photo by Kate Wadkins
DISASSEMBLE IT AND DIALOGUE WITH ME by Kate Wadkins Communication as Punk Feminist Cultural Activism
This is a paper that I wrote for the D.I.Y. Media panel at the Women Who Rock Conference in Seattle, Washington. Some of the opening paragraphs were co-written with Jamie Varriale Vélez; together, we discussed our experiences learning how to communicate effectively in our New York City community. We encourage you to get in touch for further communication on these and related topics. You can find Kate online at katewadkins.com and Jamie at rockandthesinglegirl.blogspot.com.
New York’s geography lends itself to separating feminists as well as other social justice activists, and one of our main resolutions to this predicament is community organizing. We come from a music scene founded in a love of punk rock music, a genre that has been overwhelmingly maledominated and white-dominated since its inception in the 1970s. As feminists, we have built communities around punk and “queered” it, creating safer spaces for women, queer, and trans folks, hoping to cultivate an alternative to mainstream oppressions. Unfortunately, subculture is rarely ever free of mainstream cultural ideology. Our community utilizes “DIY feminist cultural activism,” methods of doing that include booking music shows (punk and otherwise), multimedia events like creative fiction or nonfiction readings, art shows, and even feminist conferences. Women play in bands, work as social justice activists, write zines, make art, own small businesses, and generally weave work and pleasure into an active feminist lifestyle. Through our experiences in the New York City DIY/punk feminist community, we have discovered that learning how to communicate effectively, on whatever level, is what produces the cultural change we want. It means changing the way we think by listening to each other, expanding our cultural vernacular and bringing previously marginalized voices to the forefront of a new narrative. Where I enter the story is here: I have been surrounded by seedlings of feminist community since my adolescence in the Long Island “do-it-yourself” punk scene. At sixteen, my closest girlfriends and I made our best attempts to combat the acrimonious attitudes embedded in our interactions
with each other by celebrating Revolution Girl Style Now! and later forming a group called the Long Island Womyn’s Collective. As the Womyn’s Collective quickly became my first real entry to, and honest engagement with activism, it also became the first site of many dilemmas. Becoming active in a predominantly white punk scene, surrounded by predominantly white feminists, it became apparent that though our organizing might help ourselves and our direct community, we might fall short in terms of genuinely diverse, broad-based social change.
As feminists, we have built communities around punk and “queered” it, creating safer spaces for women, queer, and trans folks, hoping to cultivate an alternative to mainstream oppressions.
As the Long Island Womyn’s Collective, we established an event called The Big She-Bang. The SheBang represented the collective’s goals to highlight and encourage girls’ and women’s voices. It included a full day of activity: vendors, tablers, and a “DIY fleamarket”; speakers and presenters; an art show; and musical performances. Fast forward to 2007. The Womyn’s Collective had dissipated naturally, as collective members dispersed upon graduating college, and lost our organizing space. In July of that year, an integral organizer of the LIWC, Jodi Tilton, passed away due to complications related to Crohn’s disease and Colitis. A few original members of the LIWC decided to throw The Big She-Bang once more, in Jodi’s spirit, during the summer of 2008. We connected with the feminists in our punk scene in New York to begin brainstorming; these included fellow ex-members of LIWC as well as new women who played in bands, made art, and were involved in various types of social justice work. After our first She-Bang in New York City, the organizers of the event committed to a fully active WWR 2011 3