Malott, Curry and Milagros Pena, Punk Rockers Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class and Gender (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004), 1-13. (Call Number: ML3918.R63 M35 2004)
Throughout the first chapter of ‘Punk Rockers’ Revolution’, The Bias in Our Study: Who We Are, Where We Come from, and This Study, the authors Curry Malott and Milagros Pena talk about exactly that. They talk about their upbringing and how they were living in a predominately white capitalist society, being stereotyped and cast out of the mainstream community. Malott and Pena created their own communities of resistance in a response to this. A lot of the opinions behind these communities related to destructiveness and I believe there was a lot of this going on within the subculture although it was partly viewed the wrong way, as the outsiders were stereotyping them as criminals; they were anything but. However, according to the Classic Subculture Theory, the punk communities drew attention to the laws of society by breaking them and this then causes the stereotypes to emerge from outside. This chapter relates to the previous article on ‘Postmodernism and Punk Subculture’ in the way that they both talk about punk as being a culture of destruction and involving views that go against the mainstream views of society. However, I personally believe that the people within this community were and still are standing up for their own beliefs and not those of others. Malott also discusses how he was taught to live his life not for but with the Other and this allowed him to rid his life of the oppressive ideas of mainstream society, and then permitted himself to be a complete part of the community of punk rock. In the end the two authors were trying to decide whether or not Punk could be considered a social movement, while also being a protest community and I definitely believe it was a social movement as it allowed many other subcultures to branch out from it with the same, as well as new, beliefs.
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