Celebrating Diversity: How Punk-Identified Characters Challenge Gender Normativity in Literature

ABSTRACT

The field of lesbian literature has acquired legitimacy in the last decades and has contributed to shape the manifold sides of the contemporary lesbian subject. However, narratives produced from sexual and gender non-conforming experiences have remained outside of the marketable scope and, therefore, less accessible to the general readership. These alternative works include lesbian and queer narratives produced within feminist movements, greatly influenced by musical punk bands from the Do It Yourself scene. Moreover, they show different forms of writing and experiencing self-identified queerness as resistance to the gay and lesbian mainstream culture by depicting lesbian realities intersecting with different axes of oppression, such as gender, class, ethnicity, or race, among others. This research will examine Lynn Breedlove’s novel Godspeed, published in 2003, and Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, published ten years later, in 2013 as examples of literary works that do not reflect universal, binary, and easily consumable lesbian models, but they re-appropriate the counter-cultural context to shape alternative queer and transgender narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Punk
• American literature
• queerness
• dyke
• lesbian
• transgender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Words taken from the acronym G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living outside Society’s Shit), a trans-feminist hardcore/punk band from Olympia, Washington.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.