Lecture 5: Subculture and Style (Helen Clarke Thurs 15.11.2012)

Definition of Subculture: In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture (whether distinct or hidden) which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.

'You can have the style without the subculture'

This lecture will look at: Skateboarding/ parkour and free running/ graffiti as a performance of the city. 

The Riot Grrrl movement as a feminine and feminist subculture.

The portrayal of youth subculture in film and photography 

Dogtown & Z boys (2001)

Skater Peggy Oki

In terms of style the clothing was predominately chosen for its purposes, the long sleeves were to protect their elbows etc.

Ian Borden 'Performing the City'

Urban street skating is more ‘political’ than 1970’s skateboarding‘s use of found terrains: street skating generates new uses that at once work within (in time and space) and negate the original ones.

Gives the body something to do rather than passively consume the city landscape 

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

“Skateboarders do not so much temporarily escape from the routinized world of school family and social conventions as replace it with a whole new way of life.” (Borden:2001) 

A substitute lifestyle.




Parkour/ Free running

Parkour - a method of movement focused on moving around obstacles with speed and efficiency. Originally developed in France, the main purpose of the discipline is to teach participants how to move through their environment by vaulting, rolling, running, climbing and jumping. Parkour practitioners are known as traceurs.

Free running - a form of urban acrobatics in which participants, known as free runners, use the city and rural landscape to perform movements through its structures places more emphasis on freedom of movement and creativity than efficiency. 

Yamakasi (2001)

Using Parkour as a means of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, underlying political theme?

Jump London (2005)

Nancy McDonald 'The Graffiti Subculture'

A way of claiming ownership over public space, take for example 'tagging' ...

Here (on the street) real life and the issues which may divide and influence it, are put on pause.
On this liminal terrain you are not black, white rich or poor.
Unless you are female, ‘you are what you write’. 

Black graffiti writer Prime says:

I mean I've met people that I would never have met, people like skinheads who are blatantly racist or whatever. I can see it in them and they know we know, but when you're dealing on a graffiti level, everything’s cool and I go yard with them, they’d come round my house , I’d give them dinner or something.

Describing a levelling of different cultural groups, erasing the borders and becoming seperated from your visual appearance.

Miss Van: McDonald suggest that women come to the subculture laden with the baggage of gender in that her physicality (her looks) and her sexuality will be commented on critically in a way that male writers do not experience.

Overly sexualised cartoon figure, so overdone that it could be interpreted as an over assertion of femininity.



Swoon (US) “In the meantime there was a lot of attention coming my way for being female, and it just made me feel alienated and objectified, not to mention patronised. ‘Look at what girls can do-aren’t they cute?’ To hell with that shit. I don’t want it.” Her works very politically generated.

Angela Mc Robbie and Jenny Garber...

Girl subcultures may have become more invisible because the very term 'subculture' has acquired such strong masculine overtones (1977)

Motorbike girl... Brigitte Bardot 1960’s, Suggests sexual deviance which is a fantasy not reflective of most conventional real life femininity at the time . 

Hells Angels... In rocker and motorbike culture girls usually rode pillion. Wills 1978: girls did not enter into the cameraderie, competition and knowledge of the machine. In this subculture women were either girlfriend of.. Or ‘mama’ figure. 

Mod girl... Mod culture springs from working class teenage consumerism in the 1960’s in the UK. Teenage girls worked in cities in service industries for example, or in clothing shops where they are encouraged to model the boutique clothing. (More working class as oppose to Hippies who had all the time to personally express themselves).

Quadrophenia (1979)... Hebdige outlines the hierarchies within the mod subculture where “the ‘faces’ or ‘stylists’ who made up the original coterie were defined against the unimaginative majority...who were accused of trivialising the mod style” Demonstrating the tension between mods and rockers. 

Hippy girl

Subculture arises through universities of the late 60’s and early 70’s...
Middle class girls therefore have the space to explore subculture for longer before family etc.
Space for leisure without work: encourages ‘personal expression’ 

BAD HIPPY/ GOOD HIPPY

Janis Joplin   / Peace and 'flower power'

Riot Grrrl - Mid 1990's onwards...

Underground punk movement based in Washington DC, Olympia, Portland, Oregon and the greater Pacific Northwest.

Covered serious issues concerning empowerment, the bands involved in this scene were more about the protest rather than their music, anti-authortarian approach for e.g. Cold Cold Hearts, side project band of Allison Wolfe of riot grrrl band Bratmobile, playing 'Sorry Yer Band Sux' live at Black Cat, Washington, D.C. 3/7/97.

Influences and origins: The Raincoats, Poly Styrene, LiLiPUT, The Slits, The Runaways/Joan Jett, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Exene Cervenka, Siouxsie Sioux, Lydia Lunch, Kim Gordon, Neo Boys, Chalk Circle, Ut, Bush Tetras, Frightwig, Anti-Scrunti Faction, Scrawl, and Fifth Column 

Seen as one of the pioneers of this alternative style.

