Sorcha Dallas

The recondite and often disturbing work of the Manchester-based artist ‘Linder’ (aka Linder Sterling/Linda Mulvey)- including the ‘fem-punk’ photomontages ( 1977-9) that are the subject of this essay - draws on mass media imagery and illustrates a cross-over between art, popular culture, youth subcultures and feminist politics. Linder’s work represents a small yet noteworthy feminist-inflected contribution to punk visual culture. Although it has been argued that punk is marked by ‘a strong female presence - women were musicians, fanzine editors and clothes- makers . .’ (Frith and Horne 1987:127) - discussions of punk imagery are generally confined to the more well·known work of the male protagonists, such as Jamie Reid and his scabrous graphics for the Sex Pistols. As George McKay notes: ’ Punk itself has been charted endlessly, particularly around the Sex Pistols circa 1976-77’ (1996:75). It is hoped that highlighting Under’s work will act as a corrective.

Linder received (albeit somewhat limited) attention in the late 1990s when she was discussed in relation to feminism and a renewed interest in punk. I want to elaborate on this with reference to the feminist thinking of the 1970s on popular culture, gender and representation. Moreover, by drawing on writings about Modernist photomontage, her work can be seen as a critique of the narrow gender stereotypes found in the mass media and the reified, commodity-saturated world of consumer society.

Born in Liverpool in 1954, Linder studied art and design at Manchester Polytechnic in the mid-1970s. She subsequently went on to work in a number of related fields: fine art, graphics, photography, film and music. She was chiefly influenced by punk o f the late 1970s, which ‘triggered a wave of creativity in Manchester’ (Haslam 1999:17), and radical feminism. Linder recalls: ‘For me at 16 reading [Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch] … re-arranged my molecular structure. It was fantastic. Then later there was the neat collision of my anger and frustration and punk coming along’ (O’ Brien1999:191). Other radical feminist writers who were significant for Linder were Eva Figes, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett. Although the adoption of a feminist stance meant a sense of isolation, Linder remembers: ‘Think I was the only feminist in a world of rugby clubs, prog rock and Tamla Motown’ (e-mail interview with the author, 9 November 2000) . Some of her first graphic works were for a nascent samizdat self-publishing culture, the so-called ‘small press’ (Sabin 1993:82) with its rough and ready A4 stapled publications that exploited the then new photocopier technology of the 1970s. Although having some of its roots in the 1960s counter-culture underground press, it departed from the often highly sexist publications of that decade, like Oz and International Times. Linder’s collage-style, Dadaesque designs using disparate found imagery for punk fanzines and what’s-on magazines such as the Manchester City Fun (1978-83) were informed by feminist concerns and the emergent punk DIY bricolage aesthetic, which (dis)articulated its rhetoric and diffuse social critique. Tricia Henry has noted the significance of fanzines in the constitution and dissemination of punk visual culture: In addition to providing a network of philosophical exchange within the punk tradition, the fanzines contributed another important element: the establishment of a graphic aesthetic. Like punk fashion, punk art was low budget and easily accessible. It was anti-glossy: hand-written, xeroxed, black and white (high contrast) and collage. It suggested subversion by its very appearance, especially in its shock effect (Henry 1984:32).

Punk also spawned independent record labels creating a demand for appropriate imagery. Linder produced designs for posters, flyers and record sleeves for such Mancunian bands as The Buzzcocks and Magazine, usually under various assumed names - such as Anxious Images – in conjunction with now renowned graphic designers like Malcolm Garrett (ex-Manchester Polytechnic). Perhaps the best-known example, for some a punk icon, is the sleeve for The Buzzcocks’ single ‘Orgasm Addict’ (1977), featuring a Linder photomontage of a female pin-up with a clothes iron for a head. Linder also did artwork for Tony Wilson’s influential Factory Records and Hacienda nightclub known for their Situationist-inspired marketing.

