On punk friendship and the limits of community

Abstract

The article examines two recent memoirs by punk musicians, From the Graveyard of the Arousal Industry by Justin Pearson and The Spitboy Rule by Michelle Cruz Gonzales, and asks how do these works rethink the value and function of community in punk and what might be involved in recognizing friendship as something that can structure punk around altogether different operations than a notion of community presently does? The article contests a popular and scholarly perception that punk is best appreciated as a distinct community of outcasts, a view that justly recognizes that punk is much more than a failed social protest. Gonzales and Pearson challenge the assumption that punk offers a community for marginalized individuals, documenting the routine discrimination they faced from punks who prioritized uniformity and idealized norms of white male heterosexuality. Their memoirs examine how punk sometimes replicates the discriminatory social norms the authors encountered outside of the subculture and thus these works explore the limits of interpreting punk as a separate community. As an alternative, Gonzales and Pearson test out expressions of punk friendship that retain some of the optimism and sociability of punk while also remembering the centrality of relations of power that condition any practice of living with others.