Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)
By Dick Hebdige

Synopsis: This book investigates the styles of subculture and the processes through which mundane objects take on symbolic dimensions. In doing so, Hebdige seeks to "recreate the dialectic between action and reaction which renders the objects meaningful" (2). Basically, this is a study of the meaning of style. Grounded in a cultural studies/semiotics perspective, Hebdige looks at case studies (Rastafarianism, hipters, teddy boys, punks, glam rockers) and performs "readings" on them, focusing on the functions of subculture, the use of styles, style as a type of communication, and style as embedded in subcultural meaning. Argues that tensions between dominant and subordinate groups are found in the surfaces of subcultures and their styles. "The meaning of subculture is, then, always in dispute, and style is the arena in which the opposing definitions clash with the most dramatic force" (3). Argues that the use of "common sense" is a way to bury ideology, i.e. of "naturalizing" it. Subcultures, he argues, represent noise and interference, as well as "symbolic challenges to a symbolic order" (page?). "Others" can either be dealt with via trivialization/domestication or turned into meaningless exotica. Bottom line: Subcultural style is intentional communication which means to be read (unlike "normal" style which attempts to be "natural" or "invisible"). Subcultural style all about collage and re-organization and mutations, rather than "pure" expressions.

Interesting Specifics:

Sometimes objects/styles become "a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile" (2).

"...ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common sense" (12).

"Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the dominant classes 'succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range' [Hall, 1977]" (16).

"The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community...We can watch, played out on the loaded system of British working-class youth cultures, a phantom history of race relations since the war" (45).

"...the punk aesthetic can be read in part as a white 'translation' of black 'ethnicity'" (64).

"Reggae and punk were audibly opposed" (68).

"The twin concepts of conjuncture and specificity, (each subculture representing a distinctive 'moment' - a particular response to a particular set of circumstances) are therefore indispensable to a study of subcultural style" (84).

By subverting "conventional uses and inventing new ones, the subcultural stylist gives the lie to what Althusser has called the 'false obviousness of everyday practice'...and opens up the world of objects to new and covertly oppositional readings. The communication of a significant difference then...is the point" (102).

Subcultures can be conservative or progressive - "integrated into the community, continuous with the values of that community, or extrapolated from it, defining themselves against the parent culture" (127).

"...no amount of stylistic incantation can alter the oppressive mode in which the commodities used in subculture have been produced" (130).

Interacts With:

Many books on Janet's list, especially Stuart Hall and anything that deals with the flexibility of popular culture and the subversive potential embedded in it.
Barthes (through focus on semiotics).
Foucault ("naturalizing" of ideology by dominant class)
Gramsci (hegemony)
This is a key cultural studies book as it focuses on the totality of society, and not just on the "high" culture elements

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media (1994)
By Susan Douglas

Synopsis: An exploration of pop culture media representations of women, and the way such representations have led women to feel highly ambivalent about themselves and about feminism. Douglas looks at music, TV shows, film (a little bit), commercials, print ads, and general cultural effluvia connected to women. The tone is very casual and chatty and dated. Her argument is basically that the media has essentially cast women as brainless "bimbos" with microscopic waists who - as heroines - are always deferential to men or - as villains - are 'masculine' and gross and self-absorbed and evil. The media tried to put down women and the feminist changes taking place - a burden which feminism still bares today. She spends a bit of time on the domestic perkiness of sitcom women, though feels that girl groups - especially black girl groups - can be seen as at least somewhat empowering. Bottom line is that women continue to feel conflicted and ambivalent about the images they're presented with, and the best we can do is to teach out kids (and people in general) to be critical consumers of media - to talk back to it, question it, and make fun of it.

Interesting Specifics:

According to Disney, "vanity means a girl is probably evil and deserves to die" (30).

The Mickey Mouse Club was on from 1955-59.

The 1960 Shirells song "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" was the first #1 hit by a girl group.

Maude was great for focusing on a woman who talked back, but she also reinforced stereotypes of the feminist as "a strident, loud, unfeminine, bruiser" (203).

1976 = debut of The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, and Charlie's Angels (212).

In reference to pop culture's obsession with the "catfight:" "It may be filled with ambivalence and compromise, tradition and rebellion, but the space between the two cats - the space where we, the girls, are - is what feminism is all about" (244). [Please!!]

"But on of capitalism's great strengths - perhaps its greatest - is its ability to co-opt and domesticate opposition, to transubstantiate criticism into a host of new, marketable products. And so it was with fitness" (260). [This connects with ideas in Cycle of Outrage - that youth culture was eventually "tamed" by media co-option].

Excessive working out, as embodied by a perfect ass, "doesn't reflect hard work or entitlement so much as mindless narcissism, unproductive self-absorption, and the media's ongoing distortion of feminism to further their own misogynistic, profit-maximizing ends" (265).

'The decision to get a face-lift or not is, inescapably, a political decision" (266).

