Reading Response: Subcultures

Kathy Acker articulates a longing she has for the emergence of communal ritual in a privatized world: "I mean, ecstasy--be it sexual (or some other kind...) should be taking place somehow in our 'community'" (184).  This might be the sort of thing one gets from being in a subculture (or organized religion...or political activism...)--an intensely felt, cathected, group feeling, experienced in the public domain.

If being in a subculture might be a way of getting away with feeling intense emotions in public, McRobbie and Fregoso note the way in which subcultures (at least as they are taken up within popular and academic discourses) tend to be coded male, and they tend to be enacted in the male-coded space of "the streets."  The rough world of male subcultures that McRobbie adumbrates generates a negativity in their members against The Man, (whether by this we denote a racist and/or a class authority), but this very toughness may be vented, in an access of impotence, upon the domestic, private world of women whose subservient, unpaid labor supports these working-class males.  In a familiar misogynistic move, men blame capitalism on women--since women "seduce" and entrap men (by giving birth to their babies) into a position where they need to capitulate to the daily grind of soul-killing labor in order to earn the money to support them.  In effect, such males revolt against patriarchy (and its paternalistic responsibilities to care and to provide),  ironically, in a way which leads them to behave in revoltingly sexist and irresponsible ways towards the women in their lives.  There is, sadly, no sense, in McRobbie or Fregoso, of the possibility of a male-female alliance against patriarchy.

McRobbie's piece is interesting for the way it brings out certain complexities in male sexuality, in a way that the Silverman piece helps to delineate.  If, for Silverman, exhibitionism is a fundamental drive equally shared by males and females (but historically lost to mainstream males since the Great Masculine Renunciation in the 18th century), subcultural style enables males to regain access to sartorial excess, to show-boat in the visual field.  The result, McRobbie insinuates, may be sexual self-sufficiency, (at least temporarily, McRobbie hastens to clarify)--a means of escape from the oppressive strictures of adolescent heterosexuality, into an intensely felt, homosocial world.

McRobbie rightly resents girls' relative lack of access to a similar path of escape from compulsory heterosexuality, with its tediously inevitable marriage plot and relentless teleology towards a "premature middle-age induced by childbirth and housework," a premature shutting down of the possibilities (33).

McRobbie notes that the press tends to rationalize and play down the outbreak of subcultural activity as "boys having fun," "sowing their wild oats" (27).  Even sexually subversive gestures such as tranvestism in youth subcultures, may be rationalized and recuperated as just a healthy, temporary kink on the developmental path towards flawless heteronormativity.  In a way, McRobbie reinscribes these assumptions in that she does not challenge outright the assumption that subcultures are the exclusive property of "youth culture."  Instead of romantically privileging youth as the time of transgression and stylishly symbolic rebellion, it might be nice to try to see the possibilities of being subcultural as extending throughout the life-span--maybe even increasing with age.  (Cf. Acker on getting beyond "the age of beauty" (179)).