Her involvement with the independent music scene and her feminist concerns deepened with the formation of the avant-garde, quasi-punk/jazz group Ludus, which performed intermittently during 1978- 82. As the group’s confrontational lyricist and vocalist, Linder challenged the parameters of popular music and its narrow gender roles. Typical is the 1980 song ’ Anatomy Is Not Destiny’ from the Ludus album The Visit, as well as others featuring such taboo subjects as menstruation. Ludus combined eclectic experimental music with agitational performance. At one now notorious show Linder littered the Manchester Hacienda with red-coloured tampons and shocked a largely male audience by wearing a large black dildo and a dress festooned with raw meat. In the attempt to confound and foreground difference and the ‘materiality’ of the female body, there are strong parallels here with the transgressive American feminist body-performance art of the 1970s, such as that of Carolee Scheenmann and Lynda Benglis. Here one might note the latter’s controversial parodic didlo-sporting ‘pin-up’ from 1974 published in the American journal Artforum.

Linder’s varied art practices should not be seen in isolation as separate schemes, but as intertextual, complementary strategies that constitute an ongoing search for, as she put it, ‘a new vocabulary’ ( O’ Brien 1999:186) to challenge received ideas, evade the strictures of classification and easy assimilation. In 2000 Linder stated:

For me there’s connection between everything I do and have done … Categorisation of what I do has always been more of a problem for others than for myself. I can see a perfectly formed continuum between my punk photomontages of ‘76, dressing in raw meat and singing love songs in Ludus and now, making Spaghetti Westerns in Manchester.’

Linder’s photomontages (1977-9) consist of a series of untitled, small scale, mainly composite works made form mass-produced images culled from such ‘cultural monstrosities’ as advertising, women’s magazines and pornography. She recalled:

It was like doing a particular jigsaw puzzle. I had two piles of magazines – trashy men’s stuff and trashy women’s. I noticed that in both women were high profile. Men’s magazines were filled with pictures if women. I was fascinated by the fact that I as a woman was supposed to be in all these worlds (O’Brien 1999:191)

The photomontages consist of disjunctive assemblages of ill-fitting disparate parts, which present figures, on the whole ‘female’, as grotesque hybrids of truncated nudes and consumer goods set in domestic interiors (Fig.1). Linder recalled: ‘Suddenly I became Mary Shelley working on a kitchen table in Salford’ (e-mail interview with the author, 9 November 2000). They are made even more disconcerting and ‘unnatural’ by abrupt changes in scale and the juxtaposition in the same pictorial space of fragments o f dissimilar media from different genres: dingy black-and-white porn and glossy colour women’s magazines. Linder notes: ‘I wanted to mate the “G-Plan” kitchens with the pornography, see what strange breed came out’ (Savage 1993:403). One can view this conjunction and dislocation o f disparate material as a Brechtian estrangement strategy to denaturalize the images and inhibit easy consumption. Philip Hoare recalled their disconcerting effect: ‘Linder’s juxtapositions of hard·core porn and kitchen recipe shots were profoundly (and rewardingly) disturbing. They still are, when you see them in all their lurid glory’ (Hoare 1997).

The figures are comprised of domestic appliances and the abstracted, fetishized motifs of pornography and advertising- namely, torsos, made-up open lips and eyes - the metonymical signs for ‘woman’ and male desire. They highlight the pervasive objectification, commodification and fragmentation of the female form in the mass media. Linder, through deconstruction and representation, parodies and inflicts symbolic violence on the female subject posited as both consumer and commodity~sign by advertising, whereas Robert Gold man observes: ‘Individuals are portrayed as displayers of a collection of commodified surfaces, consisting o f fetishized body parts - lips, eyes, hair, legs, nails - each serviced by appropriate commodities’ (Goldman 1992: 33).

There are strong parallels here with contemporary feminist inflected photomontage work, such as that by the British artists Gee Vaucher and Cate Tate. Indeed, photomontage was equated by some with feminist art practice, and even as constituting a ‘feminist aesthetic’ (Breitling 1985: 162). Vaucher, best known for her caustic graphics for the anarcho-punk band The Crass (1978-84) also constructed ‘Frankenstein-like’ figures from fragments of dissimilar media, employing the disembodied signifiers of ‘woman’, in particular painted parted lips, to subvert mass media imagery. In a similar vein, Tate attacked consumerism and orthodox notions of femininity in pointed and sardonic postcard collages combining stereotypical images o f women and consumer goods. Linder’s work also has affinities with the photomontages of the American artist Martha Rosler, in particular the series Body Beautiful (1966-72), which first appeared in the small press, consisting of advertising images of female models overlaid with and disrupted by the fetishized motifs of pornography.

