CULS20015 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Queer Theory, Semiotics, Consumerism
15 Jun 2018
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Lecture 5: subcultures, musical communities, scenes: queerness and punk rock
Subcultures
• Help articulate why music is so valuable
• Help with self-fashioning and identity
• Political revolutionaries
Punk music + queerness
• Visible aesthetics, has political meanings
• Consumerist culture and how it changes throughout time
• Queer theory based on articulation of porous boundaries -> no hard defined boundaries
• Punk has to have porous boundaries to continue on
• Revolutionary possibilities bc of political oppression + hegemonic dominance created through
boundaries -> helpful way to see how boundaries transgress
• Punk rock is straight as hell -> traditionally well served by hegemonic identity
• Queerness as a lens of helping to escape or a form of escapism?
What are musical communities?
• Really difficult to explain what about punk is punk unless talking about clothes
• Understand them = understand why they form
SCENE
• Heavily geographical space - think of it as a café
• Frith: the issue is how music produces identities, how it creates and constructs an experience that
we can only make sense of by taking on both a subjective and a collective identity
• Generalize the people themselves - they are part of the community
• Prioritize consumerism, ignores class, and labels things
• In labelling things, you set up hierarchies of power and change how people interact with them ->
they should e ope ad fluid eough that these hierarhies do’t hold so uh power -> not as
productive
• Do’t assist i oetig sees to politial power
• Goes against basic revolution of music -> ignore political aspects
SUBCULTURE
• Hebdige: expression of social relationships, social structures, or social contradictions
• A group of people who hate the same things (hegemony) and like the same things (homology)
• Group of people who understand that they are being oppressed in one way or form
• Expressed homology through culture and style -> dev same taste -> similar organic structures
formed through shared origin (homology)
• Centered around NOT BEING AROUND MASS CULTURE
• Why do UK punks wear tartan?
• A style of the poverty around manchester
• Make fun of the wealthy by borrowing the tartan
• Deliberately designed to be tongue and cheek -> the way the middle class was copying the upper
class -> parody
• Its cultural is glues together by what the practices signify - they all think its funny bc theyre all in
on the joke
• Practice of playing on semiotics change the signified / signifier -> change the hegemonics
• Determined by your politics
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