Page 235 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

SUBCULTURE

that ‘power dressing’ in the 1980s was a means for the ambitious to
signifying their difference from clerical or secretarial workers. Style
serves not only to differentiate, but also to forge an identity. Identity
through style is also reliant on similarity. For a style to be recognisable,
an outfit must belong to a paradigm. Individuals from various
subcultures such as punks, Goths and skinheads, while visibly ‘different’,
can (especially to the uninitiated) ‘look all the same’. The paradigm
allows individual difference within collective uniformity. With
reference to aesthetics and identity formation, style relies on choice
and combination (or chain); it works in much the same way as genre.
See also: Bricolage, Genre, Subculture
Further reading: Hebdige (1978, 1988); Lang (1987); on fashion, see Bruzzi and
Gibson (2000); Craik (1994); McRobbie (1999, 1999); Wilson (1995)

SUBCULTURE

A group of individuals who share particular interests, ideologies and
practices. As the prefix sub indicates, such groups are understood to
form their identity in opposition to a dominant or ‘parent’ culture.
Early subcultural studies noted that this opposition was carried out
through various means, but the most visible was style. Recent work in
the area suggests that this relationship is no longer as explicit, arguing
that traditional definitions of subcultures rely on particular historical
circumstances.
Hebdige’s (1979) study of teddy boys, mods, rockers and punks is
understood as one of the founding texts of subcultural studies. He
argues that subcultures make their identity visible by the incorporation
of specific style and leisure choices. Punks, for example, used safety
pins, make-up and extravagant clothing and supported a particular
genre of music as a means of representing their identity. For Hebdige,
subcultural groups’ use of style and leisure was a form of symbolic
politics, ‘making their values visible in a society saturated by codes and
symbols of the dominant culture’ (Shuker, 1994: 238). The formation
of identity and a visible challenge to the hegemony of the straight
society are the aims of subcultures.
Central to Hebdige’s thesis is the notion of resistance, specifically in
relation to parent or mass culture. But as he stated, one of the greatest
challenges to this resistance is ‘ideological recuperation’, whereby a
subculture begins to lose its sense of difference as its style is
incorporated into commercial culture (Hebdige, 1979: 97). One of

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