Catherine Bacon's Courses

The Rhetoric of Subculture

In this course we, as Dick Hebidge writes in Subculture: The Meaning of Style: "are interested in subculture: in the expressive forms and rituals of those subordinate groups [...] who are alternately dismissed, denounced and canonized; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons." The debate on the value, function, and nature of subcultures has been going on a long time. We will listen, understand, join and reflect on the rhetoric of that debate.

There are three major categories of peoples that we are concerned with in this class: the academic sociologist, or cultural studies scholar-- for who "subculture" is theoretical categorization that illuminates the human species. Members of subcultures are subjects of their study. Then there are the members of "subcultures" themselves. They are individuals and communities of individuals that use various strategies to define themselves in opposition to, or on the margins of the "normal." Finally, there is everyone else; the media, the masses, the mainstream. None of these categories are stable. They are all imagined in various ways by either of the other two, and the rhetoric used by one is taken up and transformed by the other.