Goth Subculture Research Articles

The Integration of the Modern Kebaya with Gothic Aesthetics in a Womenswear Collection as an Embodiment of Women's Empowerment

This study examines the visual aspects of the discovery and modernization of Indonesian Kebaya. The Kebaya’s integration with the Gothic style is considered an example of its modernization. The combination of these two aspects, in addition to its innovative nature, serves as a means of preserving the cultural significance of Kebaya both domestically and globally. The Gothic style is a popular fashion trend among the younger generation. The Kebaya and Gothic styles share historical connections as they both served as emblems of women’s resistance and independence in previous eras. In terms of visual aesthetics, there are notable similarities between the Kebaya and Gothic styles, particularly in their use of lace fabric and form-fitting silhouettes. In addition to this, the examination of the Kebaya and Gothic style, frequently associated with women, suggests that the incorporation of Gothic elements into the modernization of the Kebaya can serve as a symbol of women’s emancipation. The present study employs a qualitative research methodologies, including a comprehensive literature review, trend analysis, and design and material explorations. The exercise produced a collection of ten distinct designs, each of which is manifested in four different product realisations. The collection encompasses a range of garments, including Kebaya shirts, pants, skirts, bralettes, and corsets. These pieces predominantly include black hues and exhibit fitting body forms. Additionally, they are decorated with metallic hardware accents and embellishments, which are applied to lace and denim fabrics. The purpose of this collection is to ensure the preservation of the Kebaya as an integral part of Indonesian culture while also allowing it to coexist with contemporary pop culture. This approach aims to maintain the relevance of the Kebaya in an ever-evolving and modern society. Keywords: Kebaya, gothic, modernization, culture, preservation, fashion

Arthur J. Penty and the politics of the architectural profession, 1906–1937

ABSTRACT The British political theorist and architect Arthur J. Penty (1875-1937) is today remembered as the co-originator of ‘post-industrialism’ and as the first guild socialist. His writings evince a lifelong aversion to the evils of commercial society, as well as an intense appreciation for Medieval life. Yet Penty's conservative tendencies belie his attentiveness to what Harold Perkin would call ‘professional society.’ Though he abhorred capitalism, Penty believed in assigning status to workers on the basis of social function and technical expertise. Most surprisingly, given his reputation, he held that the guarantee of such status represented the first step towards a more democratic society. This essay accordingly recasts Penty as a political theorist of the professions. It does so through the analysis of not only his core interventions in political theory, but also his lesser-known trade writings. The first section focuses on Penty's early life and context. The second explains his historical understanding of architectural decline through his contrasting narratives of Classical and Gothic aesthetics. The third section outlines his theory of how to restore democratic architecture in modernity. The fourth section comments on Penty's larger significance in the history of ideas at a time of increasing populist references to ‘traditional’ aesthetics.

‘Keep it Gothic, Man’: Gothic and Graphic Medicine in Ian Williams’s The Bad Doctor

Exploring the intersection of Gothic Medicine and Graphic Medicine in Ian William’s graphic novel, The Bad Doctor, this article discusses the ways in which gothic aesthetics, particularly representations of the abject encounter, contribute to an understanding of mental illness whilst also interrogating dominant paradigms within medical discourse. Further, this study suggests that the gothic aspects of comics as a medium contribute to the effectiveness of Gothic Medicine as a genre by offering insight into visual and verbal representations of the body. Detailed close readings indicate that Williams’s work draws a parallel between the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder on an individual level and the hostility toward the Gothic that formed a cornerstone in the foundation of modern medicine as a discipline.

