No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Post-Subcultural Turn: Some Reflections 10 Years on
Abstract
This article investigates and evaluates the key tenets of the post-subcultural turn as this has informed discussion and debate among youth culture researchers during the last 10 years. While the post-subcultural turn has produced a wealth of new analytical tools and conceptual approaches, as well as providing a basis for several anthologies, it has also given rise to a series of critical concerns regarding the viability of post-subculture as an alternative approach to the study of youth. A key, and perhaps predictable, criticism of post-subcultural theory is that it adopts a naïve, and essentially celebratory, stance regarding the role of the cultural industries in shaping the identities and lifestyles of youth. Similarly, it has been argued that, despite the claims of post-subcultural theory regarding the emergence of new, individualised and reflexive youth identities, one does not need to look very far to see evidence of the on-going role played by structural inequalities in shaping the life chances, and cultural affiliations, of youth. Where then, does this leave youth cultural studies? What, if any, are the insights, theoretical and methodological, that can be drawn from post-subcultural turn? In view of the critical debates inspired by the post-subcultural turn, what should be the key criteria for youth cultural studies over the coming decade?
... The Birmingham School and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) have been dominant theoretical frameworks in the analysis of British youth cultures, with ongoing debates about their relevance (Colosi, 2010). Post-subcultural theory, influenced by Max Weber, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Maffesoli, has shifted the focus from the collective to the individual, transferring its emphasis to the implications of subcultural participants' pursuit of individual taste and the development of their interests (Bennett, 2011;Maffesoli, 2000;Williams, 2006); however, this has resulted in a weaker understanding of the group context of youth cultural practices (Blackman, 2014). Contemporary research on youth cultures draws from various social science traditions, including the Chicago School, structural-functionalism, the Italian Gramscian School, French structuralism, the Birmingham School, and post-subcultural studies (Bennett,1999). ...
... From the 1990s to the present, against a backdrop of increasing consumerism and the rapid development of media technology, post-subcultural theory has turned its focus to the implications of subcultural participants' pursuit of individual tastes, and the development of their individual interests (Bennett, 2011), 'neo-tribe, scene, and lifestyle' were becoming used in place of 'subculture,' such as Maffesoli (2000) defining a neo-tribe as being 'without the rigidity of the forms of organization with which we are familiar, more to a certain ambience, a state of mind, and is preferably to be expressed through lifestyles that favour appearance and form.' Andy Bennett (1999) posits that postsubcultural theories should focus on how young people construct their identities through consumption and lifestyle choices. Paul Hodkinson (2002) highlights the influence of post-subcultural theory on individual identity and group affiliation. ...
... Previous youth subculture studies have favoured a wide and varied range of qualitative methodologies in their theoretical derivations and methodological explorations. An analysis of the research methods used in the study of youth subcultures reveals that the vast majority of studies in the field have taken a qualitative approach (Bennett, 2011). Ethnography has always been the most consensual and classical method for conducting research on youth subculture, and can include practices such as participation observation (Blackman, 2014), interviews (Crowe & Hoskins, 2019;Guerra, 2024b), fieldwork (Williams, 2024;Willis, 1977), and case studies (Huq, 2007;Lincoln & Robards, 2017). ...
This study used the Chinese Youth Subcultural Participation Questionnaire (CYSPQ) and the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) to examine 1,788 college students’ participation in youth subcultures and their identification with various values. The study further applied K-cluster analysis to determine the characteristics of four distinct subcultural groups – Loyal Subcultural Participation (LG), Indifferent Subcultural Participation (IG), Fashionable Subcultural Participation (FG), and Adventure and Excitement Subculture Participation (AG) – as well as each of the four distinct subcultural participation groups’ relationships with certain values. The results showed no significant differences between the four groups in self-enhancement or conservative values. However, significant differences were found in openness and self-transcendence values. LG identified less with the value of self-transcendence than the other three groups, while both AG and LG identified more with the value of openness than FG and IG, with FG identifying stronger with openness than IG.
... Within the social sciences much debate has surrounded the shifting nature of identities, subcultures, and patterns of affiliation. A post-subcultural 'turn' has challenged the longstanding notion of 'subcultures' that emphasized the creation of meanings in relation to wider social forces, and introduced new terms including 'neo-tribes', 'lifestyle', and 'scenes' as analytical categories (see Bennett 2011;Blackman 2005;Weinzierl and Muggleton 2003). In particular, postmodern theorizing has emphasized how subcultures 'react imaginatively through consumption and identity to construct creative meanings that can be liberating from subordination' (Blackman 2005, 8). ...
... The lifestyle approach (e.g. Bennett 2011;Miles 2000) emphasizes agency, holding that consumerism allows 'people to construct alternative lifestyles through local and global strategies where … people in local settings can use, appropriate and transform cultural commodities for their own authenticity' (Blackman 2005, 13). Blackman, however, critiques this emphasis on lifestyles as 'creative projects' (Chaney 2002), arguing that wider social categories (e.g. ...
... The conceptual framework of the 'scene' (Straw 1991) also coheres with the essence of the post sub-cultural turn and has been deployed in relation to groups that coalesce around musical styles. Such groupings, constantly evolving and transient in nature, come together, Bennett (2011) notes, 'bound not by class or community but by musical taste and related aesthetic sensibilities' (496). There is ongoing debate In light of this post sub-cultural turn. ...
Popular literature (Magnusson 2012; Weiss, 2010, 2012, 2013) has celebrated varying ‘bike tribes’ including road cyclists, mountain bikers, BMXers, touring riders, commuters, and urban hipsters on fixed-gear bikes. Such literature identifies how each ‘tribe’ is differentiated by habits, clothing, aesthetics, and values. With these varying cycling ‘tribes’ in mind we explore the lived experiences of road cyclists in the San Francisco Bay area of the United States as they negotiate the varying practices, rituals, meanings, and material culture that cycling offers. We engage in broader discussions within the sociology of sport regarding the utility of Maffesoli’s (1996) idea of contemporary life being characterized by ‘neotribal’ affiliations. We use ethnographic methods drawing upon both participant observations and interviews to explore the extent to which the fluidity and transience of road cycling also intersect broader structural forces, and how riders navigate their engagement with the cycling industry.
... Yet there are other recent lines of research in the youth cultural field which have more feel for the collective. Andy Bennett is the instigator of the so-called 'neo-tribal' string in postsubcultural theory (see, notably, Bennett 1999Bennett , 2011; but see also Malbon 1998Malbon , 2001. The interest in Maffesoli's concept of 'neo-tribalism' (Maffesoli 1996) separates his approach from Muggleton's. ...
... Bennett's work has been highly agenda setting and remains productive (e.g. Bennett 2011;Hardy, Bennett, and Robards 2018;Woodman and Bennett 2015). ...
... 6 Again, the discourse and/or identity-centred perspectives impose a fundamentally instrumental relation on the objects and the social, which blocks reciprocity and intensive embeddedness. Sadly for a collectivity and materiality interested scholar, it is these exact texts which inspire Bennett (see Bennett 2011;Bennett and Peterson 2004) in developing his post-subcultural work and in much of his collaborative work on scenes. 7 Nevertheless, compared to the subcultural or post-subcultural framing, the focus on the scene seems to usher in a new susceptibility to one of the strongest (sub)cultural objects of all: music. ...
This paper first investigates why the main strands in conventional subcultural and post-subcultural research have neglected the collective and material aspects of subcultural practice. It then investigates more recent attempts to include collectivity and materiality in the analysis and seeks to further develop such perspectives. In this way the paper seeks to demonstrate the need for a new embedded perspective on the material and collective dimensions of subcultural practice. In the first part of the paper, I embark on a critical reading of the traditional ‘schools’ of subcultural and post-subcultural theory. I seek to show that they all suffer from a blind spot in regard to collective and material embeddedness. In the second part, I analyse a number of ‘thick’ empirical accounts of subcultural collectivity, creativity and interchange with material and musical objects. I attempt to develop these descriptions further and seek to show how they may benefit from having more attention paid to collective and material embeddedness, as well as to the interchange between these two dimensions in subcultural practice. I hope to thus demonstrate how the embedded perspective may contribute to analyses of subcultural creativity and lived subcultural experience.
