Punk DIY as Sustainable Pedagogy

I’m wrapping my PostPunk Cultures courses on the British 1980s this week. And I’m wrapping my head around

the amazing work my students did for their DIY craft projects. Our syllabus sampled fiction, poetry, film, TV, and popular music. We also read cultural analyses of subcultural style, song lyrics, historical revivalism, Black Britishness, and queerness. We watched The Slits smash a car in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, and we watched Vyvyan smash all manner of things in The Young Ones. We parsed the disconsolate punk in Michael Hofmann’s poem “Body Heat,” considered the object relations in Julian Barnes’s Metroland, plumbed the depths of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Bass Culture,” felt the frisson of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber stories. We also attended the 20th anniversary of The FEST, Gainesville’s punk and underground music weekend.

To link the course directly to the music festival and to punk’s DIY aesthetic, I designed an assignment in which students made body art they could wear to FEST 20. I wanted the DIY project to tap the bricolage aspect of punk that Dick Hebdige discusses. He notes how “the appropriated objects reassembled” by punk and other subcultural bricoleurs could turn everyday items into symbolic warfare. Punks transformed the domestic diaper pin into edgy facial fashion. One of my students sutured a ripped t-shirt with safety pins, repairing identities torn asunder by mainstream culture.

A student-turned-bricoleur deconstructed domesticity by freighting earrings with tiny household items that reflected traditional “women’s work.” Turning women’s shoulder pads inside-out, another student punked an 80s symbol of hard, corporate femininity into spiked outer-wear that would repel shoulder sobbers. Punk frontwoman Poly Styrene made a plastic bag into a musical rebuke to consumer culture. In parallel fashion, a student assembled an outer “anti-bra” from corporate lanyard ribbons.

Since the punk’s battle cry was “No future!”–and climate change has us worried about our planet’s future–I wanted to build sustainability into my DIY assignment. And so I partnered with The Repurpose Project, a creative reuse center that diverts trash from local landfills. After consulting with Repurpose staff about a price point that would give students a fairly wide choice of materials, I gave each student $7.00 to purchase items for their body art. (This was my creative way of donating to Repurpose this semester.)

Repurpose staff also suggested that I give students an additional constraint: requiring at least 2 items from the Candy Shoppe section, which displays “trash-treasure” items that usually end up in the landfill. Many of these items are plastic. My assignment allowed students the option of combining Repurpose items with materials they already had on hand. For example, they might ‘punkify’ a vest, or a glove, or pair of shoes. After assembling their body art, students submitted photos + a 250-350 word Maker Statement. Some students chose to wear their body art to FEST 20.

In our informal feedback session in class, students found my DIY Body Art assignment as much of an outlier as I did. This is not the kind of thing students expect to do in an English Department class. They enjoyed making something with their hands instead of on their screens for a change. My students agreed that doing punk gave them a fuller sense of the texts we were studying. The project also got them out into our community, and it got them thinking about repurposing as a way to reduce waste. Some found that the DIY project brought a material sense to their writing process that was proving useful. These projects helped me to see how punk can be a sustainable and resourceful practice that we can take into our classrooms–and into our future. – MB

(Re)sources:
All student work published by permission.
Kayla Conde, The Anti-Bra. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Chandler Mordecai, Anti-Domesticated Earrings. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Vix Gutierrez. Don’t Lean on Me Shoulder Pads. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. (1979. Routledge, 1987).
Roy Udeh-Ubaka, Caged Heart. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.