This unfortunate classification at the hands of rock journalism and music media outlets misinterpreted the artists’ cultural criticisms as simply anti-authority and generation X angst, when in fact, many artists posed serious challenges to late 20th-century conventions of gender, sexuality, and feminism. The history of grunge and the meaning of its musical expression has suffered as a result of its early categorization as a hyper-masculinized and hetero-sexualized rock genre. While different attendees find different pleasures in participating in PMK-consideration is given especially to women who perform songs written from an aggressive masculinist perspective-they are nonetheless collectively informed by the specific musical, performative, generic, historical, and gendered configurations of abjection outlined in the article. Finally, and most crucially, the regular participants at PMK utilize the terms of abject in their own speech and in their own interpretations of the event. Also, given that Kristeva's abjection is centrally concerned with the body and bodily processes, especially horrific and sexualized experiences of the body, the concept provides a useful lens for analyzing the vocal and bodily display, and the bawdy humor and horrific imagery, found in abundance at PMK.
First, the event is grounded in three performative lexicons-punk rock, heavy metal, and karaoke-that are situated discursively in terms of the abject in many cases. There are several reasons for this choice. Julia Kristeva's theorization of "abjection" is used a an interpretive lens to examine these boundary negotiations.
These thresholds are diverse, with boundaries negotiated between and around musical genres, gender roles, subjective ontologies, and shifting cultural geographies in New York City. Multiple thresholds are crossed and enunciated by singers and other participants at Punk Rock Heavy Metal Karaoke (PMK)-a "live music karaoke" event once held weekly at a club on New York City's Lower East Side.
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