Women’s Punk and Post-Punk Memoir

Punk and its immediate aftermath represent a brief but intense rupture in music and ways of being in the world, especially for young women. This influence continues to reverberate today, evident in the numerous memoirs by women punk, post-punk, and indie musicians. Considering that punk offered new subject positions for women —as musicians and as dissonant femininities (aided by a contemporaneous women’s movement), and that life writing has been a major genre for women to intervene in the historical record and to control their personal histories, this confluence is not surprising. Using a phenomenologically inspired feminist textual analysis, Women’s Punk and Post-Punk Memoir: Adventures Far from Home examines this phenomenon of women’s punk and post-punk memoirs to explore the genre’s formal characteristics. How does a punk and/or post-punk life and music find textual form, and is there a connection between the scenes’ aesthetics and the literary text? In what ways do these memoirs provide gendered counter-histories to the evolving mythologies around punk and its aftermath? These counter-memoirs, through their central chronotope of an embodied and deeply felt adventure time in rock music, remap punk and post-punk, and foreground the gendered freedoms but also contradictions encountered by women punk and post-punk musicians.