Reconfiguring Gothic-Postmodernism: A Reading of Namina Forna’s (2021) The Gilded Ones

This paper explores Namina Forna’s (2021) debut novel, The Gilded Ones, as manifesting postmodern aspects which allow the text to comment on twenty-first-century life. Forna employs certain parameters of postmodernism that elucidate the postmodern lifestyle. Anchored on the bedrock of postmodernism, this paper dissects the selected text in order to reveal an artistic trajectory that captures the pulse and the tempor contemporaneous with postmodern life. Postmodernism has brought a revolution in the way a text is appreciated since it rejects the limiting boundaries of art and allows plurality of interpretations. Locating Forna’s text, The Gilded Ones within postmodernism theory, this paper employed a library-based close reading to explore the rejuvenation of horrors and fears encapsulated in the twenty first century. It engaged an interpretivist research design that allowed data to be chiselled out of primary text and coded for interpretation. Judgmental sampling was done to arrive at Forna’s The Gilded Ones since the text is replete with postmodernist aspects. The study is instrumental in addressing the fluidity of identity from a numinous paradigm allowing the physical or reality and phantasmagoria to conflate. The paper avers that Forna in her selected text, encapsulates the mechanics and aspects of Gothic-postmodernism which captures succinctly issues contemporaneous with the postmodern society. Gothic aesthetics have been used to dignify and elevate the history of a community. It is hoped that the study makes significant contribution on the dialectics surrounding identity as it voices postmodern fears. The study is instrumental in rooting for the recognition of Africa’s postmodern genre

Analysis of the Gothic Aesthetics of "The Fall of the House of Usher" from Spatial Narrative

Analysis of the Gothic Aesthetics of "The Fall of the House of Usher" from Spatial Narrative

Gothic Sublime in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

This research work is an attempt to prove Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a Gothic novel. It answers the question: why does the writer use the elements of Gothic in the text? Stevenson applies the Gothic to invoke the sublime thereby exploring possible plurality of human consciousness as well as the dual nature of late Victorian society. The research comes across the fact that two distinct personalities inhabit the same self. This thesis establishes Stevenson’s chosen work as an urban Gothic novella which adds new dimension to the existing research on the author’s literary works. It uses Gothic Aesthetics as theoretical tool drawing on concepts from Edmund Burke’s ‘sublime’ from his classic aesthetic philosophical discourse titled Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the sublime and beautiful. The application of Gothic Aesthetics aids to explore Victorian Romantic horrors and reveal the real intention of the author.

Готические мотивы в рассказах А. Конан Дойля «Коричневая рука» и В. Фёдорова «Лунная соната»

The article presents a comparative study of the stories “The Brown Hand” by Arthur Conan Doyle and “The Moonlight Sonata” by Vladimir Fedorov in terms of the Gothic aesthetics. There are significant typological similarities, in particular, in developing the redemption of guilt plot with consequent events such as the main character’s arrival at his relative’s house, an encounter with supernatural phenomena, a search for assistance and a final redemption from the curse. The stories have similar systems of characters: an elderly family member, his young relative with rational views, a restless ghost, and a minor character, an innocent victim of the ominous events. In the both stories, the Gothic chronotope is concentrated around a remote place, where events happen mostly at night. As significant are the parallels in the key motifs: the motifs of estrangement and fear, creating a peculiarly gloomy atmosphere (appearance of ghosts); the plot-building motif of a fatal secret and supernatural invasion, which convey the motifs of prosecution and guilt; and the double-vector motif of redemption.

Reading The Detail In John Ruskin’s Gothic Aesthetics

John Ruskin’s attention to details in art has generally been viewed in terms of objectivity and the rise of realism. This essay traces as an alternate trajectory linking detail with a liberated, individualist subjectivity. It traces this arc from Ruskin’s Gothic ornamental details to a range of modernist details, from Marcel Proust’s madeleine to Prufrock’s coffee spoons, by way of Hegelian theory. It aims to vivify reflection on the place of detail in aesthetics, which, though discussed by writers from Roland Barthes to Jacques Rancière, has yet to receive its full due.

Особенности преломления готической традиции в творчестве Г. Ф. Лавкрафта (на материале рассказа «Изгой»)

The aim of the research is to consider the features of the Gothic tradition implementation in H. P. Lovecraft’s creative work by the example of his story “The Outsider” (1921). The article clarifies the main provisions of the Gothic aesthetics, as well as the history of its formation and development. The connection between the Gothic and Romanticism literatures is considered: the Gothic direction arose within the early works of the latter. The scientific novelty of the study lies in an in-depth analysis of those elements of the American writer’s work that can be attributed to the Gothic direction. As a result, it has been proved that in addition to the accumulation of the author’s features, the specifics of which should be attributed to the individual author’s style, there are elements in the text of the story that correspond to the Gothic tradition.