... As I discussed previously that young women are challenging traditional public is further argued that "individualism has surpassed an emphasis on collectivity as a means by which social actors seek out desirable visual images, and construct sociocultural identities, for themselves" (Muggleton, 2000). From this argument, the post-subcultural theory has subsequently seen a range of conceptual frameworks employed, most notably 'neo-tribe', 'lifestyle', and 'scene' (Bennett, 2011). ...
... It is considered that post-subcultural theory wholly fails to comprehend the extent to which structured inequalities continue to inform both young people's access to cultural commodities and their ultimate use of such commodities in the fashioning of identities (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2006). In short, although the postsubcultural theory has presented credible arguments as to how and why the collective cultural affiliations of youth can be seen as changing in ways that embrace new, more fluid dynamic, reflexive, and interchangeable dimensions, few scholars have investigated what kinds of collectively endorsed aesthetic, cultural and other lifestyle discourse and practices inform these (Bennett, 2011). ...
... Importantly, it is argued that youth cultural studies should be investigated through a "more nuanced and locally sensitive analysis of where and how patterns of consumption, leisure and lifestyle map onto structural experiences of class, gender, race and so on" (Bennett, 2011). Thus, I consider that the studies in youth cultural forms and practices should be analysed through relations of class, gender, race, and ethnicity in the formation of both individual and collective youth cultural identities. ...
This study explored how 18-year-old women in Bangkok used social media to negotiate and express their gender identities online. In Thailand, prevailing cultures and traditional public discourses on hetero-normative sexualities constrain young women’s gender performance both offline and online. The study interrogated processes of adaptation and resistance of traditional mainstream discourses through the consideration of social media as an alternative and flexible space for young women to negotiate and communicate diverse, autonomous gender performances. A gap was identified in terms of the ways in which identity was tactically managed and constructed within different class structures. To investigate these, young women were recruited from three socioeconomic backgrounds: lower class, middle class, and upper class. Data were gathered through interviews, focus groups, and online ethnographies, such as posted pictures, shared contents, and comments on profiles, and interpreted through a multimodal and social semiotic lens to gain deeper understandings of women's classed and gendered social media practices. By examining and cross-referencing qualitative data and the construction of online profiles deriving from different social backgrounds, insights were yielded and a snapshot of the everyday identity work of Thai young women captured as they responded to and resisted traditional forms of feminine conduct.
... In general, academics use the term 'subculture' to define a cultural response to changes caused by capitalism. These cultural responses are embodied in symbolic resistance of the subordinate against dominant cultural groups through lifestyle, fashion choice and music style (Weinstein 2000;Bennett and Peterson 2004;Bennett et al. 2004Bennett et al. , 2011Hesmondhalgh 2005Hesmondhalgh , 2015. ...
... In Bandung, regional teenage communities are formed based on similar social class and status. A scene, therefore, is a heterogenous and hierarchical space, since they rely on different forms of subcultural capital which operate as the scene's internal currency (Thornton in Lukisworo and Sutopo 2017; see also Moore 2005;Bennett and Peterson 2004;Bennett et al. 2004Bennett et al. , 2011. Such capital is obtainable through continuous investment within a scene's praxis, which involves a patron's commitment to numerous collective activities and the agents' social capital accumulation (Moran 2010;Prasetyo 2017;Putra 2017). ...
Social segregation in Bandung, Indonesia, is the primary cause of stratification of youths in the city’s northern, southern and eastern regions. As a region filled with colonial legacy and inhabited by the upper-middle class, northern Bandung is equipped with infrastructures for youth activities. Southern and eastern Bandung, on the other hand, carries an image of rather undeveloped regions. This social, political and economic background has prompted Bandung youths to compete among each other, specifically in terms of expressing their identity through music. In particular, youths from Ujung Berung express their identity through metal music due to the genre’s perceived capability of conveying youth aspirations, marginality and identity expression in public space. Through djent and headbanging, these youths held onto a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos to fight against political and capital-related power. Nonetheless, as the movement developed, these youths failed to compete with the capital of major record labels. With these issues as a background, this article aims to examine the youths’ rally against the power of politics and capital. We assume that their resistance against the contestation of identity space in 2010–22 Bandung consists of four layers. Based on the data we gathered during observation, we argue that the youths’ resistance was rather a pseudo act which granted them mobility to a higher social status. This article is a result of a six-month qualitative research project conducted from June to November 2022 in Bandung. The data were gathered from various relevant sources, including books, articles, media social news coverage and other internet sources. In addition, twelve informants actively involved in the Bandung metal scene were interviewed. A cultural studies approach was taken during the whole process of observation and analysis of the aforementioned data and phenomena.
... While scholars continue to debate the relative merits of different conceptualisations, there has been somewhat of a harmonisation across what were once clearly contrasting approaches in recent years (Woodman and Bennett 2015a;Hodkinson 2016). Post-subculture theorists and researchers are giving greater attention to the structured and unequal, as well as changing environments, in which young people's cultural practices unfold (Bennett 2011(Bennett , 2018Robards and Bennett 2011;Hardy et al. 2018) and the subcultures framework has expanded beyond how it was originally deployed by the Birmingham School, to recognise the effects of social positions beyond class and to recognise forms of creativity and generational change beyond class dynamics (Huq 2007;McRobbie 2000;Nayak 2016). ...
... Rozwój tzw. najmłodszej polszczyzny (Chaciński 2003) jest konsekwencją dynamicznych zmian społeczno--kulturowych (Bauman 2011;Bennett 2011;Ożóg 2001), a jej "nobilitacja" czyni przedmiot badań coraz bardziej atrakcyjnym dla dyscyplin nie tylko językoznawczych (zob. Wileczek 2021). ...
The article aims to conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the lexis related to human collected on the website of the Observatory of Youth Language and Culture. The linguistic material obtained from the Observatory’s database covers data from 1 May 2021 to 11 September 2023. It comprises 389 lexical units, constituting a database of dictionary entries, of which 189 units represent the semantic domain HUMAN. In addition to the analysis of vocabulary reported or used by teenagers, the article describes pragmatic contexts related to the understanding, function and modification of new meanings. For this purpose, a corpus of 28,482 words was collected, consisting of 1,842 examples of the use of structures from the Observatory. The analysis of the material confirmed the existence of categorization schemes created during youth interactions.
... Studying protest culture is aligned here with the current renaissance in subcultural studies (Gildart et al. 2020), which is influenced by the seminal work of Dick Hebdidge (1979) but attentive to post-subcultural studies critiques (Bennett 2011). I focus particularly on the application of this body of subcultural theory to activism (McKay 1996). ...
In this study, I aim to discuss the nature of protest dances taking place in urban spaces of postsocialist Czech Republic. My point of departure consist in the hardbass masked dances that were produced and propagated by activists with links to far-right social movements mainly in Eastern Europe in the early 2010s. Hardbass thus mimicked the earlier anti-globalization social movement Reclaim the Streets (RTS). The anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s can be considered a truly global social movement, active not only in the core capitalist countries but also in locations that are more peripheral.
... In the early 2000s, new approaches emerged criticizing this concept. Within this post-subcultural turn, other theories have since been applied to explain the lives of young people (Muggleton & Weinzierl, 2003; also Bennett, 2011). One of these is scene theory (Irwin, 1973;Straw, 1991), which conceptualizes youth formations in modernity as fluid, reflexive and fragmented. ...
In Second Modernity, traditional affiliations, ideals and norms continuously are becoming less important. Among the things affected by that are gender norms and sexualities, so that the reflexive self now has the task of relating to these transformations. Based on scene ethnographies (interviews, group discussions, participant observations), this article examines how the (youth) scenes Visual Kei and K-pop serve as social fields to challenge traditional societal norms of gender and heterosexuality. Gender-neutral ideals and gender-differentiating norms coexist in Visual Kei; heteroamorous fantasies coexist with various sexual realities in K-pop. In both scenes, the scene-specific gender displays also significantly influence the sexual displays. Scene members embrace a great diversity of sexual orientations, thereby applying cultural globalization and socially constructing post-traditional forms of gender arrangements and sexualities that intertwine ‘Western’ as well as ‘Asian’ practices and aesthetics.
