Means of Detection: A Critical Archiving of Black Feminism and Punk Performance

Abstract

This article recalibrates genealogies of punk by focusing on a black feminist reading of four punk performances. By spending time with Poly Styrene, Tamar-kali, M.J. Zilla, and Janelle Monáe and the sound they produce, the historical rendering of punk takes on a new shape, one that is more inclusive of women of color and the presence of black female sexualities. As a way of drawing together black feminism and punk scholarship, two separate uses of a metaphoric “black hole” are analyzed and become entangled in the act of archiving these black feminist contributions to the world of punk rock. Evelynn Hammonds attends to the “black (w)hole” trope to prompt more analysis and admission of a wider range of black female sexualities and their potential. The other, by Dick Hebdige, uses “black hole” to operate as a challenge for punk to carefully unravel the logic of origin, race, and racism. The “black (w)hole” trope pivots around two senses of “record”: the record(ing) of sound and the historical record. This trope, and its play on space, then turns on the mechanisms and performances of race, gender, and sexuality that simultaneously engage not only feminism's pasts and futures, but punk's as well. The materialization of sound and its aesthetic becomes key in this engagement with black feminism and its performances of resistance. What finally emerges is the question that Jacques Derrida came to when faced with the idea of the origin of Nature and the supplement of its presence in performance: is it possible to arrive at either an origin or a presence (even one that has been absent) when the logic of its supplement continually adds and subtracts? What then does the space of the supplement offer?