was access music: acts like the Sex Pistols may have been headline material, but there was no distance between them and the people who regularly supported themyou could even stand next to Johnny Rotten in the urinal! (Marsh, 1982). Moreover, punks do-it-yourself approach to musical production was seen as a subversion of the capitalist control of music practice, while its musical sounds and lyrical themes appeared to express a kind of classbased political resistance to the economic decline of 1970s Britain. Punk found particular compatibility with the broadly Marxist principles fundamental to the development of cultural studies, values which, to a certain extent, continue to remain central to the discipline. Rejecting the implicit functionalism of previous approaches to youth culture, early cultural studies scholarship positively re-evaluated

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subcultures as collective solutions to structurally imposed problems, and the terrain of music, style and argot was theorized as the sphere where the political battleground between classes was played out symbolically. Such were the terms in which British punk was typically studied during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Subsequent work on popular music identied several problems with this approach. With the primary function of subculture conceived as a magical resolution of class contradictions in the parent culture (Cohen, 1980, p. 82), early cultural studies theorists often seemed to treat all working-class subcultures as essentially equivalent. For later scholars like Gary Clarke this often raised more problems than it solved. He questions, for example, the analytical leap needed from the desire for a solution to the adoption of a particular subcultural style. That is, how is it that punks, skins, teds and mods each sought to resolve the problem of class, but through different styles? (Clarke, 1981/1997). Moreover, while punk across both sides of the Atlantic may have been closely linked via shared musical inuences and visual styles, the strict structural analyses of this early work were often inapplicable to North American punk, a movement that was characteristically more suburban and middle class than its British counterpart (Baron, 1989). However, several scholars have nonetheless attempted to utilize traditional class-based approaches in the study of American punk. Susan Willis (1993), for example, describes hardcore as an expression of the cultural and economic contradictions faced by Americas new working class: young people working deadend jobs in the growing service sector. Echoing many of the sentiments of the Birmingham School nearly two decades earlier, she writes:
Daily life in late twentieth-century capitalism is a terrain of struggle, whose rich outpourings of cultural inventiveness marks the intensity of unresolved contradictions. The development of hardcore as a subculture is one way that teens express the contradictions of a system that degrades them as workers and aunts them as consumers. The problematic of hardcore is the problem of capitalism. (Willis, 1993, p. 381)

Another concern raised by post-Birmingham punk scholarship stemmed from the premium placed on musical realism in many of the early studies. The idea that punk music somehow reected the lives of its participants (cf. Marsh, 1982) had always been considered problematic by some critics. As Simon Frith notes in an early article on punk:
The pioneering punk rockers themselves were a self-conscious, artful lot with a good ; the music no more understanding of both rock tradition and populist cliche reected directly back onto the conditions of the dole-queue than it emerged spontaneously from them. (Frith, 1980/1997, p. 167)

However, Dave Laings (1985) book-length study helped to challenge more fully the dominance of early reectionist accounts. In One Chord Wonders, it is Laings contention that rather than mirroring the lives of its fans, even realist musical conventions like ordinary working-class accents had paradoxical effects when committed to music. For popular music in the 1970s, the ordinary was actually the

