Publisher Description

The concept of 'subculture' has long been of significant importance in research on youth, style, deviance and popular culture. Although in more recent years subculture has been the subject of sustained critique, it still provides a valuable point of reference for study and research. This text offers students an up-to-date and wide-ranging account of new developments in youth culture research that reject, refine or reinvent the concept of subculture. Bringing together key theoretical statements with illuminating analyzes of particular aspects of youth culture - popular music, clubbing, body modification, the internet, etc. - this is an ideal introduction to a diverse and wide-ranging field.

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. ‘New Accents’ is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

Subcultures: The Basics is an engaging introduction to youth cultures in a global context. Blending theory and practice, this text examines a range of subcultures such as hip hop graffiti writing, heavy metal, punk, burlesque, parkour, riot grrrl, straight edge, body modification, and skateboarding. Using case studies from around the world, it addresses such questions as: What is subculture? How do subcultures emerge, who participates, and why? What is the relationship between deviance, resistance, and the "mainstream"? How has global media and virtual networking influenced subcultures? What happens when subcultural participants "grow up"? Tracing the history and development of subcultures, with further reading and resources throughout, this text is essential reading for all those studying youth culture in the contexts of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, and criminology. -- from back cover.

Since it first emerged from Britain’s punk-rock scene in the late 1970s, goth subculture has haunted postmodern culture and society, reinventing itself inside and against the mainstream. Goth: Undead Subculture is the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to this enduring yet little examined cultural phenomenon. Twenty-three essays from various disciplines explore the music, cinema, television, fashion, literature, aesthetics, and fandoms associated with the subculture. They examine goth’s many dimensions—including its melancholy, androgyny, spirituality, and perversity—and take readers inside locations in Los Angeles, Austin, Leeds, London, Buffalo, New York City, and Sydney. A number of the contributors are or have been participants in the subculture, and several draw on their own experiences. The volume’s editors provide a rich history of goth, describing its play of resistance and consumerism; its impact on class, race, and gender; and its distinctive features as an “undead” subculture in light of post-subculture studies and other critical approaches. The essays include an interview with the distinguished fashion historian Valerie Steele; analyses of novels by Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and Nick Cave; discussions of goths on the Internet; and readings of iconic goth texts from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to James O’Barr’s graphic novel The Crow. Other essays focus on gothic music, including seminal precursors such as Joy Division and David Bowie, and goth-influenced performers such as the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Gothic sexuality is explored in multiple ways, the subjects ranging from the San Francisco queercore scene of the 1980s to the increasing influence of fetishism and fetish play. Together these essays demonstrate that while its participants are often middle-class suburbanites, goth blurs normalizing boundaries even as it appears as an everlasting shadow of late capitalism. Contributors: Heather Arnet, Michael Bibby, Jessica Burstein, Angel M. Butts, Michael du Plessis, Jason Friedman, Nancy Gagnier, Ken Gelder, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Joshua Gunn, Trevor Holmes, Paul Hodkinson, David Lenson, Robert Markley, Mark Nowak, Anna Powell, Kristen Schilt, Rebecca Schraffenberger, David Shumway, Carol Siegel, Catherine Spooner, Lauren Stasiak, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Youth culture and youth-oriented subcultures have long captured the attention of social scientists, popular media, and concerned parents alike. Yet, even as the majority of punk's 1970's pioneers and the counterculturalists of the 1960's have long left community and defining elements of style behind, we still only know little about how individuals' adult lives might nonetheless be informed by involvements such as these. My dissertation draws upon 44 face-to-face in-depth interviews with individuals who transitioned out of straightedge - a clean-living youth scene that has been associated with punk and hardcore music since the early 1980's based upon a lifetime pledge to abstain from intoxication. Interview data show former straightedge adherents believe their time as straightedge, an affiliation they have all categorically relinquished, has nonetheless laid bases for the ways they currently see themselves within the world and the lives they profess to be leading in their post-straightedge years. Rather than being part of an exploratory period that ends as many scholarly understandings of both youth subculture and adult transition indicate, findings suggest that elective youth identities may instead significantly influence how the transition to adulthood is negotiated and how adulthood is configured in the longer-term, which, arguably marks among the larger changes in the process of aging since the middle 20th Century. Deeper in this vein, where it is generally understood that individuals are exploring greater amounts of identities, consumption phases, and communities in the course of their lives relative to prior generations, there has been surprisingly little inquiry into the potential significance of those that are relinquished. Here, findings indicate that retrospective interpretive inquiry into relinquished identities can shed unique light upon elective cultural affiliation, both as a facet of subjective life history and with regard to what larger identification nodes can potentially mean.

What motivates people to dress in a manner that marks them out as different to the conventional norm? Is it true that, with dress, 'anything goes' in our mix-and-match postmodern culture? Have easily recognizable, authentic subcultures imploded in a glut of ironic revivals and stylistic fragmentation? Does this supposed 'post-subcultural' generation actively celebrate ephemerality, transience and disposability, merely casting off and trying on one alternative identity after another in an ever-accelerating fashion frenzy? This exciting book is a considered sociological examination of such questions. By listening to the voices of the subcultural stylists themselves - their subjective perceptions of their style and the ideas that lie behind them - the author provides original insights into issues of subjectivity and identity. Situating an empirical case study within a wider consideration of postmodernism and cultural change, the author rejects cultural studies perspectives that attempt to 'read' subcultures as texts. Drawing on extensive interviews with people who dress in what might be deemed a stylistically unconventional manner, he seeks instead to establish whether contemporary subcultures display modern or postmodern sensibilities and forms. He argues persuasively that they do both - a stress on postmodern hyperindividualism, fluidity and fragmentation runs alongside a modernist emphasis on authenticity and underlying essence. He concludes that a Romantic libertarianism has permeated working-class culture and that the distinction between 'individualistic' middle-class countercultures and 'collectivist' working-class subcultures has been over-emphasized.