This panel assembles three papers that posit punk as a lens of historical inquiry. Punk is a (sub)culture of the disaffected and dispossessed. At various points in the past fifty years, punk has served as a cultural practice that allows people to critique, object and position themselves “outside of society” (Patti Smith). This has taken the form of angry youths, utopian-dreaming bohemians, substance-dependent creatives, sexual “deviants” and/or genderqueer subjects who fell between the bounds of socially accepted gender norms at any given point. Punk as a historical lens asserts these “outsider” perspectives; it fundamentally radicalizes insurgent histories by questioning perceived notions of social categories, roles of governance, and the efficacies of capitalist economy.

Punk, as a creative culture, was forged in the mid-1970s among young musical artists and fashionistas in deindustrialising cityscapes, notably New York and London. Punk histories identify this decade as a period of upheaval along various fault lines. To many, the sounds that reverberated through punk represented a fall from the idealism embedded in the stunted ambitions of social movements from the sixties. Punk was a language of disaffection, formulated and articulated by youth frustrated by the cultural fallout of the 1960s and the tumultuous socio-economic terrains of 1970s-80s. In a time of No Future, punk probed and revealed the limits of liberalism: it soundtracked the advent of Reaganism and Thatcherism.

Punk may be read as both a musical idiom and an elastic historical metaphor. Since the seventies, multiple actors and groups have imbued their identities, ethics and aesthetics into the concept to varying results and cultural meanings, even contradictorily. At times it is an irreverent and contested mode of cultural expression; punk is critical for the sake of criticism. It is a language of refusal, categorically. Yet this makes punk well-suited as a lens (and discourse) through which to examine the twisted and convoluted cultural, political and social strata of the late-twentieth century. The assembled papers will each view punk differently, allowing for exploration of late twentieth century socio-economic and political change from an innovative and radical perspective.