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‘When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?’ - Judith Butler, Excitable Speech Excitable Speech is widely hailed as a tour de force and one of Judith Butler’s most important books. Examining in turn debates about hate speech, pornography and gayness within the US military, Butler argues that words can wound and linguistic violence is its own kind of violence. Yet she also argues that speech is ‘excitable’ and fluid, because its effects often are beyond the control of the speaker, shaped by fantasy, context and power structures. In a novel and courageous move, she urges caution concerning the use of legislation to restrict and censor speech, especially in cases where injurious language is taken up by aesthetic practices to diminish and oppose the injury, such as in rap and popular music. Although speech can insult and demean, it is also a form of recognition and may be used to talk back; injurious speech can reinforce power structures, but it can also repeat power in ways that separate language from its injurious power. Skillfully showing how language’s oppositional power resides in its insubordinate and dynamic nature and its capacity to appropriate and defuse words that usually wound, Butler also seeks to account for why some clearly hateful speech is taken to be iconic of free speech, while other forms are more easily submitted to censorship. In light of current debates between advocates of freedom of speech and ‘no platform’ and cancel culture, the message of Excitable Speech remains more relevant now than ever.
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Girls in male-dominated youth subcultures confront ideologies of gender which remain largely invisible and often tacitly accepted in many women's everyday lives. Punk girls choose to construct their femininity within a highly male-dominated, "masculinist," context; girls are present in such youth subcultures, but the masculine definition of their norms problematizes their participation. Thus, punk girls struggle to accommodate female gender norms within subcultural identities which are deliberately coded as "masculine." Although young women in America encounter the norms of the female gender role on a daily basis, punk girls' negotiations between the norms of femininity and those of punk open these prescriptions to critical examination which they might not otherwise be accorded. In this dissertation, I explore accounts of punk girls' engagements with both mainstream and subcultural gender norms. In constructing this account of girls' lived experiences in the punk subculture, I rely primarily upon the phenomenology, or experiential narrative, of punk girls' everyday lives. I elicited these accounts within the context of conducting participant observation in the punk scenes of four North American cities (Atlanta, Montreal, New Orleans, and San Francisco) from 1993 to 1995, conducting ethnographic interviews with forty punk girls. In the following, I explore various facets of punk girls' engagements with gender norms, including punk girls' narratives of engagement with the subculture; the construction of punk as a discourse of masculinity; punk girls' stylistic, behavioral, and discursive reconstructions of femininity; punk girls' experiences of public harassment and sexual harassment, and their strategic responses to these. I argue that these girls use the punk subculture in order to carry out resistances to varied forms of gender oppression, thereby developing stronger self-concepts in the face of adversity.