... In the first two decades of the new millennium, recurring debates have been found on the value and validity of the concept of subculture for studying youth cultures (Bennett, 2011;Williams, 2019). As amply demonstrated from our critical analysis of the latest academic frontlines in youth subculture in China, the concept continues to exert its analytical power. ...
... Pada kasus punk (Hebdige, 1979), bentuk resistansi terlihat pada bagaimana pertunjukan musik (gigs) yang diorganisir dengan prinsip Do It Yourself (DIY), saling support antar anggota subkultur, serta menjunjung tinggi konvensi berupa nilai amateurism pada bentuk musik yang disajikan. Terlepas dari kritik yang dilontarkan oleh para pendukung pasca-subkultur misalnya terkait identitas yang cair (Bennett, 2011) dan pemaknaan subkultur berdasarkan sintesis perspektif postmodern serta neo-Weberian (Muggleton, 2000), dimensi politik tersebut terus muncul dalam konteks kontemporer, baik pada level lokal, nasional maupun global. ...
Independent Performance Practice in Extreme Metal Scene. Music performance, including extreme metal, is an integral part of music-based youth groups’ socio-cultural practices. The practice and meaning construction of music performance could not be considered as stagnant, but dynamic in its relationship with surrounding objective structure. In order to understand the meaning construction upon music performance, specifically within the extreme metal scene, this research focuses on the dynamics of individual music performance practice in Yogyakarta in the contemporary neoliberal era. This research was based on re-interpretation of ethnographic qualitative data. Yet, several challenges upon research data re-interpretation had been overcome by the insider status of the second author, and also triangulation interview with previously involved-informant. According to the re-interpretation of qualitative data, it can be argued that independent music performance is the reflection of the youth’s culture-based negotiations against the dominant discourse of commercial space by mainstream cultural industries as well as limited space of expression in the urban landscapes. This kind social networks-based of music performance, ranging from local to trans-local scene and constant experimentations of the scene habitus, show the manifestation of symbolic resistance. In this case, the symbolic resistance is not only based on social class, but also as a manifestation of spatial marginality. Thus, the independent music performance in this research can be a good example in order to keep the values of music idealism in the present and in the future.Pertunjukan musik merupakan bagian yang tidak terpisahkan dari praktik sosio-kultural kelompok budaya kaum muda berbasis musik, termasuk metal ekstrem. Adapun praktik dan pemaknaan terhadap pertunjukan musik bukan merupakan suatu hal yang stagnan, namun senantiasa bergulir secara dinamis dalam relasi dengan struktur objektif yang melingkupinya. Guna membangun pemahaman atas praktik dan pemaknaan terhadap pertunjukan musik, khususnya dalam skena metal ekstrem, artikel ini membahas dinamika praktik pertunjukan musik mandiri di Yogyakarta pada era neoliberal kontemporer. Artikel ini disusun melalui proses re-interpretasi atas data yang diperoleh dengan metode kualitatif etnografi. Beberapa tantangan atas re-interpretasi data penelitian dapat teratasi dengan posisi salah satu penulis sebagai insider dalam skena metal ekstrem serta melalui triangulasi dengan salah satu informan yang sudah terlibat dalam wawancara sebelumnya. Berdasarkan hasil re-interpretasi tersebut, dinamika pertunjukan musik mandiri merefleksikan bagaimana praktik negosiasi berbasis budaya kaum muda terhadap dominasi pewacanaan ruang komersial oleh industri budaya mainstream sekaligus keterbatasan ruang berekspresi dalam landscape perkotaan. Praktik pertunjukan musik mandiri yang mendasarkan pada jaringan sosial dari level lokal hingga trans-lokal dan eksperimentasi atas habitus skena secara berkelanjutan ini merupakan manifestasi perlawanan simbolik. Dalam hal ini, perlawanan tersebut tidak hanya berbasis kelas sosial namun juga merupakan manifestasi peminggiran berbasis ruang. Praktik pertunjukan musik mandiri ini dapat menjadi exemplar yang baik guna menjaga nilai-nilai idealisme bermusik tetap hidup di masa sekarang maupun di masa depan.
... However, research that might draw upon the literature on music-based subculture is rare (for exceptions, see Baulch, 2003;2004;Luvaas, 2009;Martin-Iverson, 2012). Meanwhile, and in contrast, debates regarding concepts such as subculture and post-subculture are alive and well in English-speaking countries (Blackman, 2005;Bennett, 2011) and expanding into many new territories (see Bennett, 2013;Bennett and Robards, 2014). In this chapter, I continue to critically contextualize the subculture versus post-subculture debate using my long-term study of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Indonesian musicians by investigating the dynamic meaning of music subculture across different career stages and interlinkages within the changing socio-historical and cultural context. ...
... Under these circumstances, the class-based CCCS approaches have arguably failed to understand the complex fragmentation and proliferation of youth cultural practices and preference, as well as their subject values and motives of their choices. In this light, a body of work emerged which sought to question the previous subcultural studies done by the CCCS analysts, supporting the idea that new subcultural studies must focus on the fragmentation of identities and the unstable and shifting cultural affiliations in contemporary society (Bennett, 2011;Muggleton, 2000;Redhead, 1997). This is a group of perspectives which can be called post-subcultural theories. ...
This thesis focuses on the meaning of Chinese music subcultures, such as metal, rap, punk, and rock, and how the meaning is shaped by the influences of the Chinese context, individual practices, and musical affect.
... Muggleton (2000) suggested that postmodern subcultures had begun to splinter and become more indicative of a new subcultural tradition characterized by fluid notions of membership and the accumulation of cultural commodities. Andy Bennett (2011) extended Muggleton's approach by stating that the concept of subculture reflected a new way to perceive the relationship between musical taste and visual style, but also the ease of constructing (and even rejection of) new notions of the self through visual images (Bennett 2000, 79;Bennett 2011). Hebdige's 1979 work had to contend with previous scholarship from Chicago School theorists focusing on deviance and concepts of race and class, and Muggleton's 2000 book on the expansions of postmodernism on an aging and diversifying underground, both of which are concepts that impact the development of style. ...
Youth and music-oriented subcultures use dress to embody lifestyle, ethos, individuality, and showcase their perspectives. This literature review analyzes academic writing on dress in conjunction with subculture that has emerged since Dick Hebdige wrote a defining text, Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979 and David Muggleton wrote a reaction book, Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style in 2000. Twenty years later, at the same interval between those volumes, and using Joanne Eicher’s comprehensive definition of “dress,” this article reviews the current topics, methods, theories, and priorities. Findings indicate that academic literature on dress and subculture as joint primary variables remain surprisingly sparse. However, there is growth in including dress as a secondary variable in studies on subcultural lifestyles, and burgeoning incorporation of subcultural content in history of dress texts. The modern topics and citations are often similar to research from 1979 to 2000, though the 2000–2020 approaches differ, as methods have become more online oriented than fieldwork, and the lens to review subcultures has diversified. While publication numbers are limited, exhibitions, mass market publications, blogs, and podcasts have all seen an uptick in this area, indicating a potential gap between public interest and academic formats.
... Through exploring the working class's social experiences, Hebdige's analysis of subculture centres on 'imagination' and its subversive sense occurs through its creative invention and reinvention (Blackman, 2020). Subsequent studies, in particular post-subcultural analysis, moved away from the subcultures frame to focus on 'scenes', conceptualized as a space for gathering that is bounded by music taste rather than class (Bennett, 2011;Peterson & Bennett, 2004;Straw, 1991). A critique is further provided by Blackman (2014) who points out that post-subculture theory has ignored collective social formations within wider social, historical and political moments, and avoided critical engagement with issues of class, feminism and ethnicity by focusing on individual meaning in subcultural practice. ...
