ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the potentiality of punk ethics, discourses, and collectivism in the creation of resistant and activist practices in order to explain how resistance is being defined and constructed in the present. Through an analysis of Alice Bag’s memoir, Violence Girl: From East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story (2011), I demonstrate how the practices and narratives of resistance specific to Latinx punk communities at once complement and challenge the norms and constraints of traditional punk ethos, of dominant Latina/o culture, and of mainstream society. Alice Bag is an especially interesting figure because her marginal subjectivity and outsider perspective present a challenge to dominant narratives that exclude and erase diversity within the punk subculture. I analyze how Alice Bag constructs an intersectional and trans-generational subjectivity through memoir to counter the oppressions at many levels of society that queer Latinx punks experience. In the Latina/o tradition, she uses writing as a tool for resistance to create and build collective consciousness among marginalized subjects. While her tenure in The Bags ended almost four decades ago, punk has forever left a mark on Alice Bag in the form of an alternative, subcultural education. Alice Bag is a revolutionary pioneer in challenging stereotypes, defying rules, and continuing to pave new ways for queer Latinx punks and other marginalized subjects to negotiate their positions, tap into, and help construct an archive of alternative knowledge.
