Desires Bound with Briars: Freedom, Pleasure and Feminism

Abstract

The Slits and the Raincoats were perhaps the two most emblematic female post-punk bands in Britain. Their diverse backgrounds and styles resist equivalence on the basis of sex and gender alone. In the late 1970s, The Slits’ Ari Up was a dreadlocked Bavarian teenager and the extroverted daughter of a wealthy media heiress, for instance, whilst the Raincoats’ Ana da Silva was a contemplative Portuguese émigré in her late 20s. Yet productive comparisons can be made, and as women situated within British post-punk, all shared a formation.¹ In this instance, though, habitus does not play the same unifying role as in previous chapters. Instead the argument is situated in relation to the difficult and fragmentary situation of the women’s movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and its partial incorporation by the dominant culture. In doing so, I aim to historically contextualise the two bands in a way that has only been gestured towards so far, exploring interwoven questions of agency, pleasure, gendered consumerism, and women’s engagement with cultural production during Britain’s shift to neoliberalism.