Spring showers put a dampener on reproduction success

Bat mothers invest incredible amounts of energy in raising a pup. Typically, bats mate in the autumn and hibernate over winter; however, the females do not become pregnant until the following spring and give birth in the summer. To sustain pregnancy, bats feed on insects, such as midges and flies that can become rarer when poor weather sweeps in. In addition, younger bats need to hone their insect-catching skills which can also impair their ability to raise pups. Bianca Stapelfeldt from the University of Greifswald, and colleagues from the Bat Research Project, Germany and the Nossentiner/Schwinzer Nature Park, Germany, set out to determine how weather affects the reproductive success of adult female Natterer's bats (Myotis nattereri) of different ages.Beginning in 1990 and continuing every year since, researchers have collected Natterer's bats from bat and bird boxes in the Nossentiner/Schwinzer Nature Park in Mecklenburg-Pomerania, Germany, between July and September. The researchers measured the body mass, forearm length (measurement of body size) and identified the bat's age (whether they were adult or juvenile), before marking the bats with forearm bands to keep track of individuals through the years. In addition, the scientists noted whether the adult females had given birth that year by assessing the fur around the nipple; if there was fur, then the bat likely did not have a pup, while a lack of fur meant that she had given birth to a pup that season. Over the decades, the team also monitored archived climate data from a nearby meteorological station in Goldberg, Germany, and identified the average and lowest temperatures, the daily precipitation levels and the overnight wind speeds and total precipitation levels from 2003 to 2020.The team found that over the 17-year period, the younger adult female bats had less success in birthing and rearing baby bats, compared with older adult females, likely because the younger mothers may be unable to provide themselves with the immense amount of energy required during pregnancy and when feeding their pups. The researchers speculate that younger adult bats may forgo pregnancy to avoid investing energy into a pup that they may be unable to raise. Interestingly, wetter springs also resulted in lower birth rates in younger adult bats, which was not seen with the older mothers. The researchers suspect that rainy periods make it difficult for the bats to echolocate and hunt for food and to stay warm. Therefore, poor weather may cause the bats’ body weight to reach a critical low, so that younger bats may forgo pregnancy altogether.In addition, the researchers identified a 2-week window (from the end of April to 11 May) where poor weather had the greatest negative impact on the females’ pregnancies. It is unknown when Natterer's bats become pregnant, but this 2-week critical period is the same time pregnancies begin for other bats across Europe. Since pups have little time to grow and prepare for hibernation, adult females cannot delay their pregnancies any later, and so may abandon pregnancies if they experience adverse weather during this pivotal period.Stapelfeldt and colleagues have successfully shown the impact of poor weather on the pregnancy and baby rearing by bat mothers using long-term monitoring of a bat population and the weather conditions they encounter. Climate change is an imminent threat worldwide and many European countries are likely to become increasingly wet during this critical period for bat pregnancies, which could dramatically affect the ability of bat populations to reproduce. Increases in rainfall during the spring may be a particular threat for European bat species at risk of extinction.

Translation of black humor in the films of Tim Burton

The article looks into the specific features of the individual style of the American film director, screenwriter, and animator Tim Burton; it studies the Ukrainian language translation of the black humor in the animated dark fantasy film “Corpse Bride” (2005). The article investigates the multimodality of the film text, it studies the film director’s style which is based on the openness to macabre art, gothic subculture, the Victorian epoch, black humor, and the ironic attitude to death. Film text contains verbal and non-verbal elements of film language. The research outlines the basic features of film translation and the author’s criteria for creating a film text which consists of the verbal, nonverbal, and symbolic elements as well as the ways through which the author achieves the comic effect. The work analyzes the works by the authors engaged in the fields of film translation, psycholinguistics, and film production. The choice of the material is conditioned by the fact that this animated full-length film depicts the author’s style and contains a lot of examples of black humor in both verbal and nonverbal components of the film text. It also reflects the current theme of fear, helplessness and death, as well as an individual’s response to the destructive environment, using verbal and non-verbal means of black humor and irony. Macabre symbols, music and other details emphasize the atmosphere of the world of the dead. The research in the field of black humor is promising as there are multiple current examples in the media and social networks. The theme of the macabre is topical in view of its insufficient study in Ukrainian artistic and translation fields. Film translation creates a new multimodal/multimedia text that should have the same impact on the recipient of the target language and culture as it does on the recipient in the source culture and language. In addition to culturally-specific and lexical and grammatical problems of translation, there are technical issues, which are determined by the specifics of audiovisual translation, in particular, the need to adhere to the timing, know the standards of subtitling and dubbing, be able to work with culturally-specific information, apply translation strategies in order to produce a text that sounds most natural to the target audience.