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mainstream American or non-accented (sometimes called mid-Atlantic) accent associated with singers like Abba and Queens Freddie Mercury. Working-class accents which may have signied the ordinary and mundane in everyday life actually took on an exotic and colourful resonance when heard on record or on radio. Thus Laing argues that the radicalism of punk was not to be located in any ability to represent its audience but in the way it frustrated identication between fan and performer through the use of shock effects. For Laing, shock effects like unpleasing vocal tones, obscene language and unconventional mixing techniques were key to the development of radical listening positions and subjectivities among the punk audience. Writing over a decade later, Jude Davies (1996) further pursues the question of representation and identication in punk music. Dividing the punk movement into two distinct waves (the rst between 1976 and 1978, and the second post-1978), Davies characterizes the rst wave (exemplied by bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash) not as the authentic expression of working-class life but as nihilistic and shocking; pure, existential revolt devoid of all meaning. But, unlike Tillman (1980), Davies does not view this as indicative of punks essentially apolitical nature: on the contrary, Davies sees the political emptiness of the rst wave as an essential precondition of the greater politicization of punk after 1978. By destroying traditional audience/star relationships of hero worship and identication during this initial phase, punk was more readily able to construct different listening positions for its audience during the post-1978 period. Although second-wave bands often expressed explicitly political viewpoints in their lyrics, Davies locates punks true radicalism in its refusal to speak with an authoritative voice for or on behalf of its audience. Through an examination of the way that the vocalist addressesor does not addressthe audience, she argues that many of the most political punk bands are those who, like the Stiff Little Fingers, used certain kinds of language (especially pronouns like I or you) to constitute the listener as a discrete individual with whom communication must be established. The singer had no special status, no mandate to be spokesperson, so the song could succeed only by an act of agreement, rather than identication, on the part of the listener. For Davies, such a listening position destabilizes conventional modes of subjectivity, in turn facilitating the construction of a communality based on communicationthe rst step in a truly democratic engagement with progressive politics. On the face of it, the work of Davies and Laing might seem to contradict that of earlier punk scholars, indicating a shift from the idea that punks radicalism was in its ability to authentically represent the lives of its fans to the notion that it is when punk is unable to represent its audience that it is at its most radical. However, although they might seem to oppose one another, the fundamental point of both arguments ultimately remains the same: both see punk as an essentially progressive movement articulating egalitarian, community-based, broadly leftist politics. The only thing they disagree on is how punks radicalism is manifest. Almost from the start, punk scholars have tended to assume that the genres politics are denitionally progressive and emancipatory. Despite enormous changes to the

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demographic make-up of the punk fanbase and signicant generic and subcultural developments within the movement, academic approaches to punk have changed very little in over two decades of scholarship. Even with the visible presence of right-wing punks, conservative hardcore kids and avowedly apolitical drunk punks in many contemporary scenes, cultural studies has rarely interrogated the continued validity of viewing punk as necessarily politically radical. Even obvious ideological contradictions, like the persistent sexism in a scene supposedly based on egalitarianism, seem to be reabsorbed into a framework which assumes that the overall predisposition of punk is at least vaguely, if not always specically, left (Ward, 1996, p. 161). For example, while the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s has been theorized as a response to sexism within the punk scene, scholars still tend to situate the movement as part of the punk traditiondespite the fact that many of the riot grrrls themselves reject the punk label, preferring instead to place their project within a variety of other musical and non-musical trajectories. Punks ethos of DIY production and musical amateurism conventions that critics erroneously imply to be both unique to punk and denitionally progressiveis seen as offering a particularly valuable site for women to participate in music making (Leonard, 1997). Thus, despite any political contradictions, punk is nonetheless understood to be the genre with which those traditionally marginalized from rock music can most productively engage.1 Few punk studies begin by asking under what conditions punk culture might become articulated to radical politics. This is especially true of many American studies which tend to take punks progressiveness, as established by the earlier British work, as the starting point of analysis. The few studies which explore the movements more nonprogressive aspects, like right-wing and fascist imagery, tend to play down the importance of these ideologies within the punk scene. For example, despite its suggestive subtitle, James Wards (1996) article Appropriations and constructions of fascism in New York punk/hardcore in the 1980s actually has very little at all to say about fascism. The constructions of fascism refer not to any fascist aesthetics within the music itself but to the way many punk bands constructed local authorities as fascist during skirmishes over housing and the free use of public space. Wards discussion of other, possibly more authentic, uses of fascist imagery remains quite limited. He either re-assimilates such reactionary imagery back into a progressive framework (echoing Hebdiges (1979) earlier pronouncements about a strategic play with taboo in order to unhinge established hierarchies of meaning and value) or distances it from the true punk movement. For instance, while he notes an increasing visibility of Nazi punk bands, he argues that these groups constitute only a tiny minority of the scene and dismisses them as spuriously punk at best, [with] whatever creativity they can muster . . . quickly exhausted in a few racist rants (Ward, 1996, p. 162). In this way, many punk scholars display a distinct unwillingness to engage with the darker side of punks politics, instead presenting right-wing and fascist ideologies as merely an insignicant aberration within an otherwise left-wing movement. But in his study of heavy metal, Harris Berger (1999) talks quite unselfconsciously about the predominance of right-afliated punk/hardcore bands within the Akron, Ohio scene

