Postpunk Desires

Abstract

This chapter explores underground nightlife in the context of subcultural resistance to normative models of liberation. Ugliness in the chapter is visible as an antagonistically expressed gender and sexual nonnormativity within the postpunk aesthetics of cult film Liquid Sky (1982). The film is theorized as a dystopian feminism that aligns itself with alienated sexual and sonic space. The conceptual ugliness, in this chapter, corresponds to the queer female body as site of estrangement, ensconced in sexual and substance-desiring practices.