Minor Threats

“Minor Threats” considers the entry of minor objects—including the author's own zines—into increasingly institutionalized punk archives. What happens to the brats, new bloods, poison girls, androids of Mu, persons unknown, or younger lovers when we are called on to fill a void, correct a partial claim, set straight a story? How do the politics surrounding institutional discourses of a minor threat, especially at the crash with race or gender, displace or defuse that threat through its integration into a politics, history, or archive? How might the specific difference of the minor object be enlisted to enhance a normative principle, an already known unity? Such instrumental gestures toward minor objects are the source of inclusion's coercive, diminishing effects—on the imagination as well as on practice.