Change Is Sound: Resistance and Activism in Queer Latinx Punk Rock

Abstract

Change Is Sound explores the roles punk ethos, discourses, and collectivism play in creating resistant practices within queer US Latinx punk communities since the 1970s. My research engages critically with the fields of contemporary Latinx cultural studies and hemispheric queer studies to elucidate new perspectives on the emerging critical category of Latinx, to challenge stagnant narratives of resistance and activism in queer communities of color in the US, and to provide a framework for how resistant practices are being defined and constructed in the present. Furthermore, my study decenters the “white riot” narrative of punk that excludes and erases diversity by categorizing the subculture as a straight, white, male, suburban, middle-class, youth phenomenon. My study achieves this decentering by focusing on intersectional, transnational, and transgenerational subjectivities represented by the contributions of queer Latinx punk artists. By diversifying the perspectives and experiences represented and highlighting how these artists forge connections to larger histories of resistant practices in queer communities of color in the US and transnationally, I demonstrate how underrepresented populations expand punk’s emancipatory potential. Specifically, my research shows how resistant practices such as performative and activist interventions and the creation of online collective revisionist writings present a foundation from which queer Latinx and other marginalized communities negotiate power, hegemony, and resistance within the contemporary context of precarity and oppression under neoliberalism and capitalist globalization.