Punk in China suffers from the stigma of inauthenticity and the dilemma of belatedness. That is, it comes ‘after’ the original punk moment in the West and is understood as derivative and therefore inauthentic. It does not follow, however, that in places that came ‘late’ to punk, such as China, punk is merely an echo of Western practice. Recent scholarship has embraced the concept of ‘global punk’, alongside projects to decolonize punk studies, to destabilize Western-centric understandings of punk authenticity. Consistent with this agenda, we undertake a comparative analysis of 60 seminal 1970s UK and US punk songs and 60 Chinese punk songs released since the founding of Chinese punk in the 1990s, to analyse the translocal durability of punk. Punk in China, we argue, mobilizes a durable ethic of do-it-yourself resistance to interrogate local political conditions and adds weight to the catch-cry that ‘punk is not dead’.
What is it like to grow up amidst a conflict that has lasted generations? This chapter explores this question through ethnographic research from Hpa-An, where young people inherited a seven-decade-long conflict between the Myanmar military and the Karen National Union (KNU). Before the 2021 coup, young people in Hpa-An identified themselves as part of a distinct generation, shaped by the KNU ceasefire and the ongoing political transition. They wanted to be seen through the prism of youth, rather than solely through the lenses of nationality or ethnicity. This chapter makes two main contributions. First, it demonstrates that post-secondary education, which emerged in Hpa-An at a particular juncture in the Karen conflict, served as a site where young people developed and acted upon a unique generational consciousness. This consciousness positioned them on the fringes of both the Burmese nation-state and Karen ethnonationalism. Second, it shows that young people responded to political crises and conflicts in ways informed by both their individual biographies and collective histories. Therefore, while young people have been at the forefront of resistance to the 2021 coup, “Generation Z” should not be viewed as a homogeneous category.
Bu çalışma, Türkiye’de farklı dönemlerde ortaya çıkan Façacı ve Apaçi alt kültürlerinin otomobil modifiye uygulamalarının dönüşümsel seyrini sanal platformlardaki forum gönderileri aracılığıyla araştırmaktadır. Bu çalışma, sanal platformlardaki gönderileri, özellikle modifiye edilmiş otomobil görsellerini, nitel içerik analizi ve kimlik, alt kültür ve maddesel kültür kuramsal çerçeveleriyle analiz ederek, endüstriyel bir ürünün kültürel ifade ve kimlik oluşumun somutlaştırılmasında nasıl araçsal hale geldiğini anlamayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu alt kültürlerin üyeleri, otomobillerini farklı görünümlerle şekillendirirken kendilerini özelleştirilmiş kimliklerle özdeşleştirmeye çalışmaktadırlar. Türkiye’deki sosyal ve kültürel dönüşümlere paralel olarak bu alt kültürler önemli değişimler geçirmiştir. Façacı alt kültürü, merkez-çevre ve geleneksel-modern ikilemleri çerçevesinde kendine özgü bir alt kültür kimliği inşa ederken, Apaçi alt kültür kimliği küreselleşmenin Türkiye toplumu üzerindeki etkilerine paralel olarak daha tüketim odaklı bir paradigmaya dönüşmüştür. Modifiyeleri bu kültürel ifade ve kimlik oluşturma anlayışları çerçevesinde farklılıklar göstermekle birlikte, her iki alt kültür de ortak bir ideali yansıtan eklektik ve abartılı bir otomobil modifiyesi yaklaşımını paylaşmaktadır. İşçi sınıfı kökenli bu bireyler arzuladıkları refah seviyesi ve toplumsal kabulü otomobillerin maddi içeriği üzerinden ifade etmektedirler.
Despite the importance of the material extensions of culture, the role of materiality in the study of contemporary subcultures, youth affiliations and practices has been largely overlooked. This article explores how materiality can shape identities and foster subcultural communities using Chinese hip-hop as a prime case study that combines classical subcultural traits with ongoing online popularity. Drawing from online participant observation and 31 semi-structured interviews, this study identifies two aspects of materiality revolving around three key themes as an analytical backbone: the emotional impact of music artefacts, the dynamics of material exchanges within the community, and recurring motifs of materialism. By integrating insights from music sociology and contemporary youth studies, this article underscores the enduring relevance of tangible artefacts and physical engagement with individuals and technology, even within today’s increasingly digitised environments. This enhanced focus on materiality enables moving beyond binary classifications of subcultures and post subcultures by emphasising instead the centrality of observable cultural practices and the participants’ life experiences that revolve around them.
R/sadboys, communauté Internet et Drainers est un mémoire sur la manière dont fonctionne le subreddit r/sadboys et son rôle dans la fabrication d'une identité de fan du collectif musical.
Debates are ongoing about the harm misogynistic online communities pose to young men’s identity and understanding of masculinities. This study aims to nuance our understanding of the online incel community by analysing 14 interviews with young men from five different continents who identify or formerly identified as incel or involuntary celibate. I use a subcultural theoretical framework, and my analysis identifies three forms of subcultural involvement of incels, varying from being all-encompassing, active participation and loose attachment. Drawing on the concept of digital drift, including insights from both traditional and post-subcultural traditions, I show how incels can flexibly drift across categories, changing their level of involvement and attachment to the incel subculture over time. The article highlights the need for more direct, critical engagement with young men involved in the incel subculture to account for the various ways these young men interact with this online phenomenon.
This article draws together existing criminological work as well as developments from sociology, political science and media studies to argue that cultural criminology can offer a useful corrective to current ‘counter-extremist’ thinking about the contemporary far right. The first part of the article introduces the contemporary far right, describes how it differs from previous instances, and explains that this resurgent far-right movement has to date primarily been analysed through the lens of ‘counter-extremism’. The second part of the article problematises the concepts of ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’. The article argues that these concepts are ambiguous, imprecise and normative, and that they are freighted with ideological baggage and unsupported by empirical evidence. The third part of the article argues that cultural criminology can better inform our understanding of the contemporary far right owing to its focus on subculture and style, its attendance to networked digital media and its foregrounding of emotion and affect. The article concludes by outlining a tentative programme for cultural criminological research into the contemporary far right.
Punk culture, with its hallmark rebellious aesthetic, often stands in stark contrast to the modesty prescribed by Islamic traditions, particularly regarding women's attire. This article explores the sartorial practices of female Muslim punks in Malaysia, investigating the complex interplay of gender, religion, and subcultural identities within the Malaysian context. Employing an ethnographic approach, we examine how these women use dress for self-expression, empowerment, and resistance, challenging the historic oversights in punk discourse. Introducing the conceptual framework of ‘the localization of subculture’, our research provides a theoretical model for understanding how global subcultures, like punk, adapt to local contexts, leading to unique cultural expressions. Examining individual approaches to dress practices, our findings demonstrate the ability of the Malaysian punk community to deconstruct conventional norms and actively construct meanings of its own. This article invites a re-evaluation of subculture studies and advocates rethinking what we know about subcultures by considering local influences.
This article is a critical review of studies on gaming communities. In particular, it analyses the use of subcultural, post-subcultural and postmodern subcultural theorists in relation to video games players. Academic use of sociological concepts to study gaming communities, such as neo-tribe, subculture, lifestyle, and scene, is not always explained and almost all sociological instruments show limits in engaging the complex and changing phenomena of video gaming cultures. The article focuses on the misleading use of the term subculture and, therefore, analyses effective applications of post-subcultural and post-modern subcultural approaches to specific case studies. Eventually, the relation between gamers and video games cultures is analysed. In this sense, I argue that the complexity of gaming communities is difficult to be framed and I suggest the use of the Bourdieusian concept of champ.
Este artículo propone un análisis del potencial de la fotografía como elemento clave en la difusión de estéticas subculturales, tomando como referencia las fotografías que Miguel Trillo hizo de varios skinheads en Londres y Madrid a principios de los años ochenta. Esas imágenes plantean preguntas referidas al acto fotográfico, a las relaciones entre fotógrafo y sujetos fotografiados y a la capacidad de circulación de la fotografía impresa en publicaciones. ¿En qué condiciones fueron tomadas estas fotografías y cuáles eran los objetivos de retratados, al dejarse fotografiar, y creadores, al pulsar el disparador de sus cámaras?, ¿en qué medida pueden esas fotografías ayudarnos a comprender cómo fueron reinterpretadas (apropiadas, modificadas, popularizadas) determinadas estéticas musicales en contextos más o menos alejados?, ¿qué retos plantean las fotografías y sus soportes impresos, libros o fanzines, a la hora de estudiar los procesos de recepción por parte de los públicos?
