‘We Can't Help It If We 're From Florida’: A discursive analysis of the 1980s Gainesville punk subculture

Abstract

This thesis undertakes a discursive analysis of the 1980s Gainesville punk subculture. As such, it performs a semiotic analysis and close reading to both the textual and visual discursive production of the scene, in the form of flyers, fanzines and liner notes, in order to, on the one hand, examine the ways in which such production was made to signify disorder, and, on the second hand, to illuminate the identity representations that ultimately constructed the Gainesville punk identity. For this reason, it employs the concept of intersectionality in an effort to consider identity representations of gender, race and class as interconnected and overlapping rather than isolated. Finally, it investigates the links between Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, on the one hand, and the bodily performativity and corporeal manifestations of the Gainesville punk identity, on the other. Can the punk identity, within its capacity to disturb order, rid the ‘subject’ of its discursive constraints?