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where he conducted his eldwork. In fact, he presents the division between left- and right-wing bands as one of the most signicant structuring elements within the contemporary punk/hardcore scene. The fact that Bergera musicologist whose work is methodologically atypical of most cultural studiesis prepared to acknowledge what most punk scholars tend to avoid suggests that current cultural studies approaches to music and politics still leave many issues unexplored. As a social process, music is deeply embedded in the web of practices through which social life is produced, and thus musics relation to social meanings is heavily context dependent. However, the contexts in which punk music becomes meaningful as a site of political protestand, relatedly, the processes through which punk might come to take on entirely different meaningsremain largely unexamined by an approach which takes politics as the starting point of analysis. Much contemporary analysis of punk frequently identies a self-consciously political band or scene (e.g. Fugazi or the D.C. Scene) and then works backwards to determine the relationship between music and politics: that is, given that we already know that this scene/band/etc. is politically inclined, how are their political dispositions expressed in the music? The result is a particularly strange gap in the scholarship which raises some thorny questions about how the music of punk is dealt with in these accounts. The cultural study of popular music has been regularly criticized for centring analyses too heavily on lyrics or subcultural style, rather than on musical meanings (e.g. McClary & Walser, 1990). However, I would suggest that the problem is not so much one of too few close readings of individual musical texts but one of subordinating musical meanings to wider concerns about political investments. Too often music is treated as subsidiary to other institutional and ideological practices, as simply a vehicle for the expression of politics rather than something which is embedded in a variety of meanings and affects in its own right and interplays with politics in complex ways. In Davies and Laings studies, for instance, punk music is merely a mechanism which works to transform the outlook of the audience in order to establish democracy or inculcate radical subjectivities. The specic pleasures of snotty vocals, heavily distorted guitars, or rapid-re, three-chord structures are simply streamlined into one-dimensional platitudes about politics, resistance and subversion. Kevin Mattsons recent retrospective of American punk in the 1980s reads as a similar attempt to position musical and subcultural practices as expressions of an oppositional political agenda. That is, by situating punk in the 1980s as a response to economic deregulation and corporate expansion during the Reagan era, Mattson (2001) ideologically aligns punks DIY, anti-corporate music-making practices with radical politics. However, these were not merely economic questions related only to the distribution of punk cultural products but musical ones as well. For example, he describes the abrasive soundsblitz-like speed and shotgun lyricsof hardcore as a deliberate attempt to be unpalatable to the mainstream music industry in order to avoid corporate co-optation (Mattson, 2001, p. 89). In this way, he attempts to link punks economic and musical conventions with the rise of a New Left culture in Reagans America.

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John Gosherts article, Punk after the Pistols, is also interesting to consider in this context. Presented as a direct challenge to the existing body of cultural studies scholarship on punk, his article is, paradoxically, both atypical and exemplary of much of this work. Focusing on the intersections of music, politics and economics in the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, DC scenes, Goshert (2000) argues against conventional understandings of punk, asserting instead that it is punks inability to be dened as a subculture or as a musical genre that is its dening characteristic. As he writes:
To focus a study of punk on . . . clearly commercially successful supergroups, whether to repeat Hebdiges proclamation of punks demise in 1978 with the breakup of the Sex Pistols, or to point to the continuing inuence of punk on youth culture, consumer culture, or the music industry since that time, is to miss what is perhaps the most crucial point about punk: that its tendency is a resistance to working within the usual terms of commercial success and visibility. In other words, it is precisely when punk becomes popular culture that it ceases to be punk; thus is remains to be argued whether there is anything punk about the way in which it has been dened and described for the last twenty years of academic treatments of the subject. (Goshert, 2000, p. 85)

