124263 KO Critical Media Analysis (2019S)

Tracing relations between counter-hegemonic forces and subcultures and debates on resistance to pre-defined subject-positioning, we will consider how we are to define the notion of “sub-culture/s” within a theoretical negotiation of culture and cultural hegemony. Is it a term indicating a relation to be thought as hierarchically put “beneath” (?), positioned within (?), opposed to (?) dominant culture/s? How do subcultures come into being – what are their cultural histories and social practices? What is the difference between concepts of “subculture” and “counter-culture? We will consider a range of theoretical approaches which will shed some interesting light on the theoretical twighlight-zone which subcultures pose while, at the same time, appearing as flamboyant spaces of/for “outsiders”.
The course’s overall paradigm will be Hebdige’s notion that “subculture is … a declaration of independence, of Otherness, of alien intent, a refusal of anonymity of subordinate status. It is an Insubordination. And at the same time, it is also a confirmation of the fact of powerlessness, a celebration of impotence”. (35)
Based on a discussion of the Foucaultian and poststructuralist background of Hebidge’s concept, we will encounter a variety of subcultures and analyse in detail how they react to and/or interact with diverse master-discourses of dominant cultures. Our focus will be put on four major perspectives on hegemonic master-discourses and the subcultural responses to these where we will examine how dialectical and/or fluid the boundaries are between them:
(1) Cultural (-patriarchal) significations of the body, gender & frames of sexual identity vs. drag & performance/ bisexuality and cultural repudiation/ “the building of the body” and phallicism
(2) Subversive re-inscriptions of public and private spaces: graffiti activism and ‘social figurations’ (Elias) of tattoo-subculture
(3) Subcultural ideological/political, and/or music & style communities as formations against political/moral/ethnical cultural dogma: historical influences, bricolage, counter-bricolage and intertextuality: Rebellion and Cultural Melancholia - Romanticist influences on the 1980s Gothic/Indie movement // transgression and oneness: Hippie influences on the 1990s formations of Rave and Goa subcultures of a ‘social divine’ (Maffesoli) // Capitalism vs Punk/Electro-Punk: radical anarchy, provocation and the commercialisation of the Unpleasant // transcoding of racial identity in Reggae, HipHop and “Black Hairstyle Politics” (Mercer)
(4) Virtual bodies/identities and media-subcultures vs. dominant cultural conceptions of normative social identity; analysis of desires and fears expressed in/by virtual spaces about dominant discourses. Considerations of a “global underground” – relations of the subcultural and the cosmopolitan.