Page 108 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

92 Identity, Lifestyle, and Subculture

with “ bourgeois ” society ’ s favoring of the rich over the poor at all times.
Bohemianism was a lifestyle that embodied itself in dress, preferences in
art and literature, and forms of cultural expression such as dance. If the
bourgeoisie was repressive and repressed, bohemians were free thinkers,
free spirits, and free lovers who shocked mainstream taste with their prefer-
ence for openness and honesty regarding sexuality and human relations. If
the bourgeois wore suits, the bohemians wore baggy loose clothing. If the
bourgeois sought wealth above all, the bohemians were more interested in
ephemeral beauty and the experience of life, heightened if at all possible
with alcohol and drugs. They took seriously Walter Pater ’ s maxim in the
famous conclusion to his book The Renaissance to “ burn always with this
hard gem - like fl ame ” of passionately experienced living.
Any group that is enjoined or denied entry into public life becomes a
subculture. Jews are in some respects a classic example of a subculture –

perhaps along with gays, one of the very first subcultures. Banned, excluded,

they banded together, dressed alike, and developed affiliations and alli-
ances, and their subcultural behavior served its function well; they sur-
vived. The same was true of anarchists in the nineteenth century. Where
the dominant or mainstream culture is repressive or intolerant of differ-
ence, subcultures tend to form. Subculture usually conjures the idea of
dissent and dissonance for this reason. They usually are at odds with domi-
nant cultures that are conservative, that favor the repression of natural
impulses, that promote unfairness and inequality, that rely on power,
authority, and force to exert discipline on or control over others so that
resources can be monopolized by a minority, that are anti - intellectual and
suspicious of imagination or theoretical speculation of any kind, and the
like. It is for this reason that one should distinguish a subculture like Emo,
which allows those not favored by a dominant conservative picture of the
world that endorses force and violence over care and empathy, that is hard -
nosed realist instead of creative and imaginative, and that is repressive of
life rather than celebratory of it, to feel that their values have a place in the
world, from a conservative culture such as the hunting, beer - swilling, reac-
tionary one of backwoods America. The latter in the eyes of Cultural
Studies is not a subculture but a part of the cultural mainstream that most
subcultures would be at odds with. In Cultural Studies, then, the “ sub ”
in subculture connotes dissent and dissonance, something at odds with
conservatism and with the conservative ideal of a society ruled by the tough
and the thoughtless for the purposes of material accumulation by a minor-
ity. That core conservative value spreads itself out through a culture like