UCLA

Constellations of the Abject: Brown, Queer, and Feminist Punks in Los Angeles significantly contributes to queer, feminist, Latinx cultures by examining expressive cultures and placemaking in Southeast Los Angeles by queer and feminist Chicanx/Latinx punks. My work moves beyond expected places Latinx cultural production to show how spatial, affective, and sonic practices shape the process of placemaking for communities that often feel out of “place.” Drawing on the theories of space (Handhart 2013), sound (Vargas 2014, Vazquez 2013), and abjection (Alvarado 2018), this dissertation explores how punks use the shared affect of abjection to create community as an alternative form of placemaking in Southeast Los Angeles. Centering Southeast Los Angeles (SELA), CA as the nexus, a community that is defined by the scarcity of jobs, lack of opportunities, bad air, and perceived lack of beauty. Yet, embracing the very qualities that aremade abject and pathologized by gendered, racialized, classed politics of respectability is precisely what brings together queer and feminist punks in SELA to produce new forms of belonging affective communities.

Taking up the task of tracing brown queer and feminist punk genealogies of SELA, through the use of oral histories, ethnography, participant observation, archival research, and visual analysis of performance to answer the following: how does the affect of abjection and unintelligibility form communities? How do archival practices work to preserve the disaffected and excess of marginalized punk communities of SELA? What insights might we gain about queer and feminist punk communities by paying attention to space and sound? Lastly, how do intergenerational collaborations produce knew knowledges of gender, sexuality, and brownness for punks from Southeast Los Angeles? My focus on Latinx punk placemaking centers how queers and feminists Chicanx/Latinx punks collectively create communities through sound by precisely embracing the undesirable qualities of living in neglected neighborhoods. Through community formation queer and feminist Latinx/Chicanx punks contest gentrification, form community.