In a 1977 punk rock classic, Poly Styrene, lead singer of X-Ray Spex, produced her classic wail of teen girl outrage: "Some people say little girls should be seen and not heard," she whispered, "but I say . . . ," and here she went from a whisper to a scream, "oh bondage up yours!" In her music and in her personal style, Poly Styrene signaled her absolute refusal of the bondage she associated with "natural femininity"; she wore Day-Glo clothes in bright and unnatural colors and fabrics, and her teeth were encased in heavy braces as if to signify her indifference to the injunction on girls to be pretty or nice, sugar or spice. X-Ray Spex's songs called for liberation from the bondage of gender and consumerism, and they did so by making almost unbearable sounds. While few punk girls would ever lay claim to the label "feminist," the content of their assault on conventional femininity was often quite similar to feminist critiques of gender. However, punk allowed for a different trajectory of rebellion than feminism did. While strong girls, subcultural forms like punk and riot grrl have generated queer girls, often queer tomboys with queer futures. The 1970s was both the decade of punk and the decade of the tomboy film; this period witnessed the rise of feminism and the development of gay and lesbian pride; in the 1970s, we might say, great social change produced the hope that things could be different for girls. But the hope of the 1970s has not necessarily materialized into a better world for the cross-identified girl. In this essay I trace the evolution of two different models of rebellious girlhood: both have been labeled "tomboy," but one is linked securely to femininity and heterosexuality while the other is tied precariously to masculinity and queerness. Despite the rise of feminism and the recognition of the dangers posed by conventional femininity, I will argue, we hesitate to cultivate female masculinity in young girls.

The subculture of 1970s punk rock, especially in England, offered girls like me a refuge from femininity. From about the age of fourteen until the end of my grammar school days four years later, I embraced punk rock culture as if it were a life raft in the high seas of adolescence. Punk allowed me to dance wildly, dress in scruffy hand-me-downs, mess up my hair, and scowl a bit. It provided a barrier between me and conventional girlhood and gave me a loud and rebellious language for my outrage. Although it was not completely clear to me at the time, my own brand of adolescent rage was fueled by the demands made on me at school and out in the world to be a girl in conventional ways. Punk music and style countered those demands with an invitation to be different and to make sense of that difference. For many tomboys, punk was an opportunity to avoid the strictures of femininity that bound girlhood to the safety of domesticity; indeed, the ubiquitous safety pin that adorned many a punk outfit, for example, symbolized the misuse and indeed abuse of that household item. Within the outfits of punks, the safety pin was transformed from a marker of rational utility to a symbol of useless and totally unsafe fashion. Punk allowed tomboys to extend tomboyism into adolescence; punk gave us permission to be ambiguous about gender in our unisexual punk outfits, and, of course, in relation to the music, it allowed us to scream and shout and make noise and to finally be heard: "Some people say little girls should be seen and not heard, but I say . . ."

While "punk" tends to be the name we give to the rogue male who embodies a masculine refusal of socialization, when associated with girls it has a wholly different set of connotations. The punk girl marks her difference through indifference and takes her rebellion seriously as a political statement rather than just an individualistic stand against adulthood. Although punk rock of the 1970s did not really sustain extended interest in gender politics or sexual politics, it did provide a subcultural context in which girls could be boys and femininity could be totally rejected. Cultural studies of punk have not generally paid too much attention to the participation of girls. This has much to do with the fact that, as Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber note, the very term subculture "has acquired such strong masculine overtones." Accordingly, girls tend to be viewed as girlfriends or fans within the subculture rather than as agents, participants, and performers. If it is true that the term subculture has acquired "strong masculine overtones," then it surely makes sense to look for masculinity within girl subcultures; when girls in punk are studied, however, it is never in the context of female masculinity. The masculine girl, moreover, often functions as a lone outsider rather than as part of an elaborate subcultural group. She may be the only girl in her group to ride a motorcycle, to play boys' sports, or to dress in male clothing. In this essay I want to extend the label of punk beyond its 1970s subcultural context and make it into a marker for a particular form of tomboyism, one marked by female masculinity, noisy political rebellion, and the refusal of compulsory heterosexuality. Punk, in this essay, signifies the affirmation of masculine tomboyism.

