Youth Subcultures Research Articles

Семиотика молодежных татуировок

One of the features of the present time is the increased interest of young people in tattoos on the body. Tattoo is a cultural phenomenon that has a long history since its inception.
 The problem of the research lies in the fact that at present the youth subculture is considered as a rich source of innovations and discoveries in art, fashion, forms of leisure; as a variant of mass culture, a product of the media industry; as a form of creative activity of young people who do not find acceptance and support from the official culture. The author examines the features of tattoos of modern youth. A youth tattoo is compared with a criminal one. Emphasis is placed on the leading motivation of the tattoo – the need for self-expression. The regularity of the use of words and phrases to express attitudes towards reality and towards oneself is established. Emphasis is placed on similarities with prison tattoos. Foreign tattoos are compared with those that young people prefer to create plots and combined images. This study used the analysis of scientific literature, the formation of an expert questionnaire on the study of tattoo issues, as well as direct questioning of young people aged 18 to 28 years with further analysis of the results.

PERCEPTION OF NIHILISM BY “HUMANELY DEVELOPED” YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1850s – 1860s

It is proved that in the youth culture of the sixties of the XIX century there was a split into educational and nihilistic subcultures. The purpose of the study is to analyze the views of educated young people of the XIX century on the nihilistic system of values and lifestyle. The subject of the study is the ideas of educated young people of the 1860s about nihilism. The novelty of the work is determined by comparison of two youth subcultures – educational and nihilistic. The theme is uncovered in the context of historical and anthropological approach, which requires the study of a personality in the society. The discursive method made it possible to identify the key words and ideas of “humanely developed” young people. The axiological method made it possible to determine the value system of young people. The article analyzes the features characterizing the culture of the educated “people of the sixties”. The concept of “humanely developed” young people of the 1860s is uncovered, they were supporters of liberal reforms, highly educated, they assessed reasonably historical circumstances. Their ideas about the goals of their activities are revealed – promoting the formation of civil society, expanding personal and social rights of the individual. In the works of historians, the ideas of nihilists are mainly studied, which are often perceived by the features of all the “people of the sixties”. In historical works, nihilism is considered as the main youth subculture in Russia in the 1860s, the views of educated young people who perceived nihilists as their opponents are insufficiently studied. The main sources of the research are memoirs, letters and diary entries of prominent representatives of “humanely developed” young people, which enable us to determine the value system of their authors, the features of their cultural memory, perception of the interests of different social forces. The study led to the conclusion that the worldview of “humanely developed” young people differed significantly from the ideological attitudes of nihilism. It is proved that liberal-minded young people created their own system of values; they set the task of forming a thinking personality. Unlike nihilists, they recognized the human right to personal happiness. Educated young people and nihilists also had general ideas about public activities in the interests of the people, about granting rights to women, and about the development of education.

Sándor Horváth. Children of Communism: Politicizing Youth Revolt in Communist Budapest in the 1960s

Sándor Horváth. <i>Children of Communism: Politicizing Youth Revolt in Communist Budapest in the 1960s</i>

RESPONSIBILITY OF BEING A “HIPSTER” IN A WARTIME IN UKRAINE

The focus is on the fashion practices of Ukrainian youth, so called ‘hipsters’, during the war. In the essay we move beyond understanding hipsters as a meaningless youth subculture of cultural appropriation and recombination. Instead, we consider hipsters as a force of resistance in cultural and war front lines. Ukrainian events proved that hipsters are not only about sophisticated consumer choices and humane ecological changes. A new public aesthetic for Kharkiv is considered on the example of the Nikolsky shopping center, which was built taking into account the new demands and tastes of hipsters. Despite its recent history, Nikolsky suffered from the bombings, but managed to reopen its doors and became one of the symbols of Kharkov's resilience and rebelliousness. The hipster rebellion is considered as the creation of a new liberation aesthetic and ethic in Ukrainian society. The key features of fashion behavior in the context of deglobalization processes are outlined, and vectors for future research are proposed. The work was done with support of the Solidarity Fellowship, sponsored by the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna).