The use of such material stems from the convergence of feminist and punk reactions to the stereotypical and contradictory images of women (housewife, sex object) prevalent in the mass media o f the 1970s. Indeed, they became a major concern at this time because of their perceived central role in female subjugation. Kate Ellis, Barbara O’ Dair and Aby Tallmer noted that, ‘with the increasing feminist focus on pornography since the mid-seventies … images of women came to be seen by many feminists not as one symptom among many, but as the principal cause of women’s oppression’ (Ellis et al. 1990:15-16). So too in punk, with its revolt against established codes and values, especially the mass media’s promotion of orthodox notions of beauty, femininity and what was seen as demeaning gender roles. Poly Styrene, lead singer of the punk band Xray Spex, raged in their 1978 song ‘Identity’: ‘Do you see yourself on the TV screen? Do you see yourself in the magazines? When you see yourself does it make you scream?’

Angela Robbie has argued that feminist reactions (one might include punk here too) to mass media representations of women moved through two stages during the 1970s. A formative ‘angry repudiation stage’ in which it was:

necessary to condemn the false and objectified images of women in the mass media. Not only were these images designed to make women attractive for male consumption, they also did this by pulling women into consumer culture since to achieve this ideal it was necessary to buy an endless stream of gadgets, devices and artificial aids (McRobbie 1999:47-8)

This gave way to the more analytical ‘theory of ideology stage’, informed by Louis Althusser’s work, in which ideology is essentially seen as a social practice that naturalizes society’s dominant values and meanings (47-8). Furthermore, it interpellates, constitutes and positions agents as subjects who assume identities (consumers) through their apparent unreflective consumption of and identification with ideological forms (advertising). Moreover, in some feminist art practice of the time, Fran Lloyd also noted a ‘paradigm shift’ with a focus ‘on the systems that constructed the female rather than direct imaging’ (Lloyd 2000:40).

Attention thus shifted from censure to the dissection, analysis and subversion of mass media imagery and concomitant ideology. Indicative of this shift is Jo Spence’s survey of the mass media circa the late 1970s. She noted that women were not only depicted ‘as consumers of commodities, but … [as] commoditiies themselves’ (Spence 1978-9:31). Moreover, they ‘are continually assaulted by images of other “women” showing fragmented faces and bodies available for male pleasure’ (31). The feminist art historian Lisa Tickner in 1978 also argued:

Women’s bodies are used to sell to men and women, who are thereby encouraged to collude in their own reification … Through advertising and newspaper photographs the glamorised nude becomes accepted by both sexes as part o f the natural language of the media (Tickner 1978,238).

Linder’s view o f ‘women’ in a patriarchal consumer society is congruent with such thinking. In the 1980 Ludus song ‘Unveil’, she sings: ‘You abuse my sexuality, you take it and make it, you take it and make it … commodity, I am your property. Use me to sell man made machines, masculine dreams, use me to sell your dreams.’ Laura Mulvey reached a similar conclusion in her analysis of women as filmic spectacle for the delectation of the male gaze, and called for the destruction of this pleasure using avant-garde techniques (Mulvey 1975). One can see such an aim in the work of the 1970s feminist photography collective The Hackney Flashers:

Manipulating the image led to montage and collage. We made an image with the same visual elements as an advertisement, constructing a meaning on one hand with the use of familiar graphic style and imagery (women as glamorous, object of man’s look) and undermining it with a different ‘ad’ message (harassed mother and worker) (Hill, Kelly and Tagg 1979:81-2).

