Punk Ass Queers: Performances of the Underground in the Works of Martín Sorrondeguy

• In Event: Graphic Narratives, Music, and Democracy

Abstract

In a globalized world, sociopolitical and cultural movements enter new spaces as borders are obscured and alternate routes are explored. Weaving in and out of local, regional, and global cultures through sound, lyrics, and performance, musical subcultures such as punk rock can serve as alternative spaces where the marginalized can challenge dominant societal norms through lifestyles, belief structures, and artistic expression that cross or exist without borders. This paper explores the work of the Uruguayan-American musician, photographer, and filmmaker Martín Sorrondeguy in his hardcore-punk and queercore groups, Los Crudos and Limp Wrist, as well as in his photography books Porquería (2010) and Get Shot (2012). Sorrondeguy exposes and showcases diversity in punk scenes around the world by confronting and subverting the homogeneity, and at times exclusivity, of punk culture. His musical performances and photographs explore punk’s transnational/global nature through his own bands’ tours that took him from North to South America, Australia, Europe, and Japan. I argue, however, that through his work, Sorrondeguy constructs an “imagined” activist “community” without borders, an all-inclusive alternative space of resistance articulated in the margins of mainstream society that challenges and rejects the dominant hegemonic social structure, a liminal or third space that embraces ambiguity, transformation, and hybridity, and a space that is not defined by categories imposed by the dominant oppressive structure, but by active participants and creators of their own culture. Through abrasive messages and boundary pushing performances, Sorrondeguy’s work shows the subversive potential of a queer, heterogeneous, and transnational punk rock underground.

Author

• Sarah Dowman, University of Maryland