“We’re Only Monsters”: Punk Bodies and the Grotesque in 1970s Northern Ireland

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. These young people signalled their participation in the subculture by adopting a dress style which, at the time, was considered shocking. Indeed, punk bodies were interpreted by observers and constructed by punks themselves in terms that evoked the grotesque, the abject and the monstrous. Such bodies were also a common feature in punk iconography and appeared in punk rock songs. In this paper I aim to show how Northern Irish punks, by displaying and celebrating these bodily characteristics in a society where they were generally used to identify and describe the “other” in a sectarian framework, threatened to disturb order and encouraged or at least enabled the transgression of gender and sectarian boundaries.