MODERN SYSTEMS OF SOCIAL MANAGEMENT FOR ADOLESCENTS

The most important aspect of studying adolescent socialization is the analysis of the system of factors that determine this process. The main components of the structure of factors of socialization are defined as: – Social community (the Chinese nation, consisting of 56 ethnic groups, large socio-demographic and status groups, small groups); – Social institutions (state, education, family, information processes, media and institutions in which these institutions organize their activities); – Culture and its individual elements (national culture, folk culture, youth subculture); subjects of management, the assignment of which to the individual com-ponents of the factor system is due to the task of this study. The end result will be meeting the individual needs of young people in access to education, as well as the objective social need to improve the quality of education, transfer cultural knowledge, preserve and develop the intellectual potential of the country.

Style Construction of Li Bing's Cultural IP from the Perspective of Internet Youth Subculture

The value growth of Li Bing’s Cultural IP is critical for enhancing its cultural influence, assisting cultural development and inheritance, and enhancing the overall effect of local culture and urban ranking. In the new media period, IP value creation is inextricably linked to the discovery of youth subcultures generated by youth groups, who are the primary consumers of internet material. Referring to Herbertig’s classical theory, after discussing the style construction of Li Bing’s Cultural IP from the perspective of Internet youth subculture from collage, isomorphism, and ideographic practice, for example, through the misappropriation and meaning reconstruction of network elements, the organic combination and resonance strengthening of differentiated symbols between traditional culture and subculture, and the creation of as many audience perceptions and participation channels as possible for Li Bing’s cultural IP, to provide practical space for the expression of meaning, we can realize the style of Li Bing’s Cultural IP adapting to Internet ecology, enhance its recognition and Internet ecological integration, and realize the value upgrade of IP.&#x0D; Keywords: Li Bing, cultural IP, subculture, generation Z

The State and Features of the Media Culture of Modern Youth

The relevance of the topic “media culture of youth” is due to the insufficiency of special studies of the problem from the point of view of library activities. The article presents the results of a sociological study of the media culture of young people, conducted on the basis of the Chelyabinsk Regional Library for Youth. It is shown that it is characterized by a certain number of features of media consumption, where “getting information about what is happening in the world” is indicated as the most important by respondents. The problems of defining the concept of “media culture of youth” as a particular variant of the term “information culture”, and a comparison of the common grounds between information and media culture are raised, as well as the difference introduced by the emergence of the concept of “media culture”. Personality characteristics associated with a developed media culture are determined. The author cites the data of some sociological and statistical studies reflecting the peculiarities of the media culture peculiar to young people. The functions of the media and their influence on youth, the specifics of the existence of youth in the media environment are considered. The author highlights the peculiarity of youth activity in the media environment, including the specifics of information retrieval, the organization of communication through its interactive forms, the importance for the development of personal media culture of the phenomenon of social networks, its impact on changing the traditions of writing. The problem of network threats to users and the role of media culture formation in order to minimize such threats are considered separately. The role of the Internet in the formation of a synthesized youth subculture, which includes special etiquette, slang and hierarchy in the process of communication, is noted. The author provides data on the most typical properties of the media culture of young people, based on both existing and own research. An attempt is made to systematize these properties – the priority of communication through social networks, listening and browsing media files, turning to online games, running a network business, are called the most characteristic ones. The presented information and the results of the author’s own research are relevant for the development of strategies and tactics of libraries to form the media culture of young users.

Real Muslim Caves

This paper focuses on the religious identities of second-generation immigrant Muslim youth living in Canada. The intergenerational divide between first and second-generation immigrants is obvious in the recent development of Muslim Canadian youth clubs, which are founded, and run by youths themselves. In many cases Islamic centers are not well suited to address the religious and other needs of second-generation Muslims in Canada. Religious activities in the youth clubs are different from the religious centers of their parents, exposing this divide in the Muslim community as never before. This paper examines how youth clubs offer a protective environment for Muslim youth and argues that a distinct “religious youth subculture” is emerging among second-generation Muslim youth in Canada.

Subculture in the news: a longitudinal, semantic network analysis of punk media representation

ABSTRACT The historical relationship between youth subcultures and mainstream media has long been the subject of debate. Some researchers have proposed that, after mixed panic and hype, the media quickly coopts and commodifies subcultural threats. Conversely, others have argued that negative media coverage keeps subcultures coherent and thriving, while positive coverage is the ‘kiss of death’. Despite its continued importance, few studies have closely examined this topic and none has quantitatively examined changes in subcultural media representation over time using archival data. This paper addresses this gap though a computer-assisted content analysis of 735 newspaper articles about punk subculture spanning three decades of publication. The results provide mixed support for both theoretical predictions, but fit neither perfectly. Overall coverage is ambivalent in tone, but becomes more positive and less radical over time. Punk takes far longer to commodify than cooptation perspectives predict. It survives positive coverage, but becomes increasingly coherent. The results call into question previous claims about media representation, highlight the need for more synthetic theories of the media’s relationship to subcultures, and illustrate the utility of text-mining methods for historical youth studies.

