Goth Scene Research Articles

Becoming and being goth: How goths remember the scene’s transition from the eighties into the nineties

Goth emerged from post-punk, and by the 1980s became an identifiable feature of the popular music scene and wider popular culture. Fuelled by the success of bands such as the Sisters of Mercy, goth music and culture spread around the world, interacting with wider alternative, gothic fashions. At the end of the 1980s, goth reached a peak of interest followed by retrenchment into the alternative, subcultural spaces from which it had emerged. Nonetheless, it survives. In this article, we interview goths who became active in the 1980s and who remain engaged in order to understand how they became goths and what goth meant to them then. Using memory work, we are interested in how these goths construct their own histories and mythologies, and what this might tell us about the political and sociological importance of goth as a counter-hegemonic space at a time of globalization, consumption and commodification. We explore how they remember goth emerging from the post-punk scene with its radical politics and alternative, anti-mainstream culture. We examine the way these individuals remember becoming goth and their awareness of being in a goth scene. We then show how they remember and construct stories of when goth retrenched in an alternative underground that reconstructed the counter-hegemonic politics of punk and post-punk. Finally, we show what happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s and argue that the scene, or that part of the scene represented by our goths, is following a dialectical path carved out of the neo-Gramscian concept of negotiation when faced with the culturally and aesthetically hegemonic effect of a dominant culture.

Raw as life: the Queer, the Goth and the Gothic in Lost Souls, by Poppy Z. Brite

The Goth Subculture features a highly performative disposition relating to sexuality, body, and gender; thus, the scene promotes the emergence of queer identities. The transgender author Poppy Z. Brite inserts his novel Lost Souls in this context as one of the few authors of Gothic fiction to relate his work to the subculture of the same name. In this article I discuss the Goth Subculture parallel to Butler's gender theory, and I also discuss the character development of Nothing, Lost Souls’ protagonist, relating it to the aesthetics of the Goth scene. This study was financed in part by the Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.

Goth YouTubers and the informal mentoring of young goths: peer support and solidarity in the Greek goth scene

ABSTRACT This ethnographic article is the first contribution to the topic of the informal mentoring of YouTube vloggers (video bloggers) also known as YouTubers and focuses on the practices of young Greek goth YouTubers and their viewers. Goth YouTubers create videos as a response to problems that they personally face, which include challenges such as bullying, and dealing with negative descriptions of themselves. YouTubers take advantage of available features of multiple social media platforms which they utilise in combination with YouTube and performative techniques to create a sense of un-mediation with their viewers. The result of this is that the viewers develop a sense of intimacy with the You Tubers, and see similarities in their lives, and consequently feel able to ask the advice of the YouTuber. Goth YouTubers personally reply to their viewers with personal messages or videos. These interactions take the form of an informal mentoring which contributes to the building of solidarity within the goth scene. Thus, the article concludes that informal mentoring becomes central to the integration of new goths into the scene, into learning about the scene itself, and furthermore, as an aid to coping with problems that they face.

All black everything: Gothic cloak and swagger in contemporary hip hop

Abstract In stark contrast to the widespread popularity of the Gothic literary genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, goth music and goth fashion were largely relegated to subculture from their inception in the late 1970s. Over the past decade, however, goth fashion has moved past its musical counterpart into ubiquity, stretching its shadow-laced fingers across popular culture and into contemporary hip hop as artists incorporate goth aesthetics and Gothic literary themes into their expanding style lexicons. From the ‘Ghetto Gothic’ fashions of A$AP Rocky and Mykki Blanco to the monochromatic macabre videos of Jay-Z and Kanye West, the sartorial signs of the doomed undead are now de rigueur in rap, and washes of reverb-laden guitar beneath mournful Anglo-European voices are no longer prerequisites for sepulchral style. Contrary to the authenticity-obsessed goth scene, this phenomenon can be viewed as momentary ‘Gothic drag’, or more in keeping with hip hop culture, as ‘aesthetic sampling’ that mirrors the long-standing tradition of music sampling in rap. Rather than standing in opposition to classic definitions of goth subculture or Gothic literary tropes, the cultural syncretism in today’s hip hop serves to revitalize and recontextualize the entire macabre genre, rendering it more inclusive of diversity and free from its characteristic restraints.

‘F**king Freak! What the Hell Do You Think You Look Like?’

Greater Manchester Police’s categorisation of targeted attacks on ‘alternative subculture’ members as hate crimes prompted extensive debate about whether such incidents are comparable to those of recognised hate crime groups. Hate crime experts have contributed to this debate but there is a lack of detailed empirical research on the subject. Drawing on qualitative interviews with twenty-one respondents mostly affiliated to the goth scene, this paper uncovers extensive experience of verbal harassment and, for some respondents, repeated incidents of targeted violence. The nature and impact of such experiences, we argue, bears comparison with key facets of hate crime. Such evidence informs and underlines the importance of conceptual arguments about whether hate crime can or should be extended beyond recognised minority groups.

