Page 107 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Identity, Lifestyle, and Subculture 91

When you want to hold your boyfriends hand but his friends don ’ t think
your good enough? …
When you feel there is nothing left in this cruel world for you
Just stop and think your not the only one there is other people too
Look in the mirror and smile at what you have got
4
Dont be as fragile anymore dont, look at what your not!
That the Emo subculture generates hostility from other adolescents who
do not share the affiliative values, ideas, and lifestyle is suggestive of what

subcultures in general accomplish. A typical anti - Emo joke goes like this:
“ How many Emo kids does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to
do the replacing and two to write a poem about how much they miss the
old one. ” Subcultures like Emo differentiate and lend distinction to a par-
ticular marked identity, one that stands out from the prevailing standard
and norm. Such acts of differentiation generate hostility because they cast
doubt on the standards that others use to defi ne their own identities. And
humans by nature react negatively to threats to their selves, be those threats
physical or symbolic. The sense of devaluation and even of annulment that
occurs symbolically or culturally is as threatening, it seems, as the possibil-
ity of physical harm. It is that same threat that probably impels young
people to band together for protection in like - minded groups that place
the danger the anonymity of the crowd represents in abeyance. One pre-
serves one ’ s sense of self by being able to have a self that others recognize
and identity with. Oddly, by the logic of subcultural identity making, one
gains a self not by expressively generating something entirely unique and
specific to oneself from inside oneself but rather by adopting and adapting

oneself to styles and images that come from outside. One becomes recog-
nized as a self by being “ one of us. ”
Subcultures are not unique to young people. One of the most persistent
kinds of subculture over the ages was gay and lesbian. In response to the
conservatism that came to dominate European society in the nineteenth
century after the suppression of the French Revolution and the reforms in
authoritarian conservative society it sought to bring about, a bohemian
subculture came into being that evolved a different set of values, ones that
were more liberatory in regard to natural impulses that conservatives
sought to control or suppress, that indulged a taste for drug - induced expe-
riences that opened up the imagination and transcended the brute positiv-

ism (knowledge based solely on easily verifiable facts) that made sure
conservative society survived by cutting off speculation about alternatives,
and that espoused radical ideals of social and economic equality at odds