Browsing by Subject "punk"

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    Sounding Orientalism: Radical Sounds and Affects of Asian American Women Who Rock
    (2021-07) Liu, Runchao
    This dissertation explores the radical and queer voices of Asian American women rock musicians and influencers who are often sidelined in scholarship on American popular music by articulating local, national, and transnational forces on racial formation, musical affects, and Asian American experiences. It unsettles the idea that Orientalized aesthetics and affects are tools only for nefarious agendas by exploring how a number of Asian American women artists transform musical Orientalism into a political form of art. In so doing, I argue that these musicians devise novel and socially efficacious ways to effectively debunk the myth of Asian American apoliticism. Over the course of four chapters, my case studies range from the “oriental riff” to post-punk’s postmodern experimentations, from the first notable Asian-women-fronted rock band Fanny to recent musical ventures like Japanese Breakfast and the Drag-On Ladies, and from musical movements such as women’s music, queercore, and riot grrrl to Los Angeles’ Chinatown and Little Tokyo. Through articulating the relationship between sound, race, and affect with these case studies, I contend that the sounds, affective inscrutability, and diasporic sensibilities of Asian America have powerfully redefined U.S. radicalism and challenged hegemonic formulations of what musical activism looks like, feels like, and sounds like.
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    TV Party, New Wave Theatre, and Subcultural Television in the 1970s and 1980s
    (2016-02) Stiffler, Brad
    This dissertation offers a discursive and cultural history of subcultural television organized around detailed engagements with two television programs from the late 1970s and early 1980s, New York City's TV Party and Los Angeles’ New Wave Theatre. Utilizing surviving episodes and promotional materials, interviews with creators and participants, reviews and articles from popular and underground publications, and other historical sources, I present these programs as inimitable experiments in both the theory and practice of subcultural television, a diverse set of aesthetic and cultural practices aimed at creating marginal forms of collectivity through televisual technology. To provide context, I locate these shows during a particularly charged moment of U.S. cultural history that saw the simultaneous emergence of alternative medium forums like cable access and subcultural social formations like punk. Conventionally, subcultures are conceived as oppositional constructs existing outside the co-opting grasp of the mainstream, inherently hostile to mass-cultural mediums like television. However, for a few fleeting years on the televisual frontiers of 1970s and 1980s cable, a small collection of artists, musicians, performers, punks, and weirdos set out to produce subculture both on and through TV.