While Mattson presents the culture of Reaganism as an important context in which to understand the political imperative of American punk, Goshert situates the movements most radical impulses rmly in the years of the subsequent Bush administration. With the end of the Reagan years at the close of the 1980s, there was no longer a clearly identiable enemy against whom the punks could position themselves. While the policies of the Reagan administration did not disappear with the Bush administration, the process of normalization that such social and economic policies underwent made them increasingly difcult to address in an oppositional manner (Goshert, 2000). For Mattson, this marked the end of the political era of punk and signalled its absorption into the mainstream, but for Goshert the absence of a clear-cut adversary in fact allowed the movement to articulate new social identities and envision new forms of radical politics. These were as much aesthetic and institutional questions as political ones. For Goshert, punks politics were as manifest in generic and performance practices as they were in more explicit strategies like political grafti. Punks politics are thus mapped as part of a shift towards an avant-garde musical approach, achieved via spontaneous and transient punk performances, as well as through the dissolution of traditional genre boundaries. During the 1990s, punk was no longer a style of music; it was simply what was performed at punk shows, with funk, rap, heavy metal and country groups all heard on various punk bills (Goshert, 2000). In many other cases, individual bands incorporated a myriad of different musical inuences into their song writing, thereby making them almost impossible to categorize in generic terms (Fairchild, 1995). A response to powers ability to transform and accommodate opposition through incorporation, the aim of these musical and performance tactics was to promote constant mutation and unrecognizability within the punk scene. If punk could not be dened and made comprehensibleeither in subcultural or generic termsthen the scenes would continue to evade models of production and consumption otherwise

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omnipresent in the entertainment industry, and thereby articulate an oppositionality impossible to incorporate within the existing hegemony (Goshert, 2000). It might seem odd to use Gosherts study as an example of the way in which cultural studies often presents punks musical conventions as an expression of an overarching political agenda, because he is ultimately arguing that punk has no musical conventions since it is not a musical style but an approach to musical and political practice. However, although he criticizes most existing punk scholarship, Goshert ultimately upholds many of its central tenets. Like most punk scholars, he argues that a DIYapproach to musical production and the elimination of hierarchies between bands and fans are unique features of punk which work to facilitate egalitarianism. Similarly, he also maintains that the propagation of dissenting, counter-hegemonic values and politics is a dening characteristic of the movement. Often it seems that it is not so much the conventional denitions of punk that Goshert is disputing; rather, he seems to be questioning whether these punk characteristics are in fact presentor even possiblein the practices of bands frequently used as exemplary examples within many academic studies. In fact, in demonstrating how aesthetic and economic choices are connected to political outcomes, Gosherts article is perhaps one of the clearest examples of the wider trend within cultural studies to link musical conventions and business practices to the articulation of a broadly leftist politics. But, in the end, Gosherts article essentially effaces the question of music altogether. For him, punk is not a genre but an attitude, merely a musical/cultural site for articulating radical politics. In fact, such an approach to punk has often been quite effective for those critics wishing to marginalize all non-left and/or apolitical punk as not true punklike Goshert and Mattson who lament the loss of politics in more mainstream punk forms (which they dont consider to be punk at all but alternative music), or Ward who lambastes right-wing punk as only spuriously punk. It is only by disengaging punk music from the specicities of genre that such critics are able to present the movement as denitionally radical, and thus neatly sidestep the other investments that punk might resonate with. By centring studies on the political orientation of punk, music is subordinated to a function of these politics, rather than something which generates pleasures and meanings in its own right. These are not merely questions of identity and social location and resistance; these are things cultural studies already has a sophisticated vocabulary for talking about. It is the other stuff of music, the specic pleasures of the sounds and textures of the music itself, that we have much more difculty nding the language to express. Even expressive attempts within the punk scene itself to engage with punk music as music are often attened and contained within this rigid framework of politics. For example, the possibility that slamdancing and moshing may be affective, physical responses to the emotional quality of punk music is overlooked by scholars searching for wider political agendas in all subcultural practices. For instance, Williss (1993) attempt to politicize moshing results in a somewhat bizarre suggestion of the activity as a response to safe sex: that is, moshing as a sublimation of the desire for intimate physical contact otherwise impossible in the era of AIDS. In a much more detailed

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account of the punk dancing styles, and of the specic differences between slamdancing and moshing, William Tsitsos (1999) sees the two dancing styles as physical embodiments of differing ideological principles. The faster, more chaotic slamdancing styles favoured by apolitical (drunk) punks contrasts with the more controlled and aggressive moshing of the straight edgers, thus mirroring the ideologies of rebellion of the two different groups (the desire for complete freedom and anarchy, and the need for control and strength in maintaining lifestyle choices, respectively). As he writes:
While there are drunk punk slamdancers who, like moshers, dance to release aggression, their dancing is not as violent as moshing because the primary object of aggression for drunk punks is the mainstream, an entity not identied with the pit. However, for straight edge moshers, the object of aggression is disorder and chaos symbolized in part by the pit itself, and this disorder must be purged. (Tsitsos, 1999, p. 413)

