Pygmalion Punks: The Shared Stitches of Puppetry and the Sex Pistols

The essay turns to a rarely acknowledged but rich contextual overlap between puppetry, on the one hand, and punk sartorial and musical cultures, on the other. Through readings of two texts that present this overlap most clearly, namely, the film Labyrinth (1986) and the sitcom The Young Ones (1982-84), it shows that both the punk and the puppet challenge the domestication of specific materials as unified sites of meaning.