Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture

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Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance inside a Boys' Subculture. Lauraine Leblanc. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers College Press, 1999.

Women first got it bad. Indeed, the historic girth of Western culture, as punk girl-cum-sociologist Lauraine Leblanc reminds us, lays heaped upon the fundamentals of the male-built and male-centered ideological framework. Ladies have always needed to learn how to negotiate the discourse of maleness, and generally, accept their subordinated status with quiet smiles. In her own new book titled Pretty in Punk, Leblanc replaces smiles with sneers and silence with screams, as she examines the ways that female people from the punk subculture-adolescent women particularly-make an effort to resist a mans-dominant cultural codes which permeate a punk method of being.

Mixing sociological, subcultural, and feminist theory with ethnographic analysis, Leblanc argues that functions of resistance, which she defines as conscious political reactions to perceived oppression, serve punk women as tools of empowerment, improving selfesteem in a crucial reason for girls' social development. Through methods of stylistic innovation, parody, and bricolage, the punk subculture provides a terrain for that publicizing and questioning of dominant ideologies, including individuals of sophistication, gender, and sexuality. But punk is really a double-edged discourse for women as Leblanc argues, punk girls' resistance is frequently restricted to and inflected through the masculine codes which characterize the subculture. Thus, while punk resistance serves women like a technique of empowerment, it's all too frequently reduced to some way of accommodation. Leblanc's intention in Pretty in Punk would be to trace both particularity and also the tension of the double-movement.

There's much to commend in Pretty in Punk. Leblanc's presentation from the stories of forty United States female punks works well in permitting the women and ladies to talk on their own. She appropriately suggests the possible lack of scholarship addressing women in subcultural studies (the job of Angela McRobbie as being a notable exception), pointing to researchers' ongoing reliance upon traditional male-centered British subcultural theory. Leblanc supplies a nice synoptic genealogy of punk in Chapter Two, lounging the floor on her ethnographic analysis within the subsequent sections. Most considerably, in her own analysis she provides a nuanced and compelling explanation of punk girls' dialectic of resistance and