Subcultures and Resistance

How the Birmingham School read youth subcultures — mods, punks, skinheads — as symbolic resistance, fashioning style into a refusal of the dominant order.

Definition

A subculture, in this tradition, is a group, typically of working-class youth, that fashions a distinctive style as a symbolic, often spectacular response to its subordinate social position; resistance refers to the way such styles contest the dominant culture at the level of signs rather than direct politics.

Scope

This topic covers the cultural-studies theory of subcultures: the reading of working-class youth styles as symbolic resistance through ritual and bricolage, Hebdige's analysis of style, and the feminist critique of the field's neglect of girls. It does not cover later post-subcultural theory in depth, though it notes the debate.

Core questions

• How can clothing and music constitute political resistance?
• Is subcultural resistance real or merely symbolic and easily co-opted?
• Whose subcultures did the classic studies see, and whose did they miss?

Key theories

Style as resistance and bricolage

Hebdige read subcultural style as a coded, oppositional bricolage that disrupts dominant meanings, before being recuperated through commodification and labelling.

Resistance through rituals

The Birmingham collection theorised youth subcultures as symbolic, ritualised attempts to resolve the contradictions of their parent class culture.

History

In the mid-1970s the Birmingham Centre theorised post-war British youth subcultures as forms of symbolic resistance, a project capped by Hebdige's influential 1979 study of style. Angela McRobbie soon criticised the field's masculine bias and inattention to girls' cultures, while later scholars questioned whether coherent subcultures still exist.

Debates

Heroic resistance versus the missing girls

Feminist critics, notably McRobbie, argued that the classic studies romanticised spectacular male subcultures and overlooked the gendered, domestic spaces of girls' cultures.

Key figures

• Dick Hebdige
• Stuart Hall
• Tony Jefferson
• Angela McRobbie

Seminal works

• hebdige1995
• halljefferson1976
• mcrobbie1991

Frequently asked questions

Why study fashion as resistance?

Because for the Birmingham School subcultural style was a symbolic language through which subordinate groups expressed refusal of dominant norms, even without explicit political programmes.