Sighting the Sound: A Latina Punk Challenge to Musical Memory

Characterized by ambiguous sexual energy and resistance to male domination and objectification, the visual idiom of punk rock communicated feminist prospects through the performance of fashion. This essay interprets the creative agency of Alice Bag, Marina “Del Rey” Muhlfriedel, Trudie “Plunger” Arguelles-Barret, and Helen “Hellin Killer” Roessler as Latina and Hispanic sono-spatial artists in the early days of L.A.’s punk subculture. Situating the performance practices of Hispana (Iberian) women alongside the Latina (hemispheric Latin American) artists, L.A. punk is situated within a Spanish-American borderlands matrix of meaning, where non–Western European roots of women in punk gain coherence as a specifically bordered set of historical circumstances. By embodying musical performativity as creators of a relational theatre of musical experience, the study asserts that women punk fans redefined how alternative music was generated, circulated, and consumed.