This article explores ageing in alternative cultures and co-existing forms of hyper and alternative masculinity in the US film Jackass Forever released in 2022. The film is a continuation of the original Jackass show launched in 2000. Although a highly profitable franchise, we argue Jackass is part of an alternative culture through its playfulness and pranks that are also dangerous and revel in self-humiliation. Most of the stunts and skits also adopt a DIY approach and reflect forms of perceived masculine and adolescent pranking and clowning. We argue that such alternative and DIY-influenced activities allow men to keep enjoying alternative, ‘carnivalesque’ forms of adult play well into middle-age and can have a pro-social and beneficial impact across men's life course. Yet even if subversive, Jackass can still also reproduce masculine constraints, including suppressing the expression of boundaries and vulnerable emotions.
Kajian mengenai zine sebagai representasi budaya perkotaan dilihat dari penerapan desain tata letaknya. Zine dalam konteks budaya perkotaan mempunyai hubungan yang kompleks dengan dinamika sosial terhadap manusia serta kelompoknya. Sebagai produk subkultur masa kini, Zine beradaptasi dengan segmentasi tertentu berdasarkan nilai-nilai yang dianut oleh pembuat zine dan komunitasnya. Zine akan selalu berkembang mengikuti budaya induknya yang lahir dari komunitas subkultur tertentu. Dengan tidak adanya aturan baku mengenai format serta praktiknya, Zine akan selalu berkembang mengikuti kedinamisan subkultur masyarakat perkotaan. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian deskriptif kualitatif dengan pendekatan analisis desain tata letak yang selanjutnya dilakukan pembacaan konteks dan pembahasan mengenai konten visual zine dan melihat makna yang terkandung dengan menggunakan teori semiotika visual Roland Barthes. Dengan analisis tersebut, penelitian ini mencoba mengungkap budaya urban melalui Zine dalam kajian budaya. Masalah yang hendak dipecahkan dalam tulisan ini adalah bagaimana budaya perkotaan mempengaruhi desain tata letak pada Zine sebagai representasi budaya perkotaan. Dalam penelitian ini, terungkap bahwa hubungan kota dan Zine saling berkaitan dalam proses membentuk dan dibentuk. Kota bisa membentuk Zine dan begitu pula sebaliknya. Penelitian ini melihat Zine sebagai representasi budaya perkotaan.
The present article explores the changes and continuities in the Do It Yourself (DIY) ethos and practices in the Basque Country from the 1960s to the 2020s. In this context, music has had an outsized importance, linked especially to social and cultural movements. We base our analysis in previous works, cultural analysis, and in debates and round tables that we have organised with several young musical bands. The four decades from 1960s are characterised, therefore, by a heroic DIY ethos and practices, inspired by counterculture and nationalism. In the present day, we can talk about a different line on DIY, which paints it as non-heroic, something less idealistic and more conformist/conventional usage of DIY, driven by the new no-future ethos of trap music and online culture.
As a spiritual home for contemporary youth, the emergence of the community of "Cyber pet raising" has important cultural significance. From the perspective of post-subcultural theory, this paper studies the social media presentation of "Cyber pet raising" members, and concludes that technological and cultural factors lay the foundation for the formation of the community, and through the establishment of intimate relationships, sharing and interaction, and identity, the community can be operated and developed. However, in the cyber virtual space, members become more mobile, and style of the community is no longer obvious, shifting from a collective grand narrative to individual emotional experience and identity.
This paper studies the evolution of the punk and goth subcultures in Brisbane, Australia. We analyse how these subcultures are representing the idea of the counter-city through the 'heterotopia' displayed in the city from the birth of the punk movement in the late 1970s until now. This paper reflects on the continuous presence of these two subcultures in the city, and examines their relationship to space and the city. We investigate how spaces in the city have served these subcultural practices over the past 50 years. We examine the link between the concept of the counter-city and the material concerns of urban life by detailing the ways in which those participating in these subcultures exemplify value systems that run counter to hegemonic social and cultural norms. Using a typology of "critical urban interventions", we examine the role the musicians and audiences in Brisbane's punk and goth scenes play in the urban sphere. First, we situate music scenes and subcultures within the broader 'counter-cities' theoretical framework. We then analyse interviews from participants in Brisbane's punk and goth scenes to examine the extent to which these subcultures have displayed counter-cities dispositions in the making and remaking of these subcultures.
In this chapter, we conclude our exploration of skateboarding, power, and change with some final reflections on the implications and significance of this research, as well as offering recommendations for future research. Our discussion is presented within the following themes and sections: 1) Key Findings and Contributions to the Research Field, 2) Limitations, Significance, and Future Recommendations, and 3) Some Final Thoughts: Skateboarding Now and Where to Next. We propose that skateboarding is something that is always shifting and consists of a journey everyone needs to keep working on to ensure power is shared. We also propose that equity can be better achieved through things such as inclusion and representation, funding and other resources, and an open attitude to sharing knowledge is crucial.KeywordsEthical skateboardingSkate activismEquityInclusionRadical empathySociology
Skateboarders and scholars recognize skateboarding is invested with flexible meanings and has the overlapping status of being a subculture, and a lifestyle, action, and competitive sport. Our discussion is presented in four themes: 1) The Sociology of Skateboarding, 2) Skateboarding Researchers as “Insiders” in the Culture, 3) Methodological Considerations and Processes During a Pandemic, and 4) Chapter Summaries. We turn attention away from negative stereotypes and labelling and argue there is a boom in “change-makers” in skateboarding who are pushing for positive social change. We outline how our study addresses a need for more in-depth knowledge of what kinds of people are involved, the values they hold, challenges they face, strategies they roll out, and advice they offer for now and in the future.KeywordsSkate cultureSkate activismSubcultural capitalSports sociologySkateboarding researchSkateboarders
In this chapter we look at the formative experiences of the individuals we spoke with. The discussion is presented through four main themes: (1) Defiance Labor and Flexible Forms of reflexivity, (2) Becoming a “Skateboarder” and Early Social Barriers, (3) Internalizing Negative Attitudes, (4) Joy, Gratitude, Tenacity, and Resistance, and (5) Radical Empathy, Everyday Cosmopolitanism, and an Ethics of Sharing. We argue attention to their journey opens up a better understanding of what has shaped their commitment to being inclusive. Insights from the interviews reveal how a shared love of skateboarding, an ability to feel empathy, an outlook of openness, and an orientation of sharing rather than possessing skating are important foundations in their lives and effort to bring about social change.KeywordsSkateboardingSubcultural capitalReflexivityEmotional laborRadical empathyCosmopolitanism
This case study delves into the experiences of a women's basketball team situated in Shenzhen, South China, comprised primarily of members of sexual minority groups. Utilizing qualitative research methods, including interviews and observation of team dynamics, this research examines how lesbian and bisexual female basketball players navigate societal norms and negotiate their sexual identities. It also highlights the team's unique strategies for dealing with social interactions, group membership, and power dynamics in resisting heteronormative norms. Team B exemplifies a form of queer resistance in Chinese society and sports that is distinct from the Western pride movements and political advocacy. This strategy involves avoiding confrontation and integrating the nonheteronormative subculture into mainstream sports and society to gain support from families, the general public, and local communities, thereby promoting sports inclusivity and gaining social recognition. This study argues, from a post-structural feminist perspective, that participation in a gender-inclusive sports group provides sexual minority individuals with a unique social position and an empowering means of destabilizing power relations and reducing sexual identity tensions. In addition, it demonstrates the capacity of sports subcultures to foster collective agency and resilience in the face of dominant cultural norms, despite the constraints posed by the unaltered macro-level structure of gender. This case study provides valuable insights into how gender-inclusive sports groups can challenge and reshape preconceived notions of gender and sexuality in Chinese society while serving as a platform for queer resistance.
