Subcultures and Fandom
How groups build distinctive identities, styles and communities around popular culture, from spectacular youth subcultures to dedicated fan cultures.
Definition
Subcultures are groups that distinguish themselves from the wider culture through shared styles, values and practices; fandom is sustained, communal and often creative engagement with particular media texts, performers or genres.
Scope
This area covers the study of subcultures and fandom as forms of collective engagement with popular culture. It examines the Birmingham Centre's class-based theory of youth subcultures, the semiotics of subcultural style, the rise of fan studies and participatory culture, and post-subcultural accounts that replace fixed subcultures with fluid scenes, tribes and lifestyles. It treats how people use popular culture to create identity, distinction and belonging.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How and why do subcultures form, and what social conditions shape them?
- How does subcultural style communicate identity and resistance?
- What distinguishes fans from ordinary audiences, and what do fans produce?
- Have stable subcultures given way to more fluid scenes and lifestyles?
Key concepts
- subculture
- style
- resistance
- homology
- fandom
- participatory culture
- subcultural capital
- scene
Key theories
- Subcultures as symbolic resistance
- The Birmingham Centre theorised working-class youth subcultures as collective, symbolic responses that 'magically' resolve, at the level of style and ritual, contradictions experienced in their parent class culture.
- Participatory fan culture
- Jenkins reframes fans as active 'textual poachers' who appropriate media texts and produce their own creative works, communities and interpretations rather than consuming passively.
- Subcultural capital
- Thornton adapts Bourdieu to show how participants in club cultures accrue 'subcultural capital' — hipness and authenticity — and how the media are central to, not opposed to, subcultural formation.
History
Subcultural theory crystallised at the Birmingham Centre in the 1970s, with Resistance Through Rituals (1976) and Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) reading youth styles as class-based symbolic resistance. From the early 1990s fan studies, led by Jenkins's Textual Poachers (1992), recast fans as creative participants. By the late 1990s post-subcultural critics such as Thornton and others questioned the class-resistance model, proposing more fluid concepts of scene, neo-tribe and lifestyle.
Debates
- Resistance versus consumption
- Whether subcultures and fandoms genuinely resist dominant culture or are themselves products of, and recuperated by, the media and the market.
Key figures
- Dick Hebdige
- Stuart Hall
- Tony Jefferson
- Henry Jenkins
- Sarah Thornton
Related topics
Seminal works
- halljefferson1976
- hebdige1979
- jenkins1992
- thornton1995
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between a subculture and a fandom?
- A subculture is typically defined by a whole way of life and a distinctive style that sets a group apart from mainstream culture, often analysed in terms of class and resistance. A fandom is organised around devotion to a specific text, genre or star, and is studied especially for its interpretive and creative practices.