Likewise in punk, in which as Marvis Bayton notes: ‘Conventional notions of femininity were attacked and parodied by taking fetishized items of clothing and pornographic images and flaunting them back at society’ (Bay ton 1998:65). One might mention here Linder’s design for the cover of the Ludus record The Seduction (1981), featuring a surly female figure clad in a pair of fishnet stockings and suspenders overlaid with a sanitary towel; a execrable sign for males par excellence. Indeed, McRobbie noted at the time that both punks and feminists ‘often end up using similar stylish devices to upset notions o f “public propriety”’ (McRobbie 1980:48). The impudent display and detournement of pornography also took place on the fringes of the art world. For example, Genesis P-Orridge’s COUM collective, known to the adherents of the Mancunian subcultural scene, recast group member Cosei Fanni Tutti’s porno mode l work as a ‘document’ of performance art for their notorious 1976 Prostitution show held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Something analogous is arguably operating in Linder’s work. It not only represents an iconoclastic attack on the mass media’s demeaning imagery, its underpinning ideology and the commodity system, but also on male fantasies and visual pleasure. Like the aforementioned feminist work of the period, Linder’s ‘dialectical’ photomontages conflate and throw into relief the exclusive, contradictory yet paradoxically mutual worlds and narrow roles - sex object and consumer/housewife – that women must ‘inhabit’. According to Linder, her photomontages represent ‘configuration[s] of sex/consumer pathology’ (e-mail t o author, 9 March 2001). For Lucy O’ Brien, they represent ‘a disturbing comment’ on gender roles (O’Brien 1999:189).

The mise-en-scene presented is the suburban home: the affluent commodity-filled dream kitchen o r living room (Fig. 2). These gendered spaces and sanitized sites of the imbricating and reciprocating discourses of consumerism, sexless femininity and domesticity are rendered disconcerting and profane by the inclusion of abominable elements: uncanny pornographic imagery, namely the intractable libidinal body, (male) sexuality and desire (Fig. 3). Yet ironically the disruptive pornographic elements are themselves undermined and marred by their dislocation and recomposition. Faces hidden by incongruous objects hinder or negate facile consumption, identification and male scopophilic pleasure. As Linder noted: ‘Within the montage work, I had always deliberately hidden the naked women’s faces with domestic utensils and food’ (e- mail interview with the author, 9 November 2000). One can view these ‘configurations’ as recalcitrant ‘spoilers’ of mass media imagery and subject positioning, which inhibit the construction of ‘women’ as sex objects by undermining the verisimilitude and mimetic function of the photograph.

Furthermore, from a psychoanalytical perspective, fragmentation and fetishizing are seen as phallocentric processes for impletion, containment and the denial of difference. As Mary Kelly notes: In terms of representation, this denial is associated with a definite iconography of pornographic images where the man is reassured by the women’s possession of some form of phallic substitute or alternatively by the shape, the complete arrangement of her body (Kelly 1984:31). Linder’s ‘Frankenstein’ assemblages may thwart these processes thus representing anxious images, which stubbornly evoke difference and the threat of castration.

Objectification and fragmentation have also been seen as fundamental and pervasive features of capitalist society. Most notably, the Hungarian Marxist theorist George Lukacs, drawing on Karl Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism and sociologist Max Weber’s thesis that rational administration is the master narrative of the modern world, viewed objectification, or rather ‘reification’ and its bedfellow fragmentation, as stemming from the rationalization (division of labour, specialization) of mass production and society: ‘The fate of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole’ (Lukacs 1971:91). Under such a regime human beings appear as isolated, fragmented subjects/objects and social relations take on an independent, alienating ‘thing-like’ quality.

Linder’s work can be seen as representing an unmasking and a critique of the reified world of the consumer society through the deconstruction and detournement of its images. Jon Savage has compared Linder’s images with earlier visions of the consumer society, such as Richard Hamilton’s taxonomic and ’ tabular’ (Kaizen 2000) montage, ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ (1956), and concluded that hers were:

more critical than celebratory, more Heartfield than Hamilton, they were the dystopia to the Independent’s Group ‘s first, innocent embracing of the American consumer utopia that was just about to arrive in England. Twenty years later, consumerism seemed as much a prison as a liberation (Savage 199H03-4).

Linder ‘s bizarre hybrids of bodies and consumer goods picture commodity fetishism in which producers/consumers and animated commodities exchange appearances, and social relations assume, as Marx noted, ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx 1979:65). The strangeness of the scenes, the dissonant forms and structure of the photomontages highlight the spurious totality and contingency of the ’ reality’ o f consumer society. Yet Linder displays an almost Baudrillardian pessimism vis-a-vis consumerism. Her figures are surrounded by and made up of commodities. Although drawing our attention to the profusion and diffusion of the commodity form, they also perhaps suggest an ineluctable capitulation and subjection to it. As Jean Baudrillard has argued in typical hyperbolic manner: ‘As the wolf-child becomes wolf by living among them, so we are becoming functional. We are living in the period of the objects: that is, we live by their rhythm, according to their incessant cycles’ (Baudrillard 1988,29).

