punk, Leblanc, and how to spend your misspent youth

i'm reading a book for my feminist cultural studies class:


and, as chance would have it, i spent a substantial portion of my own misspent youth immersed - and occasionally enmeshed - in punk subculture. furthermore, the time period of Leblanc's ethnography (1993-1995) overlaps with the formative portion of my own experience, and during last night's discussion's i felt the twinge of adolescent bravado creeping back into my veins.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that the book, although only concerned with the place of women in the scene, does mention tangentially that boys gravitate towards punk subculture in an attempt to assert and establish their own masculinity. i had never thought of it in this way, but the idea held an immediate resonance.

i thought back to my own initial exposures to punk - the gateway drug of Nirvana's Seattle, the Sex Pistol-ed epiphany of Dallas, the DIY Durham debacle that was my senior year of high school - in retrospect all of these memories fit neatly within Leblanc's construction. at the time i was completely unaware, and as i matured (so to speak) i credited the initial flight from the mainstream as some hyper-individualized, faux-romanticized act of agency.

it never occurred to me as a crisis of masculinity.

eventually the scene came and went, which is to say that i came and went, and pinpointing my exact exit is difficult. before leaving college a whole new set of pretensions had emerged, and by the time i reached New York in 1999, the punk aesthetic had disappeared almost entirely...

except for one fateful blue-haired trip to Gainesville.