Subcultural Resistance Research Articles

The applicability of different subculture theories to the Istanbul metal scene in the early twenty-first century

This article discusses various subculture theories and the contemporary metal scene in Istanbul. This vibrant scene is part of the global metal transculture, where local and global elements interact. In addition to aspects of Kahn-Harris’s and Hodkinson’s theories, Weinstein’s characterization of metal subculture as a community revolving around a distinctive sound world is especially appropriate. Discourses of distinction are not a primary component of this subculture. Hebdige’s subculture theory, despite its weaknesses, is helpful for understanding this subculture, especially the articulation of subcultural resistance in terms of its relationship to the parent culture. This metal subculture retains many local parent culture features, including norms of morality, respect for elders and gender relations. At the same time, subculture members believe that metal songs empower them to make autonomous decisions in a culture that strongly values collectivism, challenge the dominant religious ideology, and contest aesthetic conventions of traditional and pop genres in Turkey.

Stay punk!! Stay free!! Subcultural identity, resistance and Covid-19 in northern Japan

Punks have been a feature of subcultural scenes in Japan since as early as 1977. One of the main hubs of punk and hardcore activity outside of Tokyo is Sapporo, where an eclectic mix of both domestic and international influences has informed the growth and maintenance of a broad and inclusive community. Here, ‘punk’ and ‘hardcore’, rather than being seen as different, are considered to be just two points on a wide spectrum of ‘punkness’. In a country often described as culturally conservative, northern Japan’s punk and hardcore subculturalists provide an opportunity to reassess ideas of subcultural resistance. Through their everyday practice of resistance, which is simultaneously spectacular, yet unrecognized as resistance, the punk community in Sapporo reject the ‘salaryman’, as a symbol of Japanese ‘national character’. This article comprises an ethnographic study of the punk and hardcore community in Sapporo, looks at what holds this eclectic community together and suggests the concept of ‘everyday resistance’ as a framework for further study. The current Covid-19 global crisis has brought unprecedented challenges – as it has to communities all over the world – but has provided an opportunity to see how a community’s everyday practice inform and shape responses to emergency situations.

Understanding Compliance in Patriarchal Religions: Mormon Women and the Latter Day Saints Church as a Case Study

Defining compliance as acquiescence in situations of inequality, this article explores patterns of compliance to gender traditionalism from the analysis of interviews with Mormon women. Analysis reveals that Mormon women face unique, context-specific mechanisms for stifling resistance to gender traditionalism. Additionally, many of the Mormon women interviewed who do not comply with traditional gender expectations regarding motherhood still accept and defend gender traditionalism. We explain this pattern with a concept that we call ideological compensation, which means that women in gender traditional religions defend gender traditionalism even if they do not live it as a way to compensate for their non-compliance. Finally, we find that some of the women frame their compliance to Mormon gender traditionalism as a statement of resistance against the broader society. We describe this phenomenon with a concept known as subcultural resistance. Overall, this study sheds light on how Mormon women interpret traditional gender expectations and the mechanisms that are put in place to stifle resistance.

‘Chaos in France’: Fieldnotes from the French punk experience

While punk and skinhead experiences in the English-speaking world have been widely documented, the same cannot be said for the French space where these subcultures nonetheless took root from the end of the 1970s onwards. This article paints the portraits of punks and skinheads who each embody, in their own way, a certain sense of ‘chaos in France’. In doing so, it opens up a research avenue that not only fills a gap in existing studies but also suggests a new way of examining the signification of subcultural resistance to dominant normativities. The article draws on observation and interviews, as well as auto-ethnographic material and critical analysis of text, music and film archives. This produces a variety of perspectives, which bring out subcultural dynamics in an analysis that is as closely focused as possible on the lives of those who embodied these dynamics to the bitter end, in all the contradictions of rebellion.

The historical development of the fashion system: a theoretical review

In this essay I show the main models used to explain the fashion system. I try to describe how these models have always show fashion as a relationship between the fashion system and the general population. To do this, firstly I make a historical tour around the most significant developments of fashion. And secondly I collect the scientific theories that have tried to explain this phenomenon. I conclude that there are three basic theories today which try to explain this relationship: the trickle-down model, the model of subcultural resistance and the virulence or contagion model. All of them are insufficient because they are not made explicit and they present serious analytical shortcomings.

Print Is Dead

Researchers have maintained a consistent interest in subcultural resistance: marginalized groups challenging their subordinate positions in society through words or deeds. Resisting groups increasingly use online media for resistance, but we know little about the web’s consequences for subcultural challengers. In this article, I explore the promise and peril of digital media for resistance relative to traditional, printed media, from an ethnographic exploration of punk subculture. Rather than finding support for either supporters or critics of online resistance, I find evidence for an alternative, dialectical perspective in which the Internet simultaneously invigorates and problematizes punk resistance. It provides the oppositional group with many technical advantages for the dissemination of subversive culture but also entails social costs such as making the subculture more accessible to its opponents, undermining some of its more radical aspects, and making it complicit in processes of commodification and exploitation. Previous studies, which tend to focus on how the Internet empowers challenging groups, largely neglect this dark side of the web. These findings contribute to our understanding of resistance in the new millennium, and its feasibility for subcultural goal attainment, by elucidating the transformative relationship between resistance and the media through which groups practice it.