AN INTEGRATED SYNTHESIS OF THE ARTS ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE USE OF VICTORIAN GOTHIC MOTIFS IN THE ART OF CREATING CLOTHES AND JEWELRY

The question of the synthesis of arts has always involved the combination of different types of art within a single object, such as, for example, architecture and sculpture, architecture and fresco painting, architecture and mosaic, stained glass, etc. But now the list of art types that can be in an interesting and unusual synthesis has expanded significantly. In a number of articles, we offered an overview of jewelry that in a certain way represents a synthetic combination of monumental architectural and, actually, miniature jewelry art. Various methods of using integral architectural structures, general street and urban ensembles, individual architectural elements, building plans, and characteristic images were presented. This article offers a review of the continuation of this trend, which has ancient roots, but gained particular popularity at the beginning of the 21st century, capturing numerous individual creative workshops and large jewelry houses. The fashion for architectural elements captivates fashion designers and fabric artists who create finished images based on architectural concepts. I especially want to single out a separate trend related to the Gothic subculture, which also gained popularity at the beginning of the 21st century. The article carries out a systematic analysis of the latest meaning of the concept of "Gothic" and its aesthetic model - the culture of Britain at the end of the 19th century, the dark manifestations of which were called "Victorian Gothic". Aspects of the revival of characteristic Gothic elements in Britain, their evolution and eclecticism with ethnic motifs are considered; formation of the concept of "Neo-Gothic" and directly "Victorian Gothic". Characteristic elements of Gothic architecture, such as stained-glass rosettes and gargoyles, become one of the favorite motifs of clothing and jewelry designers who work in this direction. Looking at the works of famous artists, such as the Italian studio Videnoir and Guo Pei, the essence of the concept of "architectural fashion" becomes clear, as their collections directly transfer images of architectural details, and sometimes entire buildings, to clothes. At the same time, they use both realistic and symbolic-metaphorical techniques; involve a wide variety of materials. The same artists are engaged in the creation of jewelry, which is sustained in the general style of the images. A careful review of their works makes it possible to generalize the features of the manifestation of the "Victorian Gothic" style in modern jewelry and clothing design.

Baby bats try out their ‘sonar’ just after birth

Baby bats try out their ‘sonar’ just after birth

Authenticity in an insider-in ethnography of post-punk

Authenticity is a central aim of ethnography, and an insider researcher is best placed to observe behaviour based on existing trust with their participants. As both a scholar of goth and a participant in the goth subculture, upon commencing his research Hodkinson noted his involvement in the scene as becoming ‘part of an extensive research project’ after years of participation. I have been the vocalist for 1919, an original post-punk band, since their reformation in 2014. The original post-punk era is usually considered to have taken place between 1978 and 1984, and was prolific for Yorkshire artists. However, I was born in 1990, and came of age as a music fan in the early 2000s. In simply answering an advert, I would be placed at the centre of a world that had existed before I did, and had survived through a mixture of nostalgia, reverence and advancements in information and communication technology. Hodkinson’s point of entry begs the question: how does someone like me, born in 1990, who although raised in Yorkshire was born in London, become an authentic researcher of 1980s Yorkshire? Not only that, but to be positioned as the kind of insider-in researcher – one who uses their position within a community to observe without the barriers of entry experienced by an outsider anthropologist – like Hodkinson.

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.

