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static "spectacle." This spectacle, first outlined by Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle, is a capitalist stasis characterized by a politics of boredom (interchangeable images, repetition, monologue) and based in an "expert" media culture of abundant commodity and conspicuous consumption. Both the situationist and the punk try to counter the spectacle and the sense of separation from action and from others it induces, by creating "situations""constructed encounters and creatively lived moments in urban settings, instances of transformed everyday life" (Wollen, p. 31). Montages, broadsheets, posters, manifestos, and slogans are designed to pro-

 

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voke "scandal and abomination"the situationist and the punk become, through situations, "a reproach to your happiness" (Genet, p. 22). Now, duly reproached, the spectator should, in Brecht's terms, "take up a position toward the action." In this attempt to "put an end to dead time" and to "get out of the twentieth century'' (Gray, p. 5), passive becomes active and the spectacle's thrall is broken. It becomes clear from Greil Marcus' 1989 book, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, and Jon Savage's 1991 book, England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, that in the breaking of this thrall, the punk persona is centered on a performance of a reinvented identity based on a rejection of expertise, of ideology, and of audience, while the textual style of the punk centers on détournement (montage) and on the transitory, revolting gesture.
Feminist-Punk: Collision/Collusion
"Feminist" best articulates, then, the politics of Fay Weldon and her texts; "punk" best articulates the style of her personae and her writing. Weldon both is a feminist-punk and writes feminist-punkthis best describes the manner of her cultural intervention. It is through the creation of a punk persona and through a punk style of language that Fay Weldon attempts, in her novels, to get out of identity categories, particularly those defining sex, sexuality, gender, and feminism.
In many ways, such a coupling seems bound to have happened, sooner or later. Punk has, after all, been used to crack the code of other literary texts. For instance, David E. James uses punk in his analysis of the literary scene in Los Angeles in an article called "Poetry /Punk/Production: Some Recent Writings in LA." Neil Nehring unashamedly collides Graham Greene with the Sex Pistols in a PMLA piece called "Revolt into Style." Most recently, Larry McCaffery, in "The Artists of Hell," has defined Kathy Acker's fiction as "fiction to slam dance by" (p. 228). My essay proposes that such slam dancing may be done in the name of feminism and, particularly, in the name of Fay Weldon.
This collision between feminism and punk produces more than a wreck, however. The interaction, however brief, changes the direction and momentum of both feminism and punk, defamiliarizes each, exposes each's inner workings. The collusion becomes apparent as an understanding between the two parties is revealed, and we realize that something can indeed be Johnny Rotten in the state of feminism. The impact reveals a pact. This is a pact that, most recently, the 1990s subcultural phenomenon of the Riot Grrrls has recognized. Erratically organized around punk bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and the tastily and not-so-tastily named

 

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Cheesecake and Chicken Milk, these grrrls "coopt the values and rhetoric of punk ... in the name of feminism" (White, LA Weekly, p. 34). They realize that the interests of feminism and punk do, in fact, surprisingly enough, coincide. Feminist-punk. Let's dance.
III
A Punk Persona: A Feminist with an Attitude
If cyberpunk is, as Stewart Brand suggests, "technology with attitude," feminist-punk is, most emphatically, "feminism with attitude." Such "attitude'' is particularly revealed, as we shall see, in transitory, revolting gestures, but also in the way the feminist-punk fashions her self in