Tomboyism usually describes an extended childhood period of female masculinity. If we are to believe general accounts of childhood behavior, some degree of tomboy behavior is quite common for girls and does not give rise to parental fears. Because comparable cross-identification behaviors in boys do often give rise to quite hysterical responses, we tend to believe that female gender deviance is much more tolerated than male gender deviance. I am not sure that tolerance in such matters can be measured, or that responses to childhood gender behaviors necessarily tell us anything concrete about the permitted parameters of adult male and female gender deviance. Tomboyism tends to be associated with a "natural" desire for the greater freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys. Very often it is read as a sign of independence and self-motivation. It may even be encouraged to the extent that it remains comfortably linked to a stable sense of a girl identity. Tomboyism is punished, however, where and when it appears to be the sign of extreme male identification (taking a boy's name or refusing girl clothing of any type) and where and when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence.

Teenage tomboyism presents a problem and tends to be subject to the most severe efforts toward reorientation. We could say that there are at least two marked forms of tomboyism, feminine and masculine, and that tomboyism is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent; as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl. Gender conformity is pressed on all girls, not just tomboys. This is where it becomes hard to uphold the notion that male femininity presents a greater threat to social and familial stability than female masculinity. Female adolescence represents the crisis of coming of age as a girl in male-dominated society. If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage (much celebrated in Western literature in the form of the bildungsroman) and an ascension to some version (however attenuated) of social power, for girls adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression. It is in the context of female adolescence that the tomboy instincts of millions of girls are remodeled into compliant forms of femininity.

The fact that some girls do emerge at the end of adolescence as masculine women is quite amazing. The growing visibility and indeed respectability of lesbian communities to some degree facilitates the emergence of more masculine women. But as even a cursory survey of popular cinema and literature confirms, the image of the tomboy is tolerated only within a narrative of blossoming womanhood; within such a narrative, tomboyism represents a resistance to adulthood itself rather than to adult femininity. Tomboy identities are conveyed as benign forms of childhood identification as long as they evince acceptable degrees of femininity and appropriate female aspiration, and as long as they promise to result in marriage and motherhood.

Many tomboy narratives are about the coercion of the masculine girl and the process that transforms her from boy to woman. For example, in both the novel and film versions of the classic tomboy narrative, The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, tomboy Frankie Addams fights a losing battle against womanhood, and the text locates womanhood or femininity as a crisis of representation that confronts the heroine with unacceptable life options. While the film version, as I will discuss later, dramatizes Frankie's sense of her own freakishness in relation to the confining social relations of the American South, the novel weaves Frankie's tale quite clearly through multiple other narratives of belonging and membership. This novel is all the more remarkable for the fact that it emerged out of the repressive cultural climate of the American South of the 1950s. Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, and she grew up with a sense of her own freakishness and inability to fit the mold of conventional femininity. She was often called "weird," "freakish," and "queer," and she felt herself to be outlandish and different. McCullers's girl hero Frankie Addams is similarly preoccupied with her own freakishness, which is depicted most often as a lack of commonality with other girls and sometimes as a form of female masculinity.

In the novel, as her brother's wedding day approaches Frankie pronounces herself mired in a realm of unbelonging, outside the symbolic partnership of the wedding but also alienated from almost every category that might describe her. In a haunting description of tomboy alienation, McCullers writes: "It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie was an unjoined person who hung around in doorways and she was afraid."

McCullers positions Frankie on the verge of adolescence ("when Frankie was twelve years old") and in the midst of an enduring state of being "unjoined": "She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world." While childhood in general may qualify as a period of "unbelonging," for the boyish girl arriving on the doorstep of womanhood, her status as "unjoined" marks her out for all manner of social violence and opprobrium. As she dawdles in the last light of childhood, Frankie has become a tomboy who "hung around in doorways and . . . was afraid."