The Expansion of Punk Rock: Riot Grrrl Challenges to Gender Power Relations in British Indie Music Subcultures

In Britain, punk culture introduced the DIY (do it yourself) ethic to a generation of young people who seized the impetus to create subversive art, music, and culture. In particular, women used this moment to open up sub cultural space for the transgression of gender and sexual hegemony. However, the political importance of women’s contribution to punk culture has been undermined in retrospective accounts of British punk that focus on male performers and entrepreneurs (Myers; Savage; Marcus 2001; Lydon et al.; Adams). In the 1990s riot grrrl responded to the cultural and political marginalization of young women and girls. An American import, riot grrrl used punk sounds, sights, and productions to challenge and resist the gender power relations of music subcultures. In this sense riot grrrl has been described as “an expansion of punk rock” in its explicit intention to disrupt gender power relations and encourage the politicized participation of girls and young women in independent punk music culture. Riot grrrl created a series of sonic moments to create punk-feminist community and provoke young women and girls’ subcultural resistance and exploration of radical political identities. In this article I draw on my doctoral research on British riot grrrl which encompassed the analysis of 17 oral histories and 5 interviews with riot grrrl participants alongside 18 secondary interviews, 5 taped interviews, 3 films, personal involvement in 3 panel discussions, and an extensive archive of fanzines, records, and media articles. In particular this article explores the strategies employed in the live music gigs of riot grrrl associated bands Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill, to discuss how these young women attempted to disrupt the spatial and sonic norms of the indie gig to incite feminist community and provoke change in their subcultural situations.

Anti-consumption as tactical resistance: Anarchists, subculture, and activist strategy

This article examines practices of anti-consumption deployed by anarchist activists as tactical actions within their overall projects of political and subcultural resistance. Drawing on existing literature on anti-consumers, my own interviews with anti-consumers, and analysis of materials that circulate in support of anti-consumption, I explore both the material and discursive effects of anti-consumption within a specific political subculture. I offer a typology of motivations for anti-consumption among activists, as well as a discussion of how overlaps and conflicts between various motivations complicate assessments of lifestyle-based resistance. I ultimately argue that the analysis I offer can prove helpful to political projects that utilize consumption-based tactics, in the construction and evaluation of effective activist strategies.

Between literature and subculture: Kanehara Hitomi, media commodification and the desire for agency in post-bubble Japan

Kanehara Hitomi won the 2004 Akutagawa Prize to a tremendous fanfare. The media spectacle served to commodify both the violence and the sex in Snakes and earrings (Hebi ni piasu, 2004), as well as the unconventional lifestyle of this 20-year-old middle-school dropout. Kanehara's work earned the distinction of high culture via this prestigious literary prize, but she is simultaneously seen as representative of a problematic youth subculture. UK/US cultural studies theory suggests a reading of text and author as an expression of subcultural resistance to the commodification process and to mainstream Japanese society. But questions remain as to how this resistance translates into political expression in an era of conservative politics and so-called apolitical youth. Ultimately, resistance is not found in the subcultural self-identification of the young protagonist Lui. Rather, working from within the media spectacle, Kanehara utilizes a literary legacy of the body in order to make her writing relevant in the virtual, hyper-commodified culture of twenty-first-century Japan.

After Sport Culture

The subcultural theory associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) has received numerous and wide-ranging critiques. Debate has been particularly prevalent within sociological work on youth, music, and style, a context in which some commentators have rejected the idea of subculture, favoring more fleeting, transient socialites. However, these debates have rarely been considered within the context of the study of sporting subcultures. In this article, the author reviews the post-CCCS oeuvre, exploring the implications for the study of sporting subcultures, questions of individuality, difference, and collective identity, and the possibility and nature of cultural or subcultural resistance. The author evaluates Atkinson and Wilson's proposition that bodily experiences or performances can resist constraints imposed by mainstream culture, illustrating this in the context of lifestyle sport culture. Thus, this article contributes to a revised agenda for the study of subcultures in sport.

Prisoners in Paradise: Subcultural Resistance to the Marketization of Tattooing

This study explores the increasingly popular use of brand symbols as imagery for tattooing. Through interviews with tattoo artists and netnographic research in tattoo communities, we capture a perceived boundary between the sacred, non‐commercial sphere of tattooing and the profane, profit maximizing sphere of the commercial world. In the tattoo subculture, brands are generally considered inappropriate for tattooing. Nevertheless, the tattoo artists more or less willingly accept the role of service providers for consumers wishing to embody brand symbols. The commercial sphere hence plays a role in the cultural identity of the tattoo culture as an Otherness, from which the tattoo culture defines itself.