Research on cultural stratification often draws on Bourdieu's misrecognition model to interpret socioeconomic gradients in cultural tastes and participation. In this model, an assumed cultural hierarchy leads individuals to adopt cultural tastes and behaviours whose status is congruent with that of their socioeconomic position (SEP). Yet, this assumed cultural hierarchy remains opaque. In this paper, we derive and test three empirical implications of the cultural hierarchy: (1) cultural activities have different status (recognition); (2) individuals in high and low SEPs have similar perceptions of the status of cultural activities (necessary condition for misrecognition); and (3) individuals prefer and engage in cultural activities whose status matches that of their SEP (status congruence). We collected survey data in Denmark and find that cultural activities differ in terms of perceived status (e.g., opera has higher perceived status than flea market), status perceptions are similar in high‐ and low‐SEP groups and individuals prefer activities whose status matches that of their SEP. These results are consistent with the idea that a cultural hierarchy exists that sustains SEP gradients in cultural tastes and participation.
The article discusses the way in which a Helsinki-based flow art community negotiates resistance in terms of hippie culture, shared and embodied conventions and reclaiming the urban space. Flow art is a form of youth culture, urban creativity, community-building and spatial occupation. It is an umbrella term for different movement-based disciplines, such as juggling, dance, object manipulation (doing tricks with props such as poi, hula hoops, contact balls and dragon staffs), acrobatics, and fire-spinning. In terms of theory, the article revisits the concepts of hippie culture and resistance in youth cultural studies and discusses them in a Finnish context. In the flow art community, resistance was actualised primarily as socially shared, fluid and embodied conventions such as peer learning and teaching as well as physical closeness and hugging. The article is informed by ethnographic fieldwork done together with flow artists in Helsinki, Finland in 2017–2018.
Çalışmada 2016-2019 yılları arasında altı sezonda izleyicileriyle buluşan Sıfır Bir: Bir Zamanlar Adana’da dizisinde dijital mecralarda üretilen altkültürel yapının özelliklerinin ortaya çıkarılması amaçlanmıştır. Dizi karakter özellikleri, senaryosu, dizi müzikleri gibi sembolik aktarımın farklı formları ile gençlik altkültürünü üretmektedir. Çalışma dijital platformların geleneksel yayıncılık içeriklerinden farklı olarak üretim sürecinde ortaya koymuş olduğu altkültürel tema üzerine inşa edilmiş olan dizinin içerik yapısını veri kaynağına dönüştürmekte, bu yönüyle dizi üzerine yapılan diğer çalışmalardan farklılaşmaktadır. Bu kapsamda 2016- 2019 yılları arasında 6 sezon 43 bölüm olarak yayınlanan dizinin 12 bölümü amaçsal örnekleme yöntemi ile çalışma evrenine çekilmiş, 317 sahne diyaloglar ve görsel özelliklerine göre içerik analizi kullanılarak incelenmiştir. Araştırma sonunda dizide üretilen sosyal grup yapısının eylem, söylem ve davranış özellikleriyle gençlik altkültür özelliği taşıdığı, kültürün üretiminde grup liderinin baskın özelliklerinin etkili olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Lider merkezli örgütlenme yapısının olması altkültürel yapıyı aynı zamanda getto kültürüne de yakınlaştırmaktadır. Eylem ve davranışlarda sıklıkla karşılaşılan suç unsurları ve şiddet “sapkın” bir davranış değil, sosyal yapıda hâkim olan kültürde, toplumsal ilişki kurma biçiminin bir sonucudur. “Hobohemia”ya egemen olan suç ve şiddet temelli kültüre karşı mücadele içinde olan gençlik altkültürü davranış, protest söylem, eylem ve diğer kültürel unsurlarla güçlü bir karşı çıkış üzerine inşa edilmiştir.
This article explores the emergence of the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) subculture, and how it transitioned from being perceived as a deviant subculture into a more legitimate culture industry. Using a historical analysis of documents, interviews with industry professionals, and ethnographic observations at EDM events; we explore the process by which this transition occurred. As we argue, the defining features of the EDM subculture also laid the foundations for outsiders to commodify the movement as a culture industry. We identify the concept of “subcultural appropriation” as the mechanism by which the movement’s politically dissident features were removed, and its place as a multi-billion dollar industry made possible. Long adherents to the subculture we interviewed, noted that this rise in popularity came at the cost of feelings of solidarity and commitment to core values of the subculture. We conclude with a discussion of how this study addresses limitations of the culture industry thesis, and argue for its continued utility to the study of subcultures and social groups.
The historical relationship between youth subcultures and mainstream media has long been the subject of debate. Some researchers have proposed that, after mixed panic and hype, the media quickly coopts and commodifies subcultural threats. Conversely, others have argued that negative media coverage keeps subcultures coherent and thriving, while positive coverage is the ‘kiss of death’. Despite its continued importance, few studies have closely examined this topic and none has quantitatively examined changes in subcultural media representation over time using archival data. This paper addresses this gap though a computer-assisted content analysis of 735 newspaper articles about punk subculture spanning three decades of publication. The results provide mixed support for both theoretical predictions, but fit neither perfectly. Overall coverage is ambivalent in tone, but becomes more positive and less radical over time. Punk takes far longer to commodify than cooptation perspectives predict. It survives positive coverage, but becomes increasingly coherent. The results call into question previous claims about media representation, highlight the need for more synthetic theories of the media’s relationship to subcultures, and illustrate the utility of text-mining methods for historical youth studies.
Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Leisure Studies, published by and copyright Routledge. This paper reports findings from interview surveys with 1215 respondents, split between the capital cities (Yerevan, Baku and Tbilisi) and one non-capital region (Kotayk, Aran-Mugan and Shida Kartli) in each of the three South Caucasus countries - Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The respondents, who were drawn from households in larger representative household social surveys, were all born between 1970 and 1976 and were aged 31-37 at the time of the fieldwork in 2007. Their life stage transitions from childhood to adulthood had roughly coincided with their countries' transitions from communism to post-communism. Data was collected on the samples' participation in selected leisure activities from age 16 to 30. Similar data was collected on the samples' careers in education, the labour market, housing and family relationships. This information enables us to identify typical leisure careers and how their development was affected by events in other life domains, all in the context of the macro-changes that were in process in each of the research locations. The evidence enables both personal leisure careers and aggregate leisure trends in different socio-demographic groups to be identified This shows that changes in leisure behaviour between age 16 and 30 were neither widening nor narrowing the differences between the leisure of males and females, or those who married and became parents on the one hand, then, on the other, those who were still single and childless at age 30. In contrast, differences by place, and by social class, grew progressively wider, thus raising the social costs of geographical and social mobility. Changes in leisure behaviour between age 16 and 30 were separating young adults into those who participated in little, if any, structured out-of-home leisure, whose main leisure spending, if any, was on alcohol and tobacco (typically consumed in homes and neighbourhoods), and those whose leisure was characterised by relatively high and sustained participation in sport, consumption of high culture, and going out to bars, cafes, cinema, discos, etc.
McKay takes us on a vivid journey through the endlessly creative counterworld of punks, ravers, travellers, tribes, squatters and direct-action protesters of every kind.
