Choosing Our Subcultures
Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (eds)
The Subcultures Reader
Routledge $32.00pb
599pp, 0 415 12728 9
I ONCE REVIEWED an anthology of essays on Madonna (the singer not
the virgin) written by academics of the Cultural Studies
persuasion. A couple of the essays were very good, most were
execrable. What the bad ones consistently did was approach the
'Madonna phenomenon' from a particular subcultural perspective
in a dry, exhaustive and reductionist way. You got Madonna from
a lesbian angle, from an ethnic angle, from a gay, Black, Puerto
Rican Vogue-dancer angle, and so on. I was struck at the time by
how often these essays, which ostensibly set out to celebrate
Madonna as an anti-establishment icon, actually ended up defusing
her. With their lumpy prose and stolid politics, these critics
managed to flatten everything that was edgy, joyful, quirky and
just plain dirty about Madonna, and offered nothing in return but
a series of trivial, obvious and utterly forgettable assertions
masquerading as insights.
That is the risk of writing academically about popular culture
or subcultures -- the gap between the object of analysis and the
discourse analysing it is often so huge as to be embarrassing.
In fact, this kind of risk lurks at the centre of all
anthropological observation. We in the West never realised it
before because the cultures being `observed' were always someone
else's. Subcultural study begins as a discernible strain within
sociology in the early twentieth century when the
anthropological focus, which had previously reflected outward
onto some purportedly exotic other place, turned inward instead,
onto the dominant Western culture. Is it a coincidence that at
this same critical moment in history the dominant culture was
beginning to fragment? Is the rise of Subcultural Studies a
symptom of that fragmentation, or had anthropologists just run
out of exotic places to go?
The essays brought together in this book span the history of
twentieth century Subcultural Studies. The editors, Ken Gelder
and Sarah Thornton, identify the various different schools of
subcultural critique that have flourished in the last eighty
years and they have chosen salient examples of writing by leading
practitioners of those schools as well as some mavericks. In an
interesting attempt to forge a genealogy of influence among the
writers included in the anthology, Gelder and Thornton have asked
those writers still living to list their 'influences'. And,
finally, the editors provide short but instructive
introductions to each of the book's eight sections.
In terms of dates of publication, the essays chosen range from
such Sub- cultural Studies precursors as Robert E. Park of the
so-called Chicago School, writing about big city life at a time
(1915) when the term 'subculture' wasn't even coined, right
through to Wendy Fonarow's 1995 essay 'The Spatial Organisation
of the Indie Music Gig' which analyses the behaviour of fans at
a contemporary live music gig, from the mosh pit to the bar. In
between these two extremes, there are essays by the usual
Cultural Studies heavies including Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Simon Frith and Erving Goffman among others
writing in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as some unexpected
delights.
Caroline Bassett's 1995 essay 'Virtually Gendered', for
example, goes into some detail about the protocols governing
identity and behaviour in the Multi User Domain (MUD) site on the
Internet called LambdaMOO. Apparently, when you log onto
LambdaMOO you not only choose a name (like Hannibal Lecturer or
ShotGun Messiah or Mr Spunky or Cyberferret) you also get to
choose your own gender. But unlike boring old Sydney where
there are currently only two or maybe three genders, LambdaMOO
has (count them) nine: neuter, male, female, either, Spivak
(described as an indeterminate gender), splat, plural,
egotistical, royal or 2nd. Imagine! None of that messy surgery
and hormone schtick, just a quick flick of the keyboard and
splat, you're a 'splat'!...
(incomplete)