Red Metal: Die Heavy-Metal-Subkultur der DDR

When thinking of East Germany, leather vests, long hair and loud guitars don’t typically spring to mind. Yet Nikolai Okunew, in his book Red Metal: Die Heavy-Metal-Subkultur der DDR, makes a strong case that they should. Exploring the heavy metal subculture in the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s, Okunew argues that the music scene provides an important lens for examining state socialism in the last decade of its existence. Indeed, over five thematic chapters, Okunew contends that the ‘red metal’ scene was a specific phenomenon of late socialism, whose behaviours and practices helped expand the boundaries of socialist norms, even as the subculture embodied and hastened those developments leading to the demise of the East German state. Red Metal opens with an exploration of metal fashion and how the leather vests, steel rivets and long hair which characterized the subculture were a form of ‘aesthetic disobedience’ to socialist norms (p.17). Copying their looks from Western images, youths used fashion to mark themselves off from mainstream society and competing youth subcultures, spending significant resources and energy—traveling to Budapest, negotiating the black market—to put together their outfits. These sartorial innovations were a means of expressing individuality and building community, and were accepted by everyday East German society by the late 1980s.

The representation of a body / artificial body in A. Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and the film adaptation by S. Kubrick

The article discusses representations of a hybrid body in the novel A Clockwork Orange and its film adaptation by S. Kubrick. Both works examine a hybrid body as a symptom of the post-human state. The article proves that in his film, Kubrick makes use of the novel’s imagery and, rather than creating a radically different work, is engaged in interpretation of the source. The eloquent orange metaphor, chosen by Burgess for the book’s title, directly points to the literary theme at the heart of the novel: youth as a restless and lawless time. In the novel, these ideas are supported with Shakespeare and Yeats quotations. That the writer should have turned to the theme of youth is explained as his response to the youth subculture of the late 1950s — early 1960s which was associated with asocial experience. The quotation from Yeats still enjoys prominence in Kubrick’s film, which, however, was made at a later date when youth culture had already received plenty of self-reflective feedback and definitions. This may partly explain the differences in the approach to the representation of a hybrid body in the book vs. the film. The article defines the central theme that prompts the choice of the representation method: an artist that embodies the power of youth and creativity

The Movida Madrileña vs Spanish Punk Culture: Disenchantment, Hedonism and the Youth's Political Commitment During the Spanish Transición

