Amy Herzog, Joanna Mitchell and Lisa Soccio Subcultures have been broadly defined as social groups organized around shared interests and practices. The term “subculture” has been used to position specific social groups and the study of such groups, in relation to various broader social formations designated by terms like “community,” the “public,” the “masses,” “society,” and “culture.” Use of the term “subcultures” in academic subcultural studies has shifted since the term was coined in the 1940s in the context of the Chicago School of sociology and its liberal, pluralist assumptions. This loosely defined interdisciplinary field has been altered and informed by Frankfurt School analyses of mass culture and society, by debates in anthropology regarding the methods and ethics of ethnography, by the critical synthesis of perspectives developed in the 1970s at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and by subsequent critique and revision of these earlier tendencies especially by feminist and poststructuralist writers. Subcultural studies often involve participant-observation, and may variously emphasize sociological, anthropological, or semiotic analysis in order to address the organization and …

Will Straw Keynote address for the Interrogating Subcultures conference, University of Rochester, March 27, 1998 For some time now, I realize, my interest in the social life of things has been greater than my interest in acts of consumption themselves. This is partly a way of negotiating the dilemmas of aging as a popular music scholar — things don’t ask that you stay up late, while dance clubs, and other famous sites of consumption, do. But I’m also convinced that our cultures and economies are being made and transformed in ways that invite an attention to the social location and ordering of cultural artifacts — the way in which music stores order and valorize the past, for example, or the manner in which certain kinds of cultural commodities travel the world. This is partly to suggest that we look, for a while, at the ways in which cultural artifacts crystallize global cultural relations, or the ways in which, in industries increasingly dependent on marketing back catalogues, compact discs or videocassettes accumulate as examples of extra-somatic memory: …

Geoff Stahl 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. We should therefore not underestimate the signifying power of the spectacular subculture not only as a metaphor for potential anarchy ‘out there’ but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation.1 Subcultures as noise: a metaphor that possesses a deep, romantic and poetic resonance for many scholars. The heroic rhetoric of resistance, the valorization of the underdog and outsider, and the reemergence of a potentially political working-class consciousness are all embedded in discourses that have shaped the theorization of subcultures in the past twenty years. The work of Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall and others connected with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, through which these conceits evolved, remain a backdrop for many contemporary theories of subcultures. Studies such as Subcultures: The Meaning of Style and Resistance Through Rituals drew their theory from such diverse sources as …

Lisa Soccio The alleged revolution of “women in rock” has received increasing media attention in the United States over the last seven years. In contrast to this media hype, hardcore punk and rock bands like Bikini Kill and L7 have demanded “revolution girl-style now,” and consequently became associated with the term “Riot Grrrl,”a term used to describe the self-conscious proliferation of all-female bands in alternative music. In this paper, I will explore the nature of revolution grrrl-style and its relationship to feminism and “post-feminism.”1 I will consider how grrrlcore production and performance can be considered manifestations of a feminist political practice. The application of the label “feminist” to contemporary female cultural production often generates tensions in an era characterized by a post-feminist rejection of that label. The increasingly prevalent yet ambiguous disavowal of “I’m not a feminist” is often made by women who appear to embody a decidedly feminist self-possession. Many of these self-defined grrrls articulate an aggressive sense of their sexuality, alongside an ironic and nostalgic sense of child-like femininity, which together sometimes contradict principles of …

David Butz and Michael Ripmeester This paper is a preliminary attempt to come to terms theoretically with empirical research findings drawn from distinctly different socio-spatial and historical contexts, but that seem similarly inexplicable through conventional theorization of power and resistance. Specifically, both authors, in the context of our separate research programs, have encountered practices of resistance that are “off-kilter” both to accepted readings of resistance, and to the fields of power within which those practices exist. We address this theoretical and material slippage in three ways. First, we draw from Scott’s treatment of everyday resistance, Foucault’s notion of “agonism” and de Certeau’s discussion of “la perruque,” to discuss what we wish to describe as off-kilter resistance: those – often ambiguous – practices that productively circumvent power, rather than actively opposing it.1 Second, we use the concept of “Third Space”2 to theoretically and descriptively situate practices of off-kilter and directly oppositional resistance within the contingencies of their historical and geographical contexts. Third, we develop brief examples from our empirical projects – in late-twentieth century northern Pakistan, and mid-nineteenth …