Goth

Undead Subculture

Auteur: Bibby, Michael; Goodlad, Lauren M. E.; Gunn, Joshua; Schilt, Kristen
Éditeur: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822339083
eISBN Pdf: 9780822389705
Lieu de publication: Durham , United States
Année de publication électronique: 2007
Mois : Avril
Pages: 456
DDC: 306/.1
Langue: Anglais

Légende

Since it first emerged from Britain’s punk-rock scene in the late 1970s, goth subculture has haunted postmodern culture and society, reinventing itself inside and against the mainstream. Goth: Undead Subculture is the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to this enduring yet little examined cultural phenomenon. Twenty-three essays from various disciplines explore the music, cinema, television, fashion, literature, aesthetics, and fandoms associated with the subculture. They examine goth’s many dimensions—including its melancholy, androgyny, spirituality, and perversity—and take readers inside locations in Los Angeles, Austin, Leeds, London, Buffalo, New York City, and Sydney. A number of the contributors are or have been participants in the subculture, and several draw on their own experiences.

The volume’s editors provide a rich history of goth, describing its play of resistance and consumerism; its impact on class, race, and gender; and its distinctive features as an “undead” subculture in light of post-subculture studies and other critical approaches. The essays include an interview with the distinguished fashion historian Valerie Steele; analyses of novels by Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and Nick Cave; discussions of goths on the Internet; and readings of iconic goth texts from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to James O’Barr’s graphic novel The Crow. Other essays focus on gothic music, including seminal precursors such as Joy Division and David Bowie, and goth-influenced performers such as the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Gothic sexuality is explored in multiple ways, the subjects ranging from the San Francisco queercore scene of the 1980s to the increasing influence of fetishism and fetish play. Together these essays demonstrate that while its participants are often middle-class suburbanites, goth blurs normalizing boundaries even as it appears as an everlasting shadow of late capitalism.

Contributors: Heather Arnet, Michael Bibby, Jessica Burstein, Angel M. Butts, Michael du Plessis, Jason Friedman, Nancy Gagnier, Ken Gelder, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Joshua Gunn, Trevor Holmes, Paul Hodkinson, David Lenson, Robert Markley, Mark Nowak, Anna Powell, Kristen Schilt, Rebecca Schraffenberger, David Shumway, Carol Siegel, Catherine Spooner, Lauren Stasiak, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Genders
- Dark Admissions: Gothic Subculture and the Ambivalence of Misogyny and Resistance
- Queens of the Damned: Women and Girls’ Participation in Two Gothic Subcultures
- Peri Gothous: On the Art of Gothicizing Gender
- Men in Black: Androgyny and Ethics in The Crow and Fight Club
II. Performances
- This Modern Goth (Explains Herself)
- Playing Dress Up: David Bowie and the Roots of Goth
- Undead Fashion: Nineties Style and the Perennial Return of Goth
- ‘‘Goth Damage’’ and Melancholia: Reflections on Posthuman Gothic Identities
III. Localities
- ‘‘To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant’’: Music and Death in Zero City, 1982–1984
- ‘‘Ah am witness to its authenticity’’: Gothic Style in Postmodern Southern Writing
- The (Un)Australian Goth: Notes toward a Dislocated National Subject
IV. Artifacts
- Atrocity Exhibitions: Joy Division, Factory Records, and Goth
- Material Distinctions: A Conversation with Valerie Steele
- Geek/Goth: Remediation and Nostalgia in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands
- The Authentic Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Hold on Vampiric Genres
V. Communities
- ‘‘When you kiss me, I want to die’’: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gothic Family Values
- The Cure, the Community, the Contempt!
- ‘‘We are all individuals, but we’ve all got the same boots on!’’: Traces of Individualism within a Subcultural Community
VI. Practices
- That Obscure Object of Desire Revisited: Poppy Z. Brite and the Goth Hero as Masochist
- God’s Own Medicine: Religion and Parareligion in U.K. Goth Culture
- Gothic Fetishism
- The Aesthetic Apostasy
References
Contributors
Index