Introduction

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approaches, which place artistic value on participation, have a long history in community organising and cultural production. From the 1970s, punk offered a new subcultural context in which DIY approaches were revisited, reinvented and reinvigorated.

Recent turns to intersectional feminist, queer, trans, anti-racist and disability politics have resulted in some punks questioning whether the value placed on participation might be exclusionary. In numerous collectives and spaces, this has resulted in a rethinking of DIY approaches to community development, arising from a growing recognition of the need for active work to empower marginalised groups.

In this chapter we show how queer feminist approaches to punk politics enable DIY collectives to prefigure the creative communities they wish to see. Analysing a study of UK punk against literature on prefiguration and community arts, we highlight how queer feminist punks can disrupt the dominant norms that marginalise their cultural contributions, while also facilitating the creation of new spaces, community groups and cultural artefacts.

Prefigurative social action

In this chapter, we position queer feminist punk organising as a form of prefigurative social action. As a concept, ‘prefiguration’ has been used to examine the politics and practices of predominantly leftist movements through the 20th and 21st centuries, especially in the Global North. Broadly defined, it describes ‘activities that embody and enact the way in which one envisions a future (better) world’ (Guerlain and Campbell, 2016: 221). Activists and social theorists position a wide variety of ventures as prefigurative, from 19th-century anarchism (Boggs, 1977), to US anti-WWII pacifism in the 1940s (Polletta and Hoban, 2016), to community gardens in East London (Guerlain and Campbell, 2016), to the Indignados and Occupy movements of the early 2010s (Burgum, 2019).

In 1977 Carl Boggs used ‘prefiguration’ to distinguish between ‘old’ and ‘New’ left politics in Europe and the United States. In the context of rising cold war tensions, growing suspicion of Soviet communism and/or socialism and the authoritarianism of many Communist Parties, the New Left emerged in the late 1950s. It ‘affirmed the importance of generalising the struggles for self-management beyond the point of production’ (Boggs, 1977: 119).