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Excellent thread(but then I would say that, wouldn't I? having been obsessing over subcultures when you were in short trousers etc etc *g*) Been meaning to get to this for a while but needing to lay aside 3 days to answer it.
Oh, and if yr thinking of a HS thread on this, there's some great stuff out there in reading terms. Hebdige and McRobbie, of course, but recently there's been alot of wonderful cult.studs/anthropology stuff on tribes and subcultures, particularly(I'm guessing this is what you're most interested in) on 'youth cultures'... eg I'd recommend these, both excellent:
Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture - Paul Hodkinson
Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, eds. Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine
Maybe also Dave Haslam’s Manchester, England, for a slight sideways angle, a subcultural story of a city…v,.good.
I can lend you the second one, if yr interested...
Coupla points:
1.Are we going to get your answers to these questions, Fly? Although you are 'researching', this strikes me as classic embedded/positioned research, and it'd be interesting/useful to hear your own position on these questions.
2.Given the care you've taken over yr original questions, tacking on something vague about 'clothes' seems a bit lame. How about:
(How)do visual/public signifiers (for example clothes, body modifications, 'on the street' gathering and presentation, participation in events/conscious visibility strategies) play a part in your processes of subcultural identification and exclusion?
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1. Do you feel you belong to one or more subcultures, 'tribes', or scenes? (I know these aren't quite the same thing, but I'm interested in all three.) What made you and what continues to make you a part of it/them - both in terms of motivations, and outwards signs?
I'm interested in how these terms differ/map uncomfortably onto each other, but I guess that's for the Head Shop thread.
Yes, I do. The degree of choice as regarding the identifying factors varies, but participation in the subcultures that grow out of these is my decision.
So, as I seem to have more (cultural) labels than a piece of D&G, divided by enabling factor:
Race/national-cultural: Specfic: Bengali, British Bengali, British(Southern)Asian, (English. Which is one of my identities, but only rarely feels subcultural). General Second Generation-ers. My membership of these is, like most of my subcultural memberships, variable in how much I idenify/qualify. But, it would seem, becoming more important to me as I get older.
Gender/sexuality: bisexual, queer outcasts (ie I’ve always found myself floating around queer scenes that are based on rejection/ejection from mainstream Gay and Lesbian culture: queer pagan, queeruption, queercore) and feminist ones eg riotgrrl, feministBDSM’er . BDSM’er, also is a stand-alone identity that sometimes, but not always involves subcultural membership/engagement.
With all of these my relationship to organised scenes has fluctuated in terms of my desire to be involved in them, and my feelings of qualification for them. Tribes and belonging are a very tricky thing for me… Am recently evolving connections/scenes which seem partly based on non-monogamy, that’s a newer one for m.
Artistic/asethetic-cultural – hmmm. Tricky this one, not so much any more. In the past, this has been a very important identifier for me. Baggy, most strongly I think, a very brief flirtation with goth, longer metaller and raver periods, a bit of an Indie thing. Most of my aesthetically-based identities have been through music. Oh, and a couple of more recent ones: jungle/drum and bass, in the mid/late 90s – which was very racially mixed but very straight….. (Unless specifically done by queers, queer jungle nights RULE) and one in which I really stick out is what I guess you could call ‘glitch kid’: Warp, Rephlex, Skam etc. Which is *very* boy and *very* white and *very* straight. There is apparently now a faggy electronica night in London which I’m pretty curious about…
Queercore and riotgrrl/kinderwhore fit in here as well, and tell me that if you get something where the ‘big’ identities and the cultural signifiers collide in a way that works for me, I get very excited. Doesn’t’ happen often. As often subcultures for me are about figuring out their specificities/limitations, the parts of me which don’t fit that scene.
Political/intellectual. Will come back to this…
I think I have a touch of sulky ‘I like not to belong’ in my subcultural dynamics; at the same time narratives of acceptance and rejection are incredibly powerful for me, for reasons pretty obviously to do with my upbringing/psychological formation. Tribes and cultures are wonderful/hideous, appalling/addictive, hurt/comfort to me….Hence, my own obsession with subcultures and safe spaces… My personal identifications are very important to me, but the extent to which these reach out into subcultural membership fluctuates wildly. SO, all my statements here are subject to change, pretty much by the second, Derrida-style...
And then work/profession has intermingled with scene/subculture, many sectors give rise to/resemble subcultures. So as a proto-academic/curator/contemporary art hack, I was definitely a member of the london contemporary art/creative scene, which is a subculture all its own. I used to drink regularly at the Pharmacy, dahling…. *g*
Academia, I’d say, also. These days, I float at the edges of these, and seem, for someone who hasn’t been in education for years, to be unable/unwilling to shake off the connections to academic scenes, in fact, instead, finding new ones.
Oh, and v.context-specific: a football fan. Which is pretty much subcultural in all my social/professional spheres. And there is an identifiable, visible subculture of Asian Leeds Fans, in which I participate slightly….
2. Are variables such as your class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality factors which affect or complicate your relationship to your subculture/tribe/scene(s)?
Well, duh. Yep. And I think I’ve covered most of this above. I often feel that I never quite fit in, in any subculture. Eg most of my queer scenes are very white and very middle class, most of my Asian scenes are very straight…. Often my music scenes have been very white and straight. And some of them very male. hence the joy for me of things like riotgrrl and queercore.
Was very odd and exciting at BiCon to manage to arrange a quick drink with 3 other bi south asian women…. We rather felt that if we all managed to be in one room, the world would end…. Was V.cool,.as though we’d never met before, the double-identification meant we immediately had loads to talk about. None of us had ever been in a room with 3 other bi SA women and spent a bit of time just staring at each other!