Interacts With:

Golden State, Golden Youth, Cycle of Outrage (really just for its focus on youth - hmm, should compare their angle on the media)
Is a little different because although it talks about ambiguity on the part of the consumer, it doesn't really go so far as to say that consumers carve their own meaning and use what they are given for their own ends. To me, this book is a "fun" book that's more conversational than anything else. Has a very "Hey, remember that show/film/song?!" feel to it. Has the same baby-boomer circle-jerk/self-referentiality thing going on that Jennifer Price's Flight Maps has.

A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s

A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (1986)
By James Gilbert

Synopsis: Gilbert investigates the increased fear of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, and examines the various factors that meshed together to create or to deal with this "problem." In this way, the book is "about the interconnection of ideas, individuals, and institutions that at first glance, might appear only to have a marginal relationship to each other" (10). Plans to deal with/investigate delinquency included sociological studies and increased pushes for censorship of pop culture, especially of crime comic books, demonstrating the "increased social and cultural power of the mass media and the marketplace over ourselves and our children" (10). Gilbert argues that a lot of this fear was brought about by general postwar anxieties about the changing society, which reached a peak in the mid-1950s, only to "cave in" via a rejuvenated appreciation for/acceptance of the power of the emerging youth culture of the 1960s (which was quickly engulfed by media attention). Gilbert's argument "focuses on the terrible but reoccurring accusation that modern American culture deprived adolescents of their innocence, their childhood, and their independence" (10). Shows that people were scared of both a burgeoning youth population and of the power and pervasiveness of "mass culture" - and mass culture's ability to wrest control away from parents (ironic in an age of nuclear family exaltation). Parents were also worried about elements of lower-class culture sneaking into youth culture (i.e. Elvis, etc). This "seduction of the youth by culture" should be seen as episodic - i.e. it comes up every so often [1920s?]. Basically, fears of juvenile delinquency were also really about fears of mass culture, and of parents losing control over their kids.

Interesting Specifics:

In a way, 1950s America has become the mass society dreamed about in the 1930s (6).

"The radical dreamers of the 1930s awakened to the dystopia of suburbia" (109).

Disputes over mass culture in the 1950s were shaped by the homogenization of American society (7).

Frederic Wertham wrote The Seduction of the Innocent (1954), and was very interested in the influence of the media on youth, but was also interested in larger sociological and cultural influences as well. He later wanted to ban sales of crime comic books to kids under 15 (106).

1950s saw a lot of fears over this new "mass culture."

Argues that issues of class were central to pop culture fears.

The Kefauver (a senator) censorship hearings were among the biggest, and he headed the Senate Subcommittee on Delinquency which "urged more self-regulation and internal censorship on the comic book, television, and film industries" (162).

In 1922, Hollywood created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, headed by Hays, to demonstrate attempts at self-policing (164). Says that in a way, "the Code was like a Victorian hemline, defining an erogenous zone" (169).

Big "youth gone awry" films included The Wild One (1953), The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and West Side Story (1961).

By the 1960s, elites even started viewing mass culture as "American culture" (214). [So, was dangerous youth culture ultimately tamed by its value in the marketplace?]

"Struggle took a new form, for despite the power of American culture to homogenize, to sanitize protest, and to absorb the energies of subcultures, the process of protest, renewal, and invention is also perpetual" (217). **

Interacts With:

The Lonely Crown, Organization Man (re. fears of mass culture)
Golden State, Golden Youth (relationship between youth and media imagery)
Pre-Code Hollywood (censorship issues)
** This quote here makes the book blend in with all those other pop culture books that are focused on the malleability of culture. I'm not exactly sure though, what this particular statement is referring to.

Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966

Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966 (2002)
By Kirse Granat May

Synopsis: This book examines popular culture representations of California from 1955-1965, especially as focused on white, middle-class suburban teenagers full of wholesome "good clean fun." Focuses on the rise of the CA postwar suburban ideal/CA as land of youth and promise; launch of Disneyland and Disney TV shows such as Davey Crockett and the Mickey Mouse Club; Rebel Without a Cause as showing suburban rebellion and Gidget as showing middle class cuteness; rise of the surf craze with its middle class, white leisured youth lifestyle; rise of the CA aesthetic in fashion; Berkeley and Watts turmoil as complicating the CA image; Reagan for CA governor as way to "restore" wholesome, golden land CA image. Argues that CA created a very sunny, youth-obsessed, wholesome, white, middle-class, leisured, problem-free fantasy image which served to obscure the real racial, class-based, and political tensions and struggles going on in the state. Though events of the 1960s occasionally snapped people out of it, the persistence of this "golden" image continues to shape memories of the past and ideas of the present.

Interesting Specifics:

"California was America's tomorrowland" (5).

"Promoting the virtues of the California teenager suburbanized popular culture" (6).

The CA youth image "represented CA trends and middle class America to the extreme: mobile, capitalistic, outdoorsy, consumer-oriented, involved in harmless, well-meaning fun" (26).

Calls "California Girls" am "aryan anthem" (113).

Interacts With:

To me this book seems almost like a top-down approach - doesn't take a very radical view of popular culture. Seems to imply that pop culture here was used as an escape, that consumers were happily taking what producers wanted them to have and using it as a means of obscuring the painful tensions of the time. So, is that radical or conservative? Seems conservative to me. This book is not about creating one's own meaning, or about multiplicity.