Some works show figures from pornographic magazines coupled to televisions and control switches or under the gaze of an oversize camera (Fig. 4), almost McLuhanite cybernetic extensions of the body, suggesting not only the pervasive nature o f the mass media, the commodification (and reification, debasement and regulation) of sexuality, the voyeurism and narcissism inherent in consumer society but also the Foucauldian surveillance society. Moreover, the televisions displace the heads of the cyborg-like figures suggesting the penetration of mass media into a reified psyche and the wholesale take-up of consumerist ideology.

Such figures and scenes are also redolent of the Situationist ‘spectacle’, the commodity saturated society of mass media diversions and passive, alienated consumers in which ‘everything that was lived directly has moved away into representation’ (Debord 1993). The cyborg-like figures also prefigure today’ s world of new media technologies and modes of consumption (video, computer games, cable television and home shopping); what has been called the ‘interactive spectacle’ (Best and Kelllner 1999), a heightened and even more pervasive and insidious form of capitalist spectacle.

Reification, fragmentation and other pernicious effects of consumerism are exposed in another composite photomontage which shows a soft porn female nude whose head is displaced by a sponge cake o f disproportionate size, making the figure a rather bizarre object for consumption, set against a kitchen amid piles of desserts and other fancy foodstuffs (Fig 5). For Roland Barthes, such mass media representations of elaborate confections and dishes constitute a mythic ‘ornamental cookery’ that denies the socio-economic realities of foodstuffs and is comprised o f ‘objects at once near and inaccessible, whose consumption can perfectly well be accomplished simply by looking’ (Barthes 1973:86). Linder here makes explicit the often subliminal connections between consumerism, eating, visual pleasure, sexuality and the demeaning labels (such as ‘cheesecake’) used to denote those women deemed sexually attractive (Clare 1985).

Moreover, the work foregrounds the often insurmountable pressures faced by women by juxtaposing in the same pictorial space contradictory roles and desires: the svelte, sexually alluring partner, dutiful housewife and the (forbidden) pleasures of eating. These conflicting demands often have harmful effects. O’Brien sees the work as alluding to eating disorders such as bulimia that frequently afflict women (O’Brien 1999:191). The work also has an iconoclastic intent, The scene is rendered illogical by disparities in scale, the photographic ‘naturalism’ of the mass media imagery is under mined and scopic pleasure, ‘the feast for the eyes’, is marred by the disconcerting nude. This is compounded by the superimposition of an oversized and intrusive phallic image of a women’s finger with a painted nail, a fetishized signifier of commodified beauty and (fe)male desire.

In addition to composite photomontages, Linder’s subversion of mass media imagery and its concomitant ideology is also achieved by the addition of one or just a few incongruous elements to a pre-existing decontextualizied single image with the original title or caption removed. These works often use cliched images taken from photo-romances. One showing a young white couple in an affectionate embrace is rendered discordant and disturbing, with masochistic overtones, through the addition of an extraneous element: an image of a dinner fork taken from advertising (Fig,6). Through its careful placing the woman is shown stabbing herself in the eyes with it, thus evoking what are seen as disabling effects: the self-delusion and blindness of those who readily subscribe to romance and domesticity.

Such incongruous additions not only undermine the photographic realism by puncturing the pictorial space and the illusion o f a seamless ‘natural’ totality, but also disrupt intended signification and reading. Walter Benjamin noted this ‘salutary’ effect: ’ Montage interrupts the context into which it is inserted’ (Benjamin 1982:28). Moreover, the absence of any supporting or contextualizing visual and linguistic texts for the production and anchorage of preferred meanings further hinders normative signification and consumption. As Barthes observed, ‘in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs: the linguistic message is one of these techniques’ (Barthes 1990:39).

