Women in Punk @ Tequila Mockingbird's Punk Museum

Tequila Mockingbird is a real person and a seminal figure in the Los Angeles punk scene—an artist, journalist, producer, and cultural archivist whose work has documented and preserved L.A.’s underground music and art for decades. She is widely known for her punk scene coverage, her pioneering television work, and for founding the LA Punk Museum, a pop-up, immersive art experience dedicated to punk history. She co-hosts The Punkast alongside UCLA musicologist Jessica Schwartz, exploring deep-dive conversations on the global and localized meanings of subcultural art. Her dedication to public pedagogy and historical preservation is further supported by her educational platform at punkschool.org, solidifying her role as an essential bridge between the historic L.A. scene and contemporary artistic scholarship.
 

Jula Bell is a Los Angeles musician, writer, spoken-word artist, and longtime participant in the Southern California punk scene. She has been active in Los Angeles punk since the 1980s, performing with bands including Bulimia Banquet, Bobsled, Marc Spitz Freestyle, Nip Drivers, and Miss Derringer. Her work with Bulimia Banquet and Bobsled helped shape the feminist punk culture that would become associated with the Riot Grrrl movement. Both bands are featured in Not Bad for a Girl and 40 Watts from Nowhere.  Bell has also been an activist, writer, and organizer within Los Angeles' underground arts community, contributing to publications including Fizz and Flipside and co-founding PORK (Punx of the Round Keg). Her perspective combines more than four decades of firsthand experience as a musician, artist, organizer, and participant in punk's evolving cultural history.      
 

Pleasant Gehman is a writer, professional dancer, actor, psychic, musician and painter. A Hollywood rock ‘n’ roll icon, during the 1970’s, she was one of the first punks in Los Angeles, documenting the scene she helped create in her fanzine Lobotomy.  From the age of sixteen onwards, Pleasant has been a journalist and cultural commentator with literally thousands of articles on everything from rock ‘n’ roll to the paranormal, from magic to homeless teenagers.
During the 1980’s, she toured fronting her three bands, all of whom released multiple recordings: The Screaming Sirens, The Ringling Sisters and Honk If Yer Horny. Concurrently, she was the talent booker for the seminal Los Angeles “alternative” clubs Cathay De Grande and Raji’s. Since the early 1990’s, under the stage name Princess Farhana and has appeared internationally as a professional belly dance and burlesque performer. Her popular podcast  The Devil’s Music explores the intersection of rock’n’roll and the occult. She is the author and/or editor of eight books, including The Belly Dance Handbook and the memoir Showgirl Confidential: My Life Onstage, Backstage And On The Road
 

Jessica A. Schwartz (any) is an Associate Professor in Musicology and Music Industry at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Schwartz is the author of Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences (Duke University Press, 2021) and is currently completing two books— one on the U.S. Atomic Age’s psychoacoustic studies and another that approaches LA punk history through re-listening to bricolage musical topographies.
In and beyond the classroom, Schwartz interrogates institutional, intersectional ableism and workshops radical accessibility, hosts the podcast series– PUNKAST, often with guest producer, Tequila Mockingbird, and the Punk Scholars Podcast (Punk Scholars Network)--, plays guitar in noise/punk bands, and is the cofounder/Academic Advisor of the Marshallese Educational Initiative, an Arkansas-based non-profit.