Conference Agenda

Participants in the hardcore punk subculture often describe a feeling of being “made” to mosh by the music, responding to musical gestures in ways experienced as unconscious or involuntary. Such sentiments echo common descriptions of affect as precognitive or pre-discursive (Desai-Stephens and Reisnour 2020). Drawing from ethnographic research in the hardcore punk scene and literature on affect, embodiment, and dance, this paper thus considers how affect theory might be productively mobilized to explore how music begets movement in mosh pits. I argue that affective qualities of the music—in dialogue with subcultural practices and discourses—spur specific movements in the mosh pit, and that these embodied experiences are integral to participants’ engagement with the subculture. Utilizing Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s concept of “sonic tactility” (2023) and Deborah Kapchan’s “aesthetics of proximity” (2022), I analyze specific sonic gestures common in hardcore punk music and their attendant affective manifestations. I argue that through these gestures, musicians engage in a sensory dialogue with audience members to encourage particular, often physically violent kinds of movement. I thus consider how these sonic and affective intensities dialogue with nuanced subcultural ethics regarding the acceptable threshold for violence in the mosh pit. Following recent scholarship on the “affective turn” in music studies, I posit that a deeper understanding of the music’s affect lends crucial insight into the role of sound in reflecting subcultural politics, which often aim to subvert normative behaviors and cultural formations.