"The secret history of the last two decades.' Jon Savage
In 1997, Paul Gilroy was able to write: "I have been asking myself, whatever happened to breakdancing" (21), a form of vernacular dance associated with urban youth that emerged in the 1970s. However, in the last decade, breakdancing has experienced a massive renaissance in movies (You Got Served), commercials ("Gotta Have My Pops!") and documentaries (the acclaimed Freshest Kids). In this thesis, 1 explore the historical development of global b-boy/bgirl culture through a qualitative study involving dancers and their modes of communication. Widespread circulation of breakdancing images peaked in the mid-1980s, and subsequently b-boy/b-girl culture largely disappeared from the mediated landscape. The dance did not reemerge into the mainstream of North American popular culture until the late 1990s. 1 argue that the development of major transnational networks between b-boys and b-girls during the 1990s was a key factor in the return of 'b-boying/b-girling' (known formerly as breakdancing). Street dancers toured, traveled and competed internationally throughout this decade. They also began to create 'underground' video documentaries and travel video 'magazines.' These video artefacts circulated extensively around the globe through alternative distribution channels (including the backpacks of traveling dancers). 1 argue that underground video artefacts helped to produce 'imagined affinities' between dancers in various nations. Imagined affinities are identifications expressed by a cultural producer who shares an embodied activity with other practitioners through either mediated texts or travels through new places. These 'imagined affinities' helped to sustain b-boy/b-girl culture by generating visual/audio representations of popularity for the dance movement across geographical regions.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
This article examines the way in which rap music and hip hop culture have been appropriated and reworked by the youth of Turkish and Moroccan communities in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. I begin by considering how, via the incorporation of German and Turkish lyrics into self-composed rap songs, Frankfurt rap groups have been able to turn the genre into a highly localized mode of expression. More specifically, such a reworking of the rap genre has enabled its use as a medium for the voicing of issues relating to the problems of racism and citizenship with which ethnic minority groups newly or recently settled in Germany are faced. In the second part of the article I consider some of the resources which Frankfurt rappers have been able to draw upon in their attempts to rework hip hop as a localized mode of expression.
Investigations into youth culture are marginal to the field of youth studies. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham published studies of the post-war youth subcultures, such as the teddy boys and the punks, in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see Hall and Jefferson, 1976). From the 1980s onwards, however, the main concerns for youth studies were the transitions that young people made into the labour market.Transitions research continues to dominate, although the advent of the rave and dance cultures of the late 1980s prompted a partial return to investigations of youth culture. In direct contrast to the influential theories of the CCCS, many recent accounts of youth culture have moved away from structural and class-based accounts of young people’s experiences and have produced studies that stress the ‘tribal’ (Bennett, 1999, 2000), ‘individualized’ (Miles, 2000) and distinctly ‘postsubcultural’ (Muggleton, 2000) nature of the contemporary youth cultural experience. Recently, however, questions have been raised as to how far these theoretical insights are useful across youth cultural identities and experiences (Hollands, 2002; Nayak, 2003; Pilkington and Johnson, 2003). This article adds to this slowly growing literature. By drawing upon data collected for a PhD, it is suggested that structural factors, such as neighbourhood residence, can be influential in shaping the cultural identities and experiences of some groups of young people.
During the last decade, numerous studies of the internet's civic dimensions have taught us a considerable amount about the form of new technologies. They have, for instance, analysed how the internet's interactive character, its multimodality and its open character create civic opportunities, not least for young people. The field has, however, rather neglected a number of important issues. For instance, the category of ‘producers’ of civic content has received little attention. Hence, research has neglected questions such as the following. What interests inspire producers of civic websites? How is the production being carried through? What views of the internet inspire their work? This article begins to redress this neglect by analysing the producers of three different websites. The three websites are brought from different spheres of civil society – party politics, commercial media and activism – and they are analysed through producer interviews. The article reveals and critically discusses differences and similarities between different modes of producing civic web resources.
This paper represents a further contribution to recent debates in the Journal of Youth Studies about subculture theory and ‘post-subcultural studies'. Specifically, we argue that the particularised focus of the latter on youth culture in relation to music, dance and style negates a fuller, more accurate exploration of the cultural identities and experiences of the majority of young people. Celebratory and broadly postmodern theories have been utilised as a means for understanding the ‘scenes', ‘neo-tribes' and ‘lifestyles' that ‘post-subcultural studies' describe. Such studies tend to pay little attention to the importance, or otherwise, of social divisions and inequalities in contemporary youth culture. Almost unanimously, post-subcultural studies reject the previously pivotal significance of class-based subcultures, as theorised by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham, in their attempts to explain new forms of youth cultural identity. We argue that this critique of subculture is premised on a partial interpretation of the theoretical objectives of CCCS and that, in fact, some of the theoretical and methodological propositions of the latter remain relevant. This argument is supported by a brief review of some other, very recent youth research that demonstrates the continuing role of social divisions in the making and shaping of young people's leisure lives and youth cultural identities and practises. In conclusion, we suggest that the ambition of the CCCS to understand not only the relationship between culture and social structure, but also the ways in which individual youth biographies evolve out of this relationship, remains a valuable one for the sociology of youth.
Initially, I will suggest that the postmodernist understanding of youth subculture relies on a determinist interpretation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) position, which denies the immense diversity in the CCCS theorization that draws on Barthes, Gramsci, Althusser, Levi-Strauss and Lacan. I shall critically examine the development of postmodern subcultural theory, which is premised on the work of three key social theorists: Max Weber, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Maffesoli. Postmodernists have extracted ideas from these thinkers and combined them to argue against what is described as CCCS' 'theoretical orthodoxy' and also to construct new terms such as 'neotribe' and 'lifestyle' to replace the concept of subculture. I suggest that postmodernism's reluctance to focus on social structure promotes an individualistic understanding of the social. The work of the Chicago School and the CCCS gave priority to the collective, whereas postmodern subcultural writing is preoccupied with the individual resulting in a weak understanding of the group context of youth cultural practices. The postmodern interventions offer some useful critical insights, but their new theorization lacks substance and critical application to young people's social, economic and cultural realities. Furthermore, I will argue that under postmodern analysis, subculture returns to a conservative Mertonian interpretation of individual adaptation that corresponds to recent political neo-liberal economic and social policies. I will demonstrate that a contradiction is apparent between the postmodern dismissal of the CCCS' model of resistance and their own argument that youth are engaged in creative and emancipatory activities.
This paper tackles the question of how we might begin to re-conceptualize contemporary youth cultural identities in the context of social divisions created through different transitional pathways, by reference to some recent ethnographic work on young adults and nightlife. Traditionally, there has been a historic divide between analyses of youth cultures on the one hand, and studies of youth transitions on the other. This has led to charges that transition studies are not only somewhat mechanical and structurally biased, but rather dull and positivistic in their orientation. At the same time, recent analyses of youth styles have been pre-occupied with more post-modern readings of club-cultures, post-subcultures, neo-tribal patterns of activity and lifestyles, and have often failed to address questions of inequality, segmentation and spatial separation amongst differing consumption groupings. This paper critically interrogates these two traditions, and seeks to advance the debate by looking at the complex relationship between labour market divisions and cultural identities in the night-time economy. It argues that while minority elements of 'hybrid' forms of identity and consumption exist, they are overshadowed by the dominance of a 'mainstream' form of nightlife provision that exploits existing cleavages in the youth population, and segregates young adults into particular spaces and places. The paper concludes by suggesting that while individual scholars may continue to work primarily in one of these two areas, transition studies need to aspire to become more culturally rich, while studies of youth cultures need to become more aware of the existence of spatial divisions and socially segmented consumption patterns among different youth groupings.
Current explanations of juvenile delinquency place a heavy stress on the delinquent's deviance, not only with regard to his behavior but also with regard to his underlying values. It can be argued, however, that the delinquent's values are far less deviant than commonly portrayed and that the faulty picture is due to an erroneous view of the middle-class value system. A number of supposedly delinquent values are closely akin to those embodied in the leisure activities of the dominant society. To view adolescents in general and delinquents in particular as members of the last leisure class may help us explain both the large amount of unrecorded delinquency and the occurrence of delinquency throughout the class structure.
Interpersonal attraction of “men seeking men” in personal advertisements is investigated by using an electronic telephone advertisement system. One hundred and sixty-seven phone advertisements from men seeking men in Ottawa, Canada, were used in this study. Content analysis reveals themes and patterns in regard to inclusion of genital language, sexual roles, sexual acts, body language, race, and age. Results reveal a strong emphasis in advertisements' content on physical appearance and sexual relationships. Physical appearance and comments related to sex were mentioned in most ads, suggesting the importance of these two issues as strategies for securing responses when placing personal advertisements seeking men.
