Subculture and Style Lecture Notes

In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is defined as a group of people that differentiates themselves from the larger culture that they belong to. 

Skateboarding and subculture
Riot Grrrl Movement
Youth subculture in film and media

Skateboarding subculture
Dogtown and Z Boys

Skater Peggy Oki















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.

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) 

Parkour
• amethodofmovement 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.

Graffiti subculture 

Nancy McDonald The Graffiti Subculture
• 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’. 
McDonald suggests 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

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 patronized.
‘Look at what girls can do-aren’t they cute?’ To hell with that shit. I don’t want it.” 

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

Inrockerandmotorbike culture girls usually rode pillion
• Wills1978:girlsdidnot enter into the cameraderie, competion 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.

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” 


Hippy Girl

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

Riot Grrrl
90's onwards
Underground punk movement in the United States, based in Washington DC, Olympia, Portland, Oregon and the greater Pacific Northwest. 

Bands
• Bikini Kill, Bratmobil, Excuse 17, Heavens to Betsy, Fifth Column, Calamity Jane, Huggy Bear, Adickdid, Emily's Sassy Lime, The Frumpies, The Butchies, Sleater- Kinney, Bangs and also queercore like Team Dresch 

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.

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 

Media attention turns to Grunge scene
• Courtney Love and
Hole
• Style without the subculture
• Distorts even further as the 90’s continue into the more more media friendly Spice Girls use of phrase “Girl Power” 

Spice Girls
• Band styling presents a set of visual ‘types’ that are easily consumable by the target audience
• There is no empowerment for young women as there is nothing but the reduction of young women to cartoon representations 


“Subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media.”

Subcultural signs like dress styles and music are turned into mass produced objects

• Eg: clothing which is ripped as an anarchic anti-fashion statement becomes mass produced with rips as part of the design

A threat to the family?

• Womens Own 1977 runs a feature on “Punks and Mothers”, smiling, reclining next to the family pool etc.
• Non political threat that ultimately will not disturb traditional values

• Hebdige suggests that the press set up this perceived threat as away of neutralising something that could not be conceived by the petit-bourgeois therefore has to be ‘domesticated’ 

Zandra Rhodes 9ct White Gold Diamond Safety Pin Brooch
• 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.

“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)”