DIY Queer Feminist (Sub)cultural Resistance in the UK

This thesis examines the role of music, power and DIY (sub)culture involved in resistance to hegemonic discourses of gender, sexuality and feminism (re)circulated within dominant society and culture. In particular, attention is focused upon young peoples' experiences within riot gml and contemporary queer feminist music (sub )cultures situated within the fabric of social change and protest cultures of contemporary Britain. A critical interdisciplinary approach and set of qualitative methodologies were employed to understand music as collective social action that incorporated (i) oral histories of British riot gml, (ii) an auto/ethnography of DIY queer feminist (sub)culturallife, and (iii) case studies of queer and feminist amateur music-makers. I argue that music provides participants with a set of vital spatial, emotional and sonic resources to provoke radical political imaginaries, identities, communities and life-courses into being. In the context of a neo-liberal post-feminist consumer society, the creation of DIY queer feminist music (sub )culture attempts to resist the disarticulation of feminism and the dominant regulation of gender and sexual diversities. These social practices offer critical insights into the continuities of the (sub)cultural resistance of girls, young women and queers throughout modem history and demands the recognition of (sub)cultural resistance as crucial to British feminism within the wider transformations of protest and activism in contemporary society.