Page 257 - Cultural Theory

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••• Eamonn Carrabine •••

Second, the theory rests on the assumption that the rest of society is ‘straight’ and
‘incorporated in a consensus’. Third, the analysis elevates ‘a vague concept of style to
the status of an objective category’ (Clarke, 1981: 178). These are formidable criti-
cisms and there is a clear sense that what troubles Clarke is the elitism of subcultural
theory. By setting up a distinction between an active subculture and a passive main-
stream, the practices of the vast majority of people who actually listen to popular
music are dismissed with a condescension that recalls Adorno’s more disparaging
comments. Moreover, as others pointed out, the constant preoccupation with class
meant that gender and ethnicity were effectively ignored in the subcultural tradition.

Contesting traditions

The almost exclusive focus on white working-class young men was first challenged
from within the CCCS approach by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1976). In
this paper they argued that because girls are subjected to much stricter parental con-
trol of their leisure time they have developed alternative strategies of winning back
space through the bedroom-centred teenybopper culture. Subcultural theorists had
completely ignored the consumption of music in the home, preferring the action of
the street to the tedium of everyday life. Angela McRobbie (1980) subsequently
developed an influential feminist critique of subcultural theory for its uncritical mas-
culine agenda and persuasively maintained that

while the sociologies of deviance and youth were blooming in the early seven-
ties, the sociology of the family was everybody’s least favourite option … No
commentary on the hippies dealt with the countercultural sexual division of
labor, let alone the hypocrisies of ‘free love’; few writers seemed interested in
what happened when a mod went home after a weekend on speed.

(ibid.: 68–9)

In her later work on the sexual politics of dance, she argued that dancing ‘carries enor-
mously pleasurable qualities for girls and women which frequently seem to suggest a dis-
placed, shared and nebulous eroticism rather than a straightforwardly romantic, heavily
heterosexual “goal-orientated drive”’ (McRobbie, 1984: 134). She has also discussed the
opportunities rave culture has afforded young women for creating new identities as well
as examining the place of popular music in magazines aimed at young girls, like Just
Seventeen, in relation to debates on postmodernism (McRobbie, 1994). Her overall
approach is driven by the insistence that the cultural life of young women is structured
in different ways from that of boys and thereby raises the crucial point that gender divi-
sions mediate the consumption and meaning of popular music.
While it is fair to say that gender issues had been marginalized in the CCCS approach
to subcultural theory, considerations of ‘race’ did occupy an important place in the
Centre’s work. For instance, Hebdige (1979: 45) was keenly aware that across ‘the
5
loaded surfaces of British working-class youth cultures, a phantom history of race rela-
tions since the War’ has been played out. Paul Gilroy (1987) has developed some of the
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