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Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture, by Lauraine LeBlanc. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. 286 pp. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8135-2650-7. $20.00 paper. ISBN: 0-8135-2651-5.
BROOK BOLEN North Carolina State University [email protected]
Sociological theories about subcultures traditionally focus on males and masculinity. Research on the negative effects of gender socialization on girls largely presents girls as passive victims who lack the opportunities or the power to (re)define gender for themselves. What happens when these two areas converge? The result is LeBlanc's Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture, a book that analyzes both teenage girls' participation in the punk subculture and girls' active construction of gender.
In this original work, LeBlanc explores how punk girls negotiate and resist hegemonic notions of femininity in the predominantly masculine punk subculture. She asks: What influences some teenage girls to become involved in the punk subculture? How do punk girls negotiate female gender norms within a masculine subculture?
Methodologically, she employs both an "ethnography of resistance" (ethnographic field...