This appropriation and use of existing signs as a more focused destabilizing device and a strategy of interruption (and alienation) locates this work in an expanded (Heartfieldian and Brechtian) frame. The Soviet theorist and advocate of John Heartfield’s often laconic post-Dada photomontage work, Sergei Tretyakov, argued: ‘We should not forget that a photomontage is not necessarily a montage of photographs. No - it may be a photo and a photo, a photo and text …’ (Tretyakov 1992:291). Here, instead of denoting a specific technique or form, photomontage is a signifying practice that alters the original meaning of images and the role of the artist and viewer. Rather than an auteur, the artist becomes, as Hal Foster puts it, ‘a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, and the viewer an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer of the spectacular …’ (Foster 1992:100). One can see Linder as a ‘manipulator of signs’ with an agitational intent. She has stated that her images were about ‘confrontation … [and] getting people to think’. Moreover, viewing her as such aligns her with the aforementioned deconstructive and iconoclastic montage-based practices. Indeed, for Neil Mulholland, Linder’s work ‘closely mirrored the kinds o f anti-consumerist montage produced by mail artists and feminist community photographers of the ’70s …’ (Mulholland 1998:5).

Another work uses a sentimental image of a couple walking in a woodland scene, gazing rapturously into each other’s eyes. Again the device of replacing a woman’s head with a confection is used, thus depersonalizing and objectifying her. She becomes ‘a sweet’ to be consumed. However the figure is rendered grotesque and ‘unpalatable’ as is the ideology. The unsettling nature of the photomontage is compounded by the placement of a cut-out of a woman’s red-lipped, open mouth with prominent teeth over the man’s crotch, suggesting a menstruating or bloodied post-castration vagina dentata. Also, there is an added extraneous text in the foreground: the word ‘romance’ in garish script overlays the image, augmenting the disruption and satirical intent, a typical Heartfieldian device. Moreover, the inclusion of such incongruous elements severely limits or negates the viewer’s scopophilic pleasure in the images and the potential for suturing, (fe)male identification and escapist fantasy.

These photomontages represent a feminist-inflected detournement of the ideology of romance conveyed by photo-strip romances and the mawkish covers of Mills & Boon-type romantic fiction. They correspond to early critical feminist work on gender, representation and ideology in teenage and women’s magazines of the 1970s, particularly the promotion of what was regarded as false consciousness, narrow gender roles and limited aspirations for teenage girls and women. In a study o f teen magazines of the time, Angela McRobbie noted that, in the proscriptive ideology that they promote, ‘the girl is encouraged to load all her eggs in the basket of romance and hope it pays off’ (McRobbie 1981:118).

Linder’s photomontages are a caustic attack on the mass media’s saccharine depiction and transformation of heterosexual relationships into an oppressive commodified and debased form: romance. In this, she may well have been influenced by Germaine Greer’s dissection and condemnation of romance in The Female Eunuch (1970), a formative text for the artist. Romance was also seen as complicit in the promotion of traditional femininity and consumerism. Moreover, it denied the disruptive realities of race, class and female sexuality. Indeed, when it did occur, displays of the latter were usually ‘punished’. As Ros Ballaster et al. note: ‘This is most evident in the fiction of the “True Romance” magazines, in which women who succumb to their sexual desires more often than not also succumb to severe psychological torment, illness and even death …’, with redemption only gained ‘through the acquisition and display of excessive femininity’ (Ballaster et al. 1991:12-13).

Linder’s assault on the ideology of romance is also probably in formed by punk’s demystifying intent. As Greil Marcus observed: ‘[[Punk] banished the love song: the sleeve of the Radio Star’s Songs for Swinging Lovers pictured a young couple hanging from a tree’ (Marcus 1993:77). Similar views were expressed by Linder’s confederates, The Buzzcocks, in wry songs such as ’ Fiction Romance’ (1978).

Finally, Linder’s ‘fem-punk’ photomontages can be seen as part of an agitational project informed by 1970s punk and radical feminism. Using the montage method to create grotesque scenes, they conflate and denaturalize the demeaning gender stereotypes prevalent in the mass media at the time. They also highlight the pervasive fragmentation, fetishization and reification of the female body in advertising and pornography. Her work also suggests strong parallels and affinities with contemporary feminist-inflected iconoclastic montage, especially in relation to the disruption of subject positioning and (male) visual pleasure. With its trenchant critique of the dubious ideals and illusions of the patriarchal consumer society, Linder’s highly unsettling imagery represents a small yet noteworthy feminist contribution to punk visual culture.

1 Lucy O’Brien, ‘Interview with Linder Sterling’, email interview, spring 2000.

2 Linder Sterling, quoted in Q Magazine – The 100 Best Record Covers of All Time, special issue, 2001, p. 74

3 Ibid.

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