Cultural Identity and Subcultural Forums

Abstract

This study analyzes the identity politics of Adult Swim’s brand culture in the context of post-network American television’s technological, textual, and cultural shifts. It shows how Adult Swim texts and paratexts, news stories about the network, and industry trade journals discursively construct the Adult Swim audience as an embodiment of dominant cultural identities (i.e., young, white, heterosexual masculinity), while simultaneously framing this community within discourses of subcultural taste and oppositional distinction. In doing so, the network alternately profits from and disavows white-male privilege by promoting this structurally dominant and highly valued group as a cultist, counterhegemonic fan base. This articulation of young, white, heterosexual masculinity to subcultural politics of taste and community both reflects and feeds the continued valuation of the young-white-male demographic in a nominally fragmented American media environment.