UP IN ARMS:
WEAPONIZING ANGER & TAKING ACTION Punk is often defined by its conventionally masculine elements—the speed, anger, and aggression of its sound and look alike—and doing so keeps the narrative centered on white males. But it is not that women and/ or people of color do not experience this same rage, it is only that they are not allowed to express it. Violence enacted and anger articulated by white men is more socially acceptable than that of women and people of color. Even rape is normalized as an outlet for male libido and aggression, and the conviction that “boys will be boys” epitomizes this casual cultural mainstreaming of fundamentally anti-social behaviors. White men who act violently are positioned alternately as victims of consumer culture, of the country’s mental health crisis, of their bad mothers, of social isolation. Think Tyler Durden and Patrick Bateman, think Ed Gein and Norman Bates, think of the mass shooter profile. Meanwhile, angry and alienated Black men are deemed wild animals or diagnosed with a racial urban pathology, Black women are reduced to and dismissed as stereotypes, Asian women are limited by orientalist notions of natural subservience and politeness. For all women, anger is not lady-like, it is unbecoming, it is unhinged. And while the mainstream story of punk likes to focus on its white male artists, the subculture does create a space for these marginalized communities to sublimate a righteous rage. The longstanding tradition of gender-relations dictates that men do things while women have things done to them. And for a woman to be angry or take action is to violate her role as passive object in this power dynamic. In her examination of the raperevenge plot of stories like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Johanna Schorn argues that the “common thread” between fictional and media representations of sexual violence is “the passive role it relegates women to.” She posits that women “are passive victims of the violence that is enacted on their
bodies, first through the actual rape, and second through the mechanisms of a rape culture that generates responses (from disbelief to vilifications).” What’s notable in Schorn’s argument is her equation of the immediate physical violence of sexual assault with the rhetorical violence that follows. To silence—by censoring or discrediting—victims of violence is to both perpetuate the myth of submission that underpins a rape culture and further divest women of their autonomy. If we (and we should) see sexual violence as a microcosm of structural oppression, then we can understand retaliation against individual perpetrators as retributive justice. And so the story goes that men are pushed toward aggression by a regrettable conf luence of genetics and social factors, and they can thus be positioned as the real victims of their own violence; women and particularly women of color, on the other hand, possess every right to be angry, yet they are still pushed into silence and inaction. Radical militant feminism posits a solution to this cultural narrative. When those in power continue to enact violence against the exploited classes, violence becomes a legitimate, if not necessary, means of resistance for those in the margins. In 1981, writer and activist Audre Lorde delivered the keynote speech at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference. Her presentation, “The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding To Racism,” offers a blistering response to the racism within the circles of white feminism. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being,” Lorde urges, “Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”