For something to become subcultural, does it have to become political? 

Riot Grrl???

Mount Pleasant Race Riots in 1991, Bratmobile member Jen Smith (later of Rastro! and The Quails), reacted to the violence by prophetically writing in a letter to Allison Wolfe: "This summer's going to be a girl riot."

Wolfe and Molly Neuman collaborated with Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail to create a new zine and called it Riot Grrrl, combining the "riot" with an oft-used phrase that first appeared in Vail's fanzine Jigsaw "Revolution Grrrl Style Now”. 



What makes this a true subculture? 

Zines revived from 1970’s DIY punk ethic. In turn this was influenced by posters and graphic design from the Dadaists in the 1920’s 30’s. Women self- publishing their own music 

Although punk seems to challenge eventually and surprisingly quickly it goes mainstream/high end and is turned into “To shock chic” which marks the end of the movement as a subculture. 

21st Century Demonisation.

“Style in particular provokes a double response (in the media): it is alternately
celebrated (in the fashion page) and ridiculed or reviled (in those articles which define subcultures as social problems)”

This is England...

Content; The new kid on the estate transforms into a British Skin. His dad has been killed in the Falklands War and his new friends become a surrogate family.

The film explores the difference between the skinhead style and the politics of the National Front skins as they infiltrate the working class estate in the UK in the 1980’s 

Subordination of Milky as 'other' by Combo - In this is England you get an example of this working class conflict in the subculture that is ultimately influenced by the immigration in the 1980's

Further research

Girls and Subcultures [1977] Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber

This text poses the question ‘Are girls really absent form subcultures or are they present but invisible?’ In summary McRobbie and Garber talk about our associations with subcultures, which we immediately relate to men. Historically girls have been absent from the classic subcultural studies, pop histories, personal accounts and journalistic surveys, which to me is unrealistic as in every subculture, both male and females play equally and uniquely important roles. Editors [Taylor, Walton and Young 1975] of Critical Criminology have identified that ‘women constituted an uncelebrated social category which was a social reaction to the more extreme actions of youth subcultures’. This is due to the huge influence of the media who are responsible for this exclusion as it tended to concentrate on more dramatic incidents. For example the violent clashes between Mods and Rockers which were events that qualified as newsworthy which were areas of subcultural activity from which women were excluded.

Jenny Garber has worked in various fields as a local authority social worker, an NHS case manager and currently in Brain injury service. Angela McRobbie has written a book titled Feminism and Youth Culture which tackles areas such as; The culture of working class girls, Jackie Magazine: Romantic individualism and the teenage girl, Rock and sexuality and Sweet smell of success? New ways of being young women. All areas I believe to be responsible for their rising feminist interest in subculture studies. The role they play in the text is to ‘attract our attention toward more teenage and pre- teenage female spheres like those forming around the pop music industry.’ Both McRobbie and Garber categorise our existences somewhere between ‘youth’ and ‘any other business’. Both which individually have no importance. 

The text quotes Paul Willis [1978] from Youth, expectations and Transitions, where he acknowledges ‘girls are represented throughout literature in terms of their sexual attractiveness’. This reminds me of the work of Rosalind Cowards account in The Look where she identifies women as being a crucial aspect towards sexual relations. Their aesthetic appeal is viewed in many ways including voyeurism, sexual peep shows and pornography. Women are exploited as objects to be viewed and appreciated in a desirable way.

The text concludes to say that ‘girls negotiate a different leisure space and different personal spaces from those inhabited by boys’. The underlying concerns are those of the cultural associations with pre-teenage girls and their anxieties about moving into the world of teenage sexual interaction. This is most obviously evident in extremely tight-knit-friendship groups. These function to socially exclude intruders into the group so they can gain private, inaccessible space. This can be directly compared to Sex and the City whereby a group of ladies in this case, frequently meet to privately discuss and unravel the hidden depths regarding men.

http://www.tagg.org/students/Montreal/Tendances/PitreHebdige.html

Hebdige - Subculture. The meaning of Style.

Realising that subculture cannot be understood without a clear conception of culture, Hebdige demarcates the two basic definitions of culture in chapter 1. One definition, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, is equated with cultivation, refinement and a standard of excellence. The other notion of culture is more generally based on it being a "whole way of life". Following T.S. Eliot and Barthes, Hebdige subscribes to the more anthropologically-oriented "notion of culture [as extending] beyond the library, the opera-house and the theatre to encompass the whole of everyday life" permeated with its ideologies and mediations of power (Hebdige, 9). He also spends a few pages discussing Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. For Hebdige, subcultures represent a challenge to hegemony not through direct means, but rather "obliquely" through style. He proceeds to write the basic thesis underlying his study of subculture and style:

Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformations go ‘against nature’, interrupting the process of ‘normalization’. As such, they are gestures, movements towards a speech which offends the ‘silent majority’, which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus. Our task becomes […] to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as ‘maps of meaning’ which obscurely re-present the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal (Hebdige, 18).