Tsitsos theorizes slamdancing and moshing primarily as a physical acting out of ideological principles. However, the distinction between slamdancing and moshing which is so integral to his study is rarely upheld so rigidly within the punk scenes he is discussinga fact which is highlighted particularly clearly by his own interview material. What becomes evident from his participants responses is that the real difference between the dance styles is not the presence or absence of specic dance moves which serve as physical manifestations of certain ideological positions; instead, the real difference is one of interpretation, the way in which political orientation serves as a lens which structures fans understanding of their own involvement in subcultural practices. For example, political punks emphasize the communal aspects of slamdancing, while apolitical punks, engaging in the same dance stress the importance of individual expression and release (Tsitsos, 1999). This is important because it demonstrates that musical, institutional or subcultural conventions in no way deliver participants to certain political positions in the way that punk scholars have traditionally implied. Certainly, a good deal of punk scholarship has demonstrated how political ideologies inevitably have aesthetic consequences, but it does not automatically follow that aesthetic practices straightforwardly embody political agendas. After all, there is nothing about punks musical and subcultural conventions that are inherentlyor even typicallyleftist. Under some conditions, punks amateurism (the fact that anyone can have a go) or the desire to eliminate hierarchies between fans and performers may well facilitate the building of an egalitarian, proto-socialist community, but the same techniques might also be employed equally effectively to decidedly non-progressive ends. The rawness of amateurish compositions may instead lend intensity and urgency to right-wing political messages. Or non-hierarchical relations between bands and fans may help to increase group solidarity and thereby contribute to more clearly articulated political goals and agendas within these more reactionary scenes. Equally so, a DIY approach to musical production and a circulation of materials through the independent and underground channels favoured by many Oi and Nazi punk bands may result less

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from the desire to subvert corporate control of music practice than from a more practical need to remain hidden from public view. Consequently, a more sophisticated vocabulary for theorizing the relationship between aesthetics and politics is needed within punk scholarship. Specically, we need to nd ways of talking about musical and other aesthetic and subcultural practices that do not merely subordinate them as subsidiary to wider political concerns. Of course punk, like many forms of popular music, is often highly political in so far as it is deeply bound to questions of resistance, social location and commodication. However, it is necessary to develop a vocabulary for talking about punk that can theorize its moments of political engagement without attening the affective specicities of the music into a predetermined framework of radicalism. We need to nd ways of talking about punk that take into account the pleasures and emotional investments the music evokes. Pleasures that are not clearly articulated to politics are often viewed with suspicion by a discipline searching for popular forms of resistance to the dominant hegemony. While it is important to stress that music fans are not merely dupes to the culture industries, that music is one site where people make do with what resources they have and resist the power structures that oppress them, music isnt just about the politics of resistance. To say that is not to diminish musics political effects but to warn that a blindness to everything but musics political effects can lead to an elision of the other investments that it also resonates with. As critics, we need to be careful and realistic, as well as politically engaged. Music is never just music, but the politics of music are rarely present in any pure form either. For every punk band or fan who refuses to limit the denition of punk to a musical genre, preferring to see punk music as merely a complement to the wider political impulses of the culture, there are many more for whom punk is primarily about the music, and any political engagement they mayor may nothave is subsidiary to the enjoyment of the music itself. Does this make the engagement of these fans less authentic? Does it make them a less interesting object of study? Or perhaps most importantly, does it make them less punk? At this time, cultural studies offers us few tools with which to come to terms with musical engagements that fall outside the more conventional political analyses that have characterized most of the existing work on punk. The specic pleasures of musical experience continue to remain unexplored.

Note
[1] It should, of course, be stressed that early British and American punk offered women unique (and, at the time, unprecedented) opportunities to eschew the peripheral or decorative roles conventionally assigned to them by most other music scenes and actively serve as lead singers, drummers, bassists and guitarists in punk bands. Ultimately, though, punk was and remains a male-dominated youth subculture, both numerically and ideologically: Even within . . . the most rhetorically egalitarian and oppositional of youth subcultures, notes Lauraine LeBlanc (1999, p. 64), girls are still on the outside.

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References
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