A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

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lot of PVC… you could just imagine it, it was just shocking to the world… shocking
to my mum… (l.1:1248ff.)
Talking about the importance of punk in terms of its impact upon her development, Lola
says:
Punk revolutionised me, there‟s no doubt about it, and it was quite a marvellous
thing to me… I think if you were into punk you can never not be a punk…
(laughs…) in your identity, so… erm… that‟s another part of the puzzle for me, in
that it definitely… and that was… that made me political actually… yeah, anarchy,
being able to think of different models of being… to question… that you had a right
to break down barriers even, there was a lot of that in punk… obviously to do with
class structure and sexism…and to me it just absolutely… and also, just that thing
of celebrating in a dark way, of just celebrating… you know… I know it was quite
nihilistic at times, but… just that thing of not caring… and even in terms of how I
looked by then… cos, of course, punk wasn‟t exactly about standard beauty, and that
was very powerful… (l.830ff.)
Punk‟s embrace of areas of life rejected by mainstream culture as negative and ugly was
something Lola found personally empowering as part of a process of growing more
confident about her own body. As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder note:
The power of transgression always originates at the moment when the derided object
embraces its deviance as value. Perversely championing the terms of its own
stigmatisation, marginal peoples alarm the dominant culture with a canniness about
their own subjugation (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000:35).
It was as a punk, then, that Lola first became involved with the Outsiders Club.
Tuppy really had no understanding of how naïve someone like me might be… from
my very limited life experience… say I‟ve hit twenty one, twenty two… I‟ve had
very few sexual experiences… Tuppy thinks I‟m this wowee sexual adventurer…
how stupid can you be, basically, I think… that‟s one of the big issues, I think, with
her… no understanding of anyone‟s past or… positioning in society, in a sense…
and what is oppressing you and defining you…