Class is a tricky one for me, as true to my ‘doesn’t fit’ impulses, I feel in-between working and middle-class. Or perhaps more correctly, between lower middle and middle-class. Am a huge inverse snob, am slowly trying to work on this, and am alive to the absurdity of it. But more and more find myself in subcultures/scenes where I feel like the declassé pleb. One of my oldest(school) friends has a similar experience, in that, she went to four weddings this years of friends from the recent years, and discovered that they were all from what we’d consider ‘posh’ backgrounds…. So I think that’s a product of how our lives have gone/social mobility. And anyone here who’s ever suggested I’m posh knows how easy it is wind me up with that!
3. To what extent is your taste in art or popular entertainment a contributing factor or a complication?
Ooh, was talking just the other day about this. Through my participation in some scenes that grew for me out of BiCon/participation in a visible bisexual community, I’m finding myself hanging out with/having Goths as friends for the first time in about 15 years…. Add conversations with Gambit and K, and Ex and I’m realising that the primary reason I never lasted in the Goth scene was that I loathed and still loathe most of the music. And that I’m far too muso (still, and am about as unmuso as I’ve ever been) to engage with a scene where I don’t like the music. As, there are lots of other things about both historical Gothic aesthetics and some of what (from a hugely ignorant outside position) appear to be the standards.
Eg, had a fascinating conversation with a couple of friends who pointed out that 15/20 years ago, the Goth scene had often been one of the only safe spaces to express their bi and sm sexualities… Which is something I think I could have benefited hugely from. But, as I don’t like the music, it was never gonna happen. Though I’m having other conversations elsewhere about what ‘Goth’ actually *is*, which are proving fascinating. As I did my little speech about the music to one of the ‘elder goth’ people mentioned above, and he promptly interrupted me to tell me that he hates the music as well. And put a Kylie cd on…..
So if someone can help me out on what goth is, I’d be very grateful. I guess it’s an unstable as all identity categories….
Also, I don’t particularly rate Buffy, which is pretty heinous in most of my subcultures and simple friends circles. It’s pretty much become a contrary badge of pride, these days!
4. If you belong to or feel kinship with more than one subculture/tribe/scene, how do they overlap or conflict? Is one more important than another? Do they relate to specific separate aspects of your life (eg, are you part one tribe musically, and another sexually, with no overlap)?
Crikey yes. Having spent a bit of time in Manchester and Leeds recently, realised how much I miss living somewhere with a visible/decent-sized South Asian quarter. And how much I feel at home in that/how it’s a major reason that I can’t see myself settling permanently in Right-On. But on the other hand, my bi/queer/’marrying out’/ SM id’s don’t go down too well here, if I express them. To say the least.
If I go into curry houses with white friends, I often have to deal with some ‘dad aged’ man asking me what I do, what profession I’m in, whether I’m studying or not… Stumbled hazily into a Pizza place in Fallowfield at 3am and found myself have a fascinating but slightly testing conversation with the two Manc Asian lads running it about how Brighton didn’t have many Asians, what Manchester was like for ‘us’ etc..V.cool, ended with email swopping and ‘gis a yell if yr up this way and we’ll take you out’….
I’m out to my immediate family, but to no-one else in my (extended)family/community. So pretty obvious conflict there. Basically, it would cause my family far more hassle than even I want to cause them…
Overlaps: Bi and BDSM, which very much surprised me at my first BiCon.. They don’t map exactly onto each other (and this has been a source of tensin/conflict at bicons) but the large crossover, was for me a very exciting discovery.
A lot of my music tastes (which don’t really dictate my subc. Engagements to such a degree) these days are pretty straight. I can seek out queer versions of most of them, though I don’t tend to bother…
5. Do you believe that something called 'the mainstream' exists, and if so do you feel outside of that? If you do feel outside of it, is that by your choice, or because the mainstream itself has certain defined, policed boundaries which you fall outside?
Mainstream is such a contextual term and I think any discussion or use of the term has to remember that every step of the way…. There are certainly things I do which I think mark me as pretty far away from the majority, but majority and mainstream don’t map neatly onto each other….. Much of my cultural consumption, is utterly majority and mainstream…
And then in minority mainstream cultures, I can still find myself in a minority/subculture, as I’ve described above queer and Asian often work like this against each other… But I’m getting tired and this is already War and Peace-length….
6. Are there other subcultures/tribes/scenes with which your own s/t/s of choice has a sense of allegiance or animosity? If so, why? If it's animosity, who started it?
Hmm. I guess all my queer subcultures have animosity towards homophobes. But then many of my non-queer ones have that. I and others have commented on the sad, and not entirely surprising truth that subcultures are quite capable of being bigoted. Each racist queers and asylum-bashing ‘old’ immigrants.
Too many of the tribes I might otherwise feel comfortable in have a superiority complex/mock the sheeple thing which I hate.
Will have to think more about this.
7.(How)do visual/public signifiers (for example clothes, body modifications, 'on the street' gathering and presentation, participation in events/conscious visibility strategies) play a part in your processes of subcultural identification and exclusion?
Some of them, it’s not involved at all, Eg my membership of the barbelith subculture…. In others, my choices on presentation/visibility are vast, important, and a part of what I love about my participation. Still others, eg British Asian, are at least indicated/hinted at, whatever I choose to wear, but can be minimised/maximised dependent on where I present myself.
Sexuality is the prime area where I consciously and joyfully play with appearances – and the site of stress in terms of the difficulty of presenting physically/textiley as bisexual….
Appearing can be added to appearance, eg bi(sorry) participating in things like Pride, BiCon, clubbing is in varying degrees about expressing allegiances/connecting with like people.
Again, will come back, as this is already way too long and I have much to say about this last one. |
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