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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
285
of whiteness. Punk has no one origin, but its genealogies are constrained and whitewashed. The lack of genealogical variability itself forms another actual hole that allows an ‘‘other’’ status to become distorted, and virtually collapses any chance at interrupting that ‘‘black and white dialectic.’’ The work of cultural studies critics like Dick Hebdige and Angela McRobbie have outlined and analyzed punk’s beginnings and how subcultures produce signifiers of meaning and ‘‘transformations [that] go ‘against nature’, interrupting the process of ‘normalization’.’’49 Not that music needs cultural theory’s help50 but, the question becomes: do countercultures that claim egalitarianisms of the underground – without looking into how dominant and relational discourses of race, gender, and sexuality – foreclose meaning and repeat loaned-out signifiers of freedom and loss? In Subculture, the found meanings in punk style and counterculture identify with a subaltern positionality: they appropriate and meld an ‘‘open identification with black British and West Indian culture.’’51 Hebdige points to a mirroring and referential link to pre-bourgeois (class) qualities of ‘‘inequality, powerlessness, and alienation’’ due to a displacement from ‘‘its own location in experience,’’52 without mentioning the direct relation of colonial British empire and imperialism. This analysis is also found in U.S. resonances of punk, like Daniel S. Traber’s description of ‘‘L.A.’s ‘White Minority’’’ punk scene, that posits a position of assuming a transgression to Other status, choosing an ‘‘asceticism of harsh poverty,’’ (35) and ‘‘using self-marginalization to achieve a sense of hard ‘realness’.’’53 Interestingly, Hebdige makes allusions to a ‘‘chain of conspicuous absences’’ in the way the white punks ‘‘played up their Otherness,’’ but only in opposition to skinheads.54 The supplemental punk commodity flourished in the alienated forms of reggae and the ‘‘translation of black ’ethnicity’‘‘ and warranted an aesthetics of ‘‘emulation’’ from the ‘‘quintessential subterranean,’’55 as previous sociologists and Houston Baker confirm. Perhaps, we can generously say, Hedige’s implication is that punk not only claims the space of the black hole mechanism as a white thing of value, but this valorization also de-values, subsumes, and passes over the punk performances that might have negotiated and addressed racialized aspects of the (sub)culture at large. X-Ray Spex, with a young Poly Styrene at the helm, was one such performance as one of the first ‘‘punk’’ bands to come onto the stage in 1977, two years before Hebdige’s publication (Figure 2).56 Born in the UK to Somali and white British parents, Styrene makes ample use of satire to conduct overarching dialogues that enter the multiple paradoxes of consumer culture, postcolonial alienation, and social materialism. At the beginning of her song ‘‘Genetic Engineering,’’ she calls out the title of the song (as she does with most of her songs) and after a count off in German, portending the song’s performance while referencing a recent past of racial genocide, the music responds in a fierce punk revolt. ‘‘Ripping’’ through the density of instruments, out of the ascending blues scale, the ground-up super-sonance, and the summoning saxophone contributions of Lara Logic, comes the Tina Turner-like grain of Poly Styrene belting out the chorus: Genetic engineering Could create the perfect race