A Happy and Instructive Haunting: Revising the Child, the Gothic and the Australian Cinema Revival in Storm Boy (2019) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018)

ABSTRACT A recent spate of remakes of film titles dating from the Australian cinema revival in the 1970s suggests a renewed interest in this significant corpus. It has a deeper resonance insofar as the original films also represent landmarks in Australian Gothic aesthetics. In two of these productions, Storm Boy (2019) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018), the renewal of the Gothic discourses and the allied figure of the child are inflected by an optimistic vein of “post-millennial Gothic”. It is apparent in the styling and in the post-feminist and cultural consciousness of both productions, and the sense in which both remakes provide resolutions to the earlier films and embed layers of contemporary social pedagogy in the revised Gothic scenarios. Both of these productions suggest a recognition that the films of the cinema revival may not speak to a current generation, and this dissonance is particularly apparent in the revised figure of the lost child in the remakes.

Aesthetics and Incidence of the Rose Window in the Santos Juanes Church, Spain

Gothic architecture represents one of the most attractive moments of sacred architecture. In this context, some architectural elements act as leading characters, which are known as Gothic aesthetics. One of these is the rose window. It is a set element filled with marked symbolism that arouses considerable interest, and Spain has plenty of examples. In Valencia (Spain), the Santa Catalina or San Nicolás churches are extremely relevant temples. A coetaneous building of these churches is the Santos Juanes Royal Parish church, located next to the city's Central Market. Today it presents traces of this gothic origin, although the building has undergone complete Baroque modification, as evidenced by the huge

Investigating Asian Parti-colored bats using the BatTalk internet of things approach

Labor intensive visual observation has been used to study the activities of Asian parti-colored (APC) bats in the past. Through an Internet of Things (IoT) platform called BatTalk, we continuously monitor the APC bats population to investigate its compositional changes, life history, and environmental factors. BatTalk achieves the same goals as traditional visual observations with reduced man power and minimal interference to the bat activities. In particular, BatTalk automates the process to understand APC bats' regular annual life cycle history and estimate the percentage of the baby bats born and raised there, who would return to their original habitat in the coming year. This paper proposes an inexpensive manner to identify the bat habitats and bat movement paths by identifying the bat's ultrasonic signal strength and GPS position, and then show the information in a map. Our study indicates that for current BatTalk deployment, the wireless communication delays have small variance, and as long as the observer moves with a constant speed, even if he/she moves fast, the bats still can be accurately located.

The ambiguities of ancestry: antiquity, ruins and converging traditions of Australian Gothic Cinema

ABSTRACT ‘Gothic’ is identified as a prominent mode of Australian cinema since the 1970s. In commentary on Australian Gothic films, the aesthetic ancestry is often traced to literary conventions in colonial and pre-colonial British or European literatures. This article draws attention to the convergence of these literary and cinematic traditions and compares the prevalence of landscape as a Gothic figure in Australian films with the architectural elements of historical Gothic literature. The discussion proceeds through the British Gothic novel and its history as analogue of Gothic architecture of the time, and several recent accounts of ‘Australian Gothic’ cinema that invoke this history of the Gothic novel, and the dissonant description of ‘Australian Gothic’ in Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka’s account of Australian Revival films. Two recent productions, Celeste [Hackworth 2018. Australia: Unicorn Films] and the television remake of Picnic at Hanging Rock [Rymer, Kondracki and Brotchie 2018. TV Mini-Series. Australia: Amazon Studios/FremantleMedia/Screen Australia], are compared as recent parodies of Gothic aesthetics that foreground architectural features over landscape. It is argued that while it is important to identify antecedents, the colonial connotations of ancestry are ambiguous and potentially overpower attention to the generative visions in Australian Gothic cinema.

Varia: Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800): The Horrors of Alienation, War, Slavery, and Social Segregation

The article discusses a selection of poems from Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800), offering a close reading to show how Robinson engaged with pertinent historical issues, such as slavery, war and power relations, that marked the last decade of the eighteenth century. It explores Robinson’s use of Gothic and sublime aesthetics to communicate the ruptures found in society and to represent various states of otherness. In the poems under discussion, the Gothic is used to externalize both psychological and social collapse, communicating the sense of instability, vulnerability, alienation, anxiety, and fragmentation. Robinson’s use of Gothic conventions creates a gloomy atmosphere which seeks to accentuate the ills of eighteenth-century British politics and society and to engage the reader sympathetically.