Backdoor Rebel Routes for Bad Girls

Moving along the shoreline from Santa Monica to Marina del Rey, the work proposed the coast as a charged threshold, neither land nor sea, neither public nor private, where power, desire, and survival are continuously renegotiated.

Rather than treating the “bad girl” as an identity or attitude, the lecture framed badness as a method. Across music, film, performance, and myth, badness emerged as a strategy for autonomy within systems that regulate bodies and behavior. From Maria Nordman’s refusal of spectacle, where presence replaces action, to the slow-motion fetishization of function in Baywatch, the shoreline staged a recurring tension between agency and capture. Figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Jean Harlow appeared not as tragic excesses, but as women demanding authorship within institutions designed to consume them. Elsewhere, Pudgy Stockton, punk infrastructures like NaNa, and Chicano tattoo culture reframed badness as durability: strength, community, and resistance sustained over time.

The lecture also traced moments where badness collapses into disposability, exposing the violence of public consumption and the precarity of visibility. Myth and pop culture converged in figures whose power lies not in domination, but in calculation, adaptation, and duration. They do not storm the gates; they reroute the system.

What emerges is a portrait of Los Angeles not as a city of dreams, but as a terrain of negotiation. Along the shoreline, where borders are rehearsed and erased by the tide, remaining becomes an act of resistance in itself.