As a genre, the tomboy film, as I will show later, suggests that the categories available to women and girls for gendered and sexual identification are simply inadequate. The tomboy film dramatizes the plight of both masculine and feminine tomboys. In her novel, McCullers shows that the inadequacy of gender categories is a direct result of the tyranny of language—a structure that fixes people and things in place artificially but securely. Frankie tries to change her identity by changing her name: "Why is it against the law to change your name?" she asks Berenice. Berenice answers: "Because things accumulate around your name." Without names, confusion would reign and "the whole world would go crazy." But Berenice also acknowledges that the fixity conferred by names traps people into many different identities, racial as well as gendered: "We all of us somehow caught. . . . And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught." Frankie thinks that naming represents the power of definition, and name changing confers the power to reimagine identity, place, relation, and even gender. "I wonder if it is against the law to change your name," says Frankie. "Or add to it . . . Well I don't care . . . F. Jasmine Addams."

Psychoanalysis posits a crucial relationship between language and desire, such that language structures desire and expresses therefore both the fullness and the futility of human desire—full because we always desire, futile because we are never satisfied. Frankie in particular understands desire and sexuality to be the most regimented forms of social conformity—we are supposed to desire only certain people and only in certain ways. But her desire does not work that way, and she finds herself torn between longing and belonging. Because she does not desire in conventional ways, Frankie seeks to avoid desire altogether. Her struggle with language, her attempts to remake herself through naming and to remake the world with a new order of being are ultimately heroic but unsuccessful. McCullers's pessimism has to do with a sense of the overwhelming "order of things," an order that cannot be affected by the individual, which works through things as basic as language and forces nonmembers into memberships they cannot fulfill.

In this essay, unbelonging characterizes a queer girl identity, the punk tomboy, which can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity. I want to produce carefully here a model of youthful female masculinity that calls for new and self-conscious affirmations of different gender taxonomies, taxonomies flexible and varied enough to recognize the masculinity of young girls. The affirmation of alternative girl masculinities may begin not by subverting masculine power or taking up a position against it but by turning a blind eye to conventional masculinities and refusing to engage. Frankie Addams, for example, constitutes her rebellion not in opposition to the law but through indifference to it: she recognizes that it might be against the law to change one's name or add to it, but she has a simple response to such illegal activity: "Well, I don't care." For the tomboy, the girl with no real social power of her own, the preadult with no access to the agency required to bring about social change, power may adhere in different forms of refusal: "Well, I don't care."

I want to trace here the meanings that attach to preadult female masculinities, the logics used to explain them, and the measures taken to dispel all cross-identification during puberty. I also want to examine the ways in which youthful female masculinity articulates itself over and against the many strategies used to silence it and the ways in which a rogue or punk tomboyism might be cultivated among girls. This punk tomboyism, I will argue, constitutes a pathologized form of girl identification that parents, counselors, and psychologists find aberrant and try to repress. Social science studies of tomboyism use the feminist language of "androgyny" to refer to the versions of which they approve. Androgyny within this literature represents a healthful alternative to the excesses of gender polarization. But androgyny, I will propose, does not really describe the gender identity of the punk tomboy. When discussions of tomboyism are framed in relation to androgyny, the masculinity of the young girl is once again discounted.

While much of the scholarly work on tomboyism has appeared in social science journals, there are many different zones of representation to which one might look for alternative images of the tomboy, including children's literature, films, and TV specials. I will be drawing my examples of alternative depictions of tomboyism from a set of films made between 1953 and 1986 that constitute the genre of the tomboy film. I will also examine closely a 1995 TV special on tomboyism that proposed to examine boyish girls, their desires, and their potential futures. This program examined head-on the great anxiety generated by the prospect of lesbian futures for tomboy girls. At the same time, the researchers and interviewers in the program were unable to identify any bad effects of early cross-identification among girls. Ultimately, I will be asking questions about how we might cultivate an aesthetic of masculinity among young girls, how we might encourage punk tomboyism, and how we might theorize relations between preadult and adult female masculinity.