This article examines different forms of voluntary risk-taking behaviour amongst young people living and learning in a risk society. It draws on research conducted with a Scottish dance-education company and a synthesis of Elisian, Bakhtinian and Bourdieusian theories. It argues that risk-taking may be particularly alluring in 'societies of caution' in which youth experience significant levels of control and surveillance in schools and other heavily supervised contexts, and may also offer young people a means of solving some of the challenges presented by the risk society. However, access to relatively safe and supervised activities like (e.g. bungee jumping) is limited by the possession of various capital resources. Spontaneous and unregulated acts (e.g. trolley surfing) require far fewer capital resources. The study shows that successfully performing risks can assist young people to secure positions of belonging and status within desirable peer groups and to develop culturally venerated identities. Risk is often synonymous with hegemonic masculinity and, for young men specifically, voluntary risk-taking may be function as a strategy for avoiding culturally denigrated categories like 'wimp' and 'sissy'. Thus, the paper is able to demonstrate the commonality of a range of activities, from physical risks to 'identity risks'.
I spent the summer of 1990 studying the work of disk jockeys involved in the ‘House’ club scene in London, Manchester and Belfast. What I was initially intrigued by was how a popular music genre could develop such a following, indeed, some notoriety, without the traditional trappings of ‘rock 'n' roll’ (‘star performers’, ‘groups’), and without a manifest ideological stance adopted in relation to mainstream lifestyles. I came to conclude that a shift of meanings had occurred in the activity of mass dancing to records during the late 1980s, a shift which has created a new and central role for disk jockeys.
Despite the criticisms of subcultural theory as a framework for the sociological study of the relationship between youth, music, style and identity, the term 'subculture' continues to be widely used in such work. It is a central contention of this article that, as with subcultural theory, the concept of 'subculture' is unworkable as an objective analytical tool in sociological work on youth, music and style -that the musical tastes and stylistic preferences of youth, rather than being tied to issues of social class, as subculture maintains, are in fact examples of the late modern lifestyles in which notions of identity are 'constructed' rather than 'given', and 'fluid' rather than 'fixed'. Such fluidity, I maintain, is also a characteristic of the forms of collective association which are built around musical and stylistic preference. Using Maffesoli's concept of tribus (tribes) and applying this to an empirical study of the contemporary dance music in Britain, I argue that the musical and stylistic sensibilities exhibited by the young people involved in the dance music scene are clear examples of a form of late modern 'sociality' rather than a fixed subcultural group.
First publ.by: Saxon House,1977
New technologies are often perceived as important resources in attracting young people to formal politics, but less is known about how young people use them to create participatory practice on their own terms. This article examines young women's less conventional technology-enabled political and social activity in order to understand how these are operating as emergent modes of participation in a new political environment. It explores young women's use of online DIY culture, blogs, social networking sites and related technologies to open up questions about what counts as politics, and what is possible as politics for young people, and young women in particular, at the present moment. It suggests that these activities represent new directions in activism, the construction of new participatory communities, and the development of new kinds of public selves, while also telling us important things about the limits of the kinds of conventional citizen subject positions offered to young women at this time.
The concept of subculture has been criticised a great deal in recent research on youth and popular music. Two concepts have emerged as offering new ways of conceiving musical collectivities, particularly among young people: scenes, and tribes (or neo-tribes). I offer criticisms of the work of advocates of both terms. I also argue, however, that there is no possibility of a return to the concept of subculture in any adequate sociology of popular music, even if the concept may have some residual use in the sociology of youth. I discuss the potential advantages of the concepts of genre and articulation as a way of at least beginning to address some of the problems raised in the literature on subcultures, scenes and tribes, concerning the politics of musical collectivities. The common feature of the three terms under discussion is that they have been discussed by those concerned with the relationship between youth and popular music, and I close by reflecting on the relationship between the study of these two entities. I suggest that the assumption that there is a close relationship between youth and popular music was the result of particular historical circumstances and I argue that, while the study of young people's relationships with popular music remains a topic of interest, the privileging of youth in studies of music has actually become an obstacle to a more fully developed understanding of music and society.
Gathered here together for the first time is a collection of 12 in-depth and reflective pieces by activists and other key figures in [Britain's] DiY culture, telling their own stories and histories. From the environmentalist to the video activist, the raver to tthe road protestor, the neo-pagan to the anarcho-capitalist, the authors demonstrate how the counterculture of the 1990s offers a vibrant, provocative and positive alternative to institutionalized unemployment and the restricted freedoms and legislated pleasures of UK plc.
This article examines how older fans of punk rock articulate their continuing attachment to the music and its associated visual style.While sociological research on popular music audiences is well established, little attention has been paid to the articulation and management of fan practices of individuals beyond the age of 30. Based on ethnographic interviews conducted with older punk fans in East Kent, England, the article begins to redress this oversight in studies of popular music audiences.This involves an assessment of both the way in which articulations of punk style transgress with age from the visual to the biographical and how older punks develop particular discursive practices as a means of legitimating their place within a scene dominated by younger punk fans. Yes Yes
America's quest for the ideal self: dissent and fulfilment in the 60s and 70s
- á79 Hutchinson
- P Clecak
Hutchinson, 9Á79. Clecak, P., 1983. America's quest for the ideal self: dissent and fulfilment in the 60s and 70s.
Outsiders: studies in the sociology of deviance Subcultures or neo-tribes?: rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste
- Richardson
Richardson, eds. Habitus of the hood. London: Intellect Books. Becker, H.S., 1963. Outsiders: studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: Free Press. Bennett, A., 1999a. Subcultures or neo-tribes?: rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste. Sociology, 33 (3), 599Á617. Bennett, A., 1999b. Hip hop am main: the localisation of rap music and hip hop culture.
Notes on the present status of subculture The sociology of subcultures
- J Irwin
Irwin, J., 1970. Notes on the present status of subculture. In: D.O. Arnold, ed. The sociology of subcultures. Berkeley, CA: The Glendessary Press, 164Á171.
The clubcultures reader: readings in popular cultural studies
- S Redhead
- D Wynne
- O Connor
Redhead, S., Wynne, D., and O'Connor, J., eds., 1997. The clubcultures reader: readings in popular cultural studies. Oxford: Blackwell.
After subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture Basing-stoke: Palgrave, In defence of neo-tribes: a response to Blackman and Hesmondhalgh Punks not dead: the significance of punk rock for an older generation of fans
- á178 Bennett
Kahn-Harris, eds. After subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture. Basing-stoke: Palgrave, 162Á178. Bennett, A., 2005. In defence of neo-tribes: a response to Blackman and Hesmondhalgh. Journal of youth studies, 8 (2), 255Á259. Bennett, A., 2006. Punks not dead: the significance of punk rock for an older generation of fans. Sociology, 40 (1), 219Á235. Bennett, A. and Kahn-Harris, K., eds., 2004. After subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Inside subculture: the postmodern meaning of style
- D Muggleton
Muggleton, D., 2000. Inside subculture: the postmodern meaning of style. Oxford: Berg.
Unspectacular subculture? Transgression and mundanity in the global extreme metal scene After subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture Can you feel it?: DJs and house music culture in the UK. Popular music
- London
- á86 Hutchinson
- K Kahn-Harris
London: Hutchinson, 81Á86. Kahn-Harris, K., 2004. Unspectacular subculture? Transgression and mundanity in the global extreme metal scene. In: A. Bennett and K. Kahn-Harris, eds. After subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 107Á118. Langlois, T., 1992. Can you feel it?: DJs and house music culture in the UK. Popular music, 11 (2), 229Á238. Lipsitz, G., 1994. Dangerous crossroads: popular music, postmodernism and the poetics of place.
Popular music and local identity: rock, pop and rap in Europe and Oceania
- T Mitchell
Mitchell, T., 1996. Popular music and local identity: rock, pop and rap in Europe and Oceania.
The end-of-the-century party: youth and pop towards
- S Redhead
Redhead, S., 1990. The end-of-the-century party: youth and pop towards 2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cultural responses of the Teds: the defence of space and status
- T Jefferson
Jefferson, T., 1976. Cultural responses of the Teds: the defence of space and status. In: S. Hall and T. Jefferson, eds. Resistance through rituals: youth subcultures in post-war Britain.