The Movida Madrileña vs Spanish Punk Culture:Disenchantment, Hedonism and the Youth's Political Commitment During the Spanish Transición David Vila Diéguez In "The Construction of Youth in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s," Mark Allinson states that the eighties' and nineties' "Spanish youth culture is distinct in that its emergence from the heady excesses of a suddenly liberated post-Franco Spain deprives it of the social signification as deviance or resistance often associated with youth subcultures" (265). This resonates with those scholars who argue that the culture of the Transición was rather celebratory and that it functioned, among other things, as an element of political deactivation and amnesia regarding Spaniards' recent dictatorial past (Labanyi; Subirats; Resina; Vilarós; Martínez; Morán). In addition to this, Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi speak of youth culture during the Transición as the "official image of Spain" (312), placing Spanish youth cultures strictly within the dominant culture of the time and blurring the possibility of imagining the existence of other deviant or resistant subcultural formations. Finally, other scholars such as Nuria Triana Toribio go as far as to state that "movida or Nueva Ola, were the names given to Spanish punk" (275), in a definitive maneuver that cancels any possibility of a deviant punk subculture to have existed in Spain by establishing an ontological equivalence between punk and the mainstream and predominantly middle/upper-class Movida madrileña. Let me advance two of the most common erroneous conclusions drawn from these and other similar perspectives: that the Movida madrileña is the epitome of all youth cultures and subcultures in Spain and that there was a generalized political apathy among most young people during the Transición. Refuting these two conclusions is one of the main goals of this article. In order to do so, I will carry out a comparative study between the Movida madrileña and a another understudied but rather popular youth movement that I will, [End Page 113] from now on, refer to as Spanish punk culture, Spanish punk, or simply punk —three of the main ways in which the individuals involved in this movement referred to it in an attempt to clearly differentiate themselves from the Movida. By comparing these two movements, I aim to reassess the ways in which we understand the youth's political commitment during the Transición. Disenchantment and the Youth's Reaction to It In 1980's January edition of El ciervo, an agricultural engineer named José Antonio del Cañizo reflected on the disenchantment that affected most Spaniards at that time. "Con ser aún tan breve la etapa posfranquista, sin embargo ya pueden distinguirse en ella dos épocas: la de la ilusión por el cambio y la del desencanto" (Cañizo et al. 27). José Antonio viewed with sorrow how the same people that a few months ago "leía periódicos y revistas, iba a los mítines, leía montones de libros sobre política y, en definitiva, mostraba un gran interés por la clase política en general" (27), were now completely skeptical about politics and showed a severe case of "abulia" (27). Specifically talking about the Spanish youth, he regretted how, after running enthusiastically to join different political parties, "ahora se refugia[b]an, desengañados y frustrados en el pasotismo y la indiferencia" (27–28). This disenchantment has been studied by many cultural critics since then. Still in 1980, Jesús Ibáñez spoke of it as the state caused by "la distancia entre lo que [la democracia] pudo haber sido y lo que fue" (194), a perspective that aligns with Pedro Pérez del Solar's understanding of disenchantment as a "desilusión" (16). In a fairly similar vein, Santos Juliá refers to it as a gradual loss of faith in the government that started with the appointment of Adolfo Suárez as prime minister in 1976, "un falangista, católico y con amistades en el opus dei, presidente de una de las pocas asociaciones políticas acogidas a la legislación vigente, la Unión del Pueblo Español, y ministro...

Exiting the Revolution: Alternative Ways of Life in Beijing, 1966–1976

During the Cultural Revolution, many young people in Beijing exited the revolution by engaging in alternative ways of life. Echoing the fledgling tendency of reassessing the underlying meaning of youth subcultures in the Eastern Bloc, this article discusses the diverse mentalities behind these alternative lifestyles and challenges the traditional wisdom that regards youth subcultures as an easy form of everyday resistance to the regime. It also challenges the traditional landscape of Cultural Revolution literature that mainly focuses on youth activism as a means of mass participation. Young people could make political but not subversive choices by exiting the revolution. While some people exited simply to entertain and socialize, others exited to obtain a better political position during the Cultural Revolution, and others to pursue a meaningful way of life influenced by orthodox ideology. Exiting the revolution was not an easy option as well and, on many occasions, the ability to live alternatively reflected certain young people’s privileged access to resources that others could not access in the People’s Republic of China.

EPA (aka A-Traktor) Girl Greasers in Sweden: Girlhood in Motion?

This article focuses on girlhood in one of the youth subcultures of rural Sweden, EPA greasers. The EPA, a car that Swedes aged 15 and older can legally drive, is at the centre of EPA culture. In this uniquely and previously male Swedish youth greaser culture, there has been a recent increase in the number of Swedish girls driving EPAs. Previous research has shown how EPA culture and EPA girlhood are shaped through distancing from hegemonic urban and middle-class norms and ideology. In this article, we seek to develop an understanding of EPA culture, specifically the ways in which it has been adopted by girls. Starting out from their online performances, we will explore how place, femininity and resistance intersect. The findings demonstrate how EPA girls use a playful way of troubling norms in their online performances, understood here as space and outlet to resist and mess around with dominant discourses and prejudice. This can also be understood as a way of talking back to masculinity, the majority society and urbanity.

Ghost Animal Carnival: A Study on the Community Culture of Video Users in Bilibili

The penetration of new media technology continues to affect the rapid development of Internet communities. Internet users who break through the limitations of time and space start creative practice or communication activities according to their interests, which promotes the rapid rise of marginal youth subculture. Ghost animal video is an important branch of subcultural circle, and its community also presents a unique ecological culture in its self-development. Focusing on the ghost animal video community in bilibili, combined with post-modern characteristics, pastiche and parody, self-identity and other related theories, this paper explores the construction mechanism and existing problems of this community culture, and describes the ritual resistance and group carnival in this community, which has a profound impact on the whole community culture.

