Abject Outcasts: Defining Oneself as an Outsider in the Northern Ireland Punk Subculture

Abstract

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when cross-community contact was relatively uncommon in Northern Ireland, the punk subculture attracted both young Catholics and Protestants who temporarily set aside their political, religious and class differences. This set punks outside the mainstream of the wider culture. But not only did this behaviour mark them out, punk discourse sought to present the subculture as being anti-establishment and distant from the mainstream. This paper seeks to discuss some of the features of punk which enabled participants in Northern Ireland to deliberately cast themselves as outsiders, notably by discussing the role that the abject and horror played in distancing punk from the dominant culture and how this divergence from the mainstream was entrenched by constructing and maintaining strict boundaries between the punk subculture and the wider society.