Rethinking Subcultural Resistance

This article reconceptualizes subcultural resistance based on an ethnographic examination of the straight edge movement. Using the core values of straight edge, the author’s analysis builds on new subcultural theories and suggests a framework for how members construct and understand their subjective experiences of being a part of a subculture. He suggests that adherents hold both individual and collective meanings of resistance and express their resistance via personal and political methods. Furthermore, they consciously enact resistance at the micro, meso, and macro levels, not solely against an ambiguous “adult” culture. Resistance can no longer be conceptualized in neo-Marxist terms of changing the political or economic structure, as a rejection only of mainstream culture, or as symbolic stylistic expression. Resistance is contextual and many layered rather than static and uniform.

Waker Cells and Subcultural Resistance

A back alley hovel amidst glimmer of 1990s Seattle, Blaek Cat Cafe proelaimed a disjunction with spaee of Ameriea. Hidden amidst asphalt, painted blaek, and surrounded by junk, Cat was uninviting to most passers-by. Like gargoyles meant to scare off demons, Cat's facade seared away most everyone but punks, and declared space to be an autonomous zone; as if to say, All Ye Who Enter, cheek your hierarchical, law-bound, regulated, capitalist ideas of domination at door, for you are about to enter an underground. Here, in this underground, in this place lurking below dominant landscape, punks practiced and elaborated a defiant eulture, a life and polities steadfastly eritical of the System. The sentiment here is based largely on my extensive experienee at Blaek Cat Cafe, a eooperatively owned and run restaurant, whieh thrived for five years (1993—1998) in Seattle. It was primarily a place defined by anarehopunks—those punks who adhere to anarchist principles and ways of being—and it was a powerful site for solidarity and resistanee. Indeed, poteney and tenor of Black Cat Cafe starkly eontrasts with composition of many subcultural trends. Consider, if you will, punks of Cat in a context where youth subeultures are increasingly experienced through eapitalist and internet mediations. Corporate music, fashions, and entertainment are ready-made with an alternative sales pitch. Meanwhile, eleetronic media are subsuming more interpersonal time; friendships and subcultures often rely on email more than on group outings. The neighborhood hangout, a site for subeultural activity, is on wane, and internet ehat rooms are encroaching on its territory. The neatly bounded subeulture is more in doubt than ever before and eyberculture is increasingly central to many eultures. There ean be no doubt that subcultures are thriving through electronic media, but their characteristics are markedly divergent from those of classical youth subcultures. Subculture is practiced differently at a computer than when it is shared in a bed or a basement. Subcultural compromises, however, are not new to youth subeultures, whieh have often had to negotiate with dominant culture. Subcultural resistance in wealthy nations has frequently depended upon eapitalist institutions; subeultures can be, in this sense, parasites on eapitalist businesses. Things such as music venues, reeording industry, bars, restaurants, and universities have long been used by subcultures, and this dependence upon capitalism has often compromised subcultural resistance. When a subculture is bathed in alcohol at a club, centered on reverence for musieians, or forced to endure constant surveillance, its ability to resist and be autonomous is in jeopardy.

Assimilation and resistance: housing indigenous Australians in the 1970s

During the early 1970s, large numbers of Aboriginal people became tenants of the Housing Commission of New South Wales under the Housing for Aborigines program. Most moved from government reserves or dilapidated and overcrowded private rental dwellings to broadacre suburban estates. As public housing tenants, they encountered considerable pressures to become 'respectable' citizens, to build their lives around privacy, sobriety, moral restraint, the nuclear family, conventional gender roles and wage labour. For many indigenous Australians, these expectations-which were based as much on class relations as on colonialism— represented a threat to their conventional ways of life and their obligations to extended family and community. This paper explores the patterns of conformity and resistance amongst Aboriginal tenants. It draws on the sociological and cultural studies literature on youth subcultural resistance and compares anthropological theory about indigenous responses to the pressures of modernity.

Betrayal and Fear: Press Coverage of Canadian Skinheads

This paper examines the ways in which skinheads and the press in Canada mutually engage in public strategies to subvert each other’s significatory powers. Arguably, skinheads present a limited challenge to the social mainstream which, like their style, exists primarily on the surface. In analyzing the media response, the discursive containment of subcultural resistance is revealed as news reports retain the social order of the existing institutional structure. As skinheads attempt to draw attention to themselves and to society’s hidden contradictions, the media exploit their spectacularity, transforming it into a saleable news commodity.

Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making

A radical feminist art includes an understanding of how women are constituted through social practices in culture. Once understood how women are consumed in this society it would be possible to create an aesthetics designed to subvert the consumption of women, thus avoiding the pitfalls of a politically progressive art work which depicts women in the same forms as the dominant culture. To better understand the point at which theory and art intersect it might be useful to consider women's cultural production in four categories. One type of women's art can be seen as the glorification of an essential female art power. The second strategy or type of feminist artistic practice views women's art as a form of subcultural resistance. Third category of women's art derives as well from this aspect of isolationism. The final type of artistic practice situates women at a crucial place within patriarchy which enables them to play on the contradictions that inform patriarchy itself.