Giroux and Simon write about punk:
…punk culture’s lived appropriation of the everyday as a refusal to let the dominant culture encode and restrict the meaning of daily life suggests the first instance of a form of reistance that links play with the reconstruction of meaning. This particular popular form, filled as it is with abortive hopes, signifies within bourgeouis culture a “tradition of the scorned.” That is, punk culutre (or for that matter any lived relation of difference that doesn’t result in dominance or infantilization) reuptures the dominant order symbolically and refuses to narrate with permission. It is scored by the bourgeoisie because it not only challenges the dominant order’s attempt to suppress all differences through a discourse that asserts the homogeneity of the social domain but presents the possibility of a social imagination in which a politics of democratic difference offers up forms of resistence in which is becomes possible to rewrite, rework, recreate, and reestablish new discourses and cultural spaces that revitalize rather than degrade public life. Whether conscious or not, punk culture partly expresses social practices that contain the basis for interrogating and struggling to overthrow all those forms of human behavior in which differences becomes the basis for subjecting human beings to forms of degredation, enslavement, and exploitation. Of course, there is more at work in punk culture than the affirmation of difference; there is also teh difference of affirmation, that is, affirmation becomes the precondition for claiming one’s experience as a legitimate basis for developing one’s own voice, place, and sense of history. (168)
Giroux, Henry A., and Roger I. Simon. “Popular Culture as a Pedagogy of Pleasure and Meaning.“ Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. 2nd ed. Henry A. Giroux. New York: Routledge, 2005. 157-184.
