Date of Award
August 2017
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Communication and Rhetorical Studies
Advisor(s)
Dana L. Cloud
Keywords
Cultural Studies, DIY Punk, Geography, Performance, Publics, Rhetoric
Subject Categories
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
This thesis takes the example of two scenes of activity—a punk house in Huntington, West Virginia and a 2016 DIY punk rock festival—to investigate the material-spatial influences that play out across the worldmaking performances of DIY Punk counterpublics as they oscillate across spaces that range from the intimate underground to the public writ large. Drawing on a mass of data including field interviews from punk house residents and fragments gathered from the festival and the internet, I render these scenes as radical activist worldmaking spaces that organize and prepare the international DIY punk community to do instrumental activist work. This work intervenes in counterpublic theory (Asen; Brouwer, Squires; Fraser) through an interface with geography (Blomley; Harvey; Mitchell; Staeheli) and performance studies (McKenzie; Taylor) by emphasizing space and mobility’s importance for the development of counterpublics and by pointing out the role of performance for understanding stylistically shared knowledges and counterpublic efficacies in general. Finally, this thesis draws on Lester Bangs to introduce a new counterpublic modality for thinking about enclaves that are primarily art communities and secondarily activist ones: the DIY punk party.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Bince, Ryan L., "Getting Out of the Basement: Space, Performance, and the Oscillation of DIY Punk Publics" (2017). Theses - ALL. 161.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/161