Family and Parenthood in an Ageing ‘Youth’ Culture: A Collective Embrace of Dominant Adulthood?

‘Youth’ music and style cultures, such as the punk, goth, metal and club scenes, are often regarded as opposed to the institution of the family and the values it symbolises. Yet significant numbers of the participants of such groups are now remaining actively involved into their thirties and beyond alongside the taking on of permanent cohabitation, marriage and parenthood. This article explores the increasing importance of family life for ageing members of ‘youth’ cultures in relation to the case study of the goth scene, a dark-themed grouping whose average age is rising. I emphasise the collective nature of the embrace of family among older goths and the implications of this for the values and environment of the group itself and the trajectories of individual members. Amongst other things, I explore whether the drift towards family and parenthood amongst goths might be understood as a collective assimilation into dominant adulthood.

Pagans and Satan and Goths, oh my: dark leisure as communicative agency and communal identity on the fringes of the modern Goth scene

Goth music's cultural terrain has been extensively mapped in the first decade of this century. Through a dark leisure framework, the present article examines the way in which parts of the Goth scene embraced paganism and, latterly, Satanism, as actual practices and ontologies of belief. Ethnographic research and case studies on paganism and Satanism in Goth subcultures are used. This paper argues that being a pagan or Satanist in the fringes of the Goth scene is a way of using dark leisure to resist, usefully and meaningfully, the fashionable but instrumental globalised choice of mainstream popular culture.

Beyond spectacular specifics in the study of youth (sub)cultures

This paper examines how much we can learn about youth music and style groupings from the detail of the spectacular content and practices which most obviously distinguish such groups. First, I consider an apparent revival in theoretically driven interpretations of subcultural style, music and content in recent work on the goth scene, arguing that, for all their sophistication, such studies seem liable to reproduce some of the difficulties of earlier studies of spectacular symbolic meanings unless their findings are connected with other kinds of evidence. The paper then examines recent calls for greater focus on the minutiae of participants' sensory experience of distinct subcultural practices. I discuss case studies of promising work in the area, while emphasising the need to avoid reducing subcultures to the specificities of selected spectacular experience. Drawing the two parts together, I suggest many elements of subcultures are neither imprinted in spectacular sounds and texts nor discernable from the immediate sensations spectacular practices give rise to. In order to enhance our overall understanding it is important, therefore, that our examination of the distinct and extra-ordinary features of subcultures is contextualised in relation to broader understandings of a range of other properties and patterns which may be less distinct, unique or extra-ordinary.

Ageing in a spectacular ‘youth culture’: continuity, change and community amongst older goths

This article explores the continuing involvement in youth music and style cultures of older participants through examination of the case study of the goth scene. It does so in the context of a widespread neglect, until recently, of what happens to participants of 'youth cultures' as they move beyond adolescence and also of a growing consensus about the broadening of youth itself as a life course period. Drawing on recent work on older participants in other music and style related groupings, the article uses original qualitative research to examine the developing lives and identities of goths as they become older. Rather than regarding continuing participation as a simple extension of youth, the focus is on the ways participation accompanied and was reconciled with material, domestic and physical elements of developing adult lives. Through reference to the case study, I emphasize the ways the experience of ageing for long-term music and style culture participants can constitute a collective experience.

East German Goth and the Spectres of Marx

AbstractThe East of Germany, theBundesländerof the former GDR, is an important centre of Goth activity. The Goth scene is remarkably large in this part of Germany, and one of the most important yearly Goth festivals, theWave-Gotik-Treffen, takes place in Leipzig. This article investigates the specific characteristics and internal dynamics of East German Goth subcultures after German reunification. Combining subcultural theory and Gothic criticism with Derrida's notions of spectrality and hauntology, the potentials of Gothic as a form of cultural criticism are explored in an investigation of the psycho-social wasteland of the undead GDR. It will be argued that post-Cold War unification has not only led to a new political order, but has also given rise to a new type of Gothicism, as East German Goth subculture is haunted by ‘spectres of Marx’ that provide a critical engagement with globalised capital and media. As a specifically German version of the worldwide Goth scene, moreover, it marks the local boundedness of globalised subcultures.

“So Full of Myself as a Chick”

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and Internet postings, this article analyzes gender in a local Goth scene. These Goths use the confines of the subcultural scene, where they are relatively safe from outsider view, and the scene’s celebration of sexuality as resources to resist mainstream notions of passive femininity. This article probes the struggles of women in this Goth scene to examine the broader possibilities and limitations of strategies of active feminine sexuality in gaining gender egalitarianism. I argue that although these women do transform sexual expectations and experiences, their gains are hampered by an overly narrow vision of gender egalitarianism that both obfuscates the broader landscape of gender inequality and blurs the reproduction of an ideological system in which romance trumps sex.