Youth Subculture Performance from the Perspective of Emotional Communication——A Study Based on the Phenomenon of “Crazy Literature”

Since the year of 2022, the subculture of "crazy literature" has become increasingly popular among young people, and the discourse characteristics of its texts and the emotional motivations behind them have also begun to be concerned and discussed. Through discourse analysis, in-depth interviews and questionnaires, it can be found that in terms of discourse characteristics, "crazy literature" frequently uses rhetoric such as repetition and piling up, and constructs a clear sense of picture with logically disordered discourse; in terms of emotional motivation, "crazy literature" reflects the strong needs of youth for emotional catharsis and self-regulation; in terms of interaction mode, "crazy literature" is not an isolated emotional expression of individuals, but a carrier of youth's social desires, showing the characteristics of a "carnival" interactive ritual.

“You’re a disgrace to the uniform!” Lev Protiv’s challenge to the police in Moscow streets and on YouTube

ABSTRACT Lev Protiv presents itself as a “social project” intertwining civic involvement, moral policing, and entertaining YouTube content. Promoting a healthy lifestyle and claiming to defend innocent youth, Moscow vigilantes have patrolled public spaces since 2014 in search of people consuming alcohol or smoking, for the purpose of enforcing the law. However, their targets are not only drunkards and youth subculture, but also police who are reluctant to implement the law. Financially supported by the government for two years in 2014 and 2015, and earning money thanks to its YouTube channel, why is Lev Protiv’s vigilante activity, openly challenging state authority, tolerated in an authoritarian regime? Based on analysis of raid videos and ethnographic observation, this paper shows that Lev Protiv has imposed a particular form of police oversight from below, forcing law enforcement officers to act as vigilante auxiliaries, partially in line with the governmental management of civil society.

Emoticons production of Bing Dwen Dwen: Meme, online socialization and youth subculture

With new media technology growing leaps and bounds, the interaction between youth subculture and mainstream culture has taken on different characteristics than before. Since the opening of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, youth groups have produced plentiful emoticons based on Bing Dwen Dwen through bricolage and homology. Our analysis classifies the current emoticons from two perspectives, content and function, and explore their meanings according to semiotics; our finding reveals that the youth uses them as social currency to achieve emotional catharsis, satisfy entertainment needs and gain a sense of community belonging; in addition, the symbolic transformation by youth also reflects the reconciliation between youth subculture and the sinking mainstream values

‘We come from the underground’: grounding Chinese punk in Beijing and Wuhan

AbstractThe history of the Chinese punk scene in the scientific literature or in retrospective testimonies is traditionally dominated by a Beijing-centric approach, which stresses the importance of Beijing punk bands in the 1990s for the formation of this youth subculture. However, at the same time another punk scene was emerging in Wuhan, and no convincing argument has been provided to explain how, at the same time, in two Chinese cities, a punk movement appeared. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and collection of data, this article aims to explain how in the mid-1990s young Chinese succeeded into territorialising a foreign subculture in two different Chinese cities.

Formation of Moral and Ethical Values in Students of the New Ukrainian School Based on the Use of Innovative Technologies

At the present stage of creation of Ukraine as a democratic, legal state and its integration into the European community, the problem of forming moral and ethical values in students of the New Ukrainian school based on the use of innovative technologies is becoming more relevant. The effects of political and moral crises, globalization of society and detachment of the younger generation from national background, replacement of universal moral and ethical values by the youth subculture are becoming increasingly apparent. This encourages the use of innovative learning technologies at primary school lessons, the best ways of moral and ethical education of students based on various exercises, games and more. The centuries-old experience of the life of the Ukrainian people, its ideals, ideas of good and evil, sublime and ugly are concentrated in moral and ethical values. The educational rate of moral and ethical values is that they are also the result of the practice of educating the younger generation. It is convincingly proved that the acceleration of the pace of life, a large flow of knowledge affects modern people, requires the ability to find the necessary solution quickly, using search methods and many different sources of information in this regard, among traditional forms and methods of teaching, innovative pedagogical technologies are increasingly used in pedagogical practice. The article reveals the problem of formation of moral and ethical values in students of the new Ukrainian school based on the use of innovative technologies, theoretically substantiates and proves the feasibility of their use in primary school. The article describes the technologies that primary school teachers are successfully working on. The advantages of these technologies are revealed, their significance, essence and tasks are discussed.