Enduring Attachments: On the Temporalities of Punk

The chapter explores how three authors—Alice Bag, Michelle Cruz Gonzales, and Shawna Potter— interrogate a punk temporality that involves personal experiences of ageing, recollection, and enduring attachment. Their memoirs document ongoing desires to transform punk with new stories that remake its past and future and these works also explore the strange temporalities of punk and its ever-shifting relations of power, particularly those that intersect with race, gender, and age. This chapter considers how recollections of one’s salad days create a curious temporality that can shift punk culture in the present by insisting upon its capacity for difference; understanding a punk temporality that affects the past and present simultaneously in ways that generate future frictions; exploring how a punk temporality is rooted in understanding local and historical differences in punk culture that characterize shifting expressions of power and privilege that have never been linear or uniform and which remain volatile in the present; understanding how ageing in punk has shifted from a linear conception of time marked by age to a notion of temporality that can address the persistent present inaugurated by digital memory that leads multiple generations to now share title to the subculture in ways that fundamentally alter assumptions about ageing, influence, and temporality.