Pushing Authenticity. Challenging Narratives and Performances on Women’s Subcultural Participation

Abstract

This thesis examines women’s subcultural participation based on ethnographic fieldwork and 73 interviews with women within the skateboarding and rave cultures. The study explores and develops how we view female participation. From a theoretical perspective, subcultural scholars have a tradition of assuming subcultures as masculine, viewing masculinity as the norm for authenticity. These assumptions have led women and femininity to being marked out as inauthentic and mainly explaining their participation as gender resistance. This viewpoint has affected everything from the research design in general to research questions, methods and the data collection in particular. Revisiting the relations between the subcultural, identity, meanings, authenticity and gender, and viewing subcultures as open for interpretation, this study suggests that subcultures can be constructed as masculine, feminine or neither. The study argues that gender resistance is a small part of subcultural women’s participation. Instead, their participations, identities, authenticities and meanings are constructed around boundary work towards the non-subcultural. It is only through establishing these boundaries that gender resistance can be articulated as meaningful. The methodological strategies and conclusions of this study demonstrate that how we tend to view women’s subcultural participation needs to be reconsidered.

Popular Abstract

Are subcultures masculine? Do you have to be a man to be seen as authentic within subcultures? And what about women in subcultures? Do they have to tone down their feminine traits to be viewed as authentic? Previous research on subcultures often suggests that this is the case and is usually based on a masculine position. To explore the matter, I decided to ask women within subcultures themselves. I was interested in how they viewed the subcultures, how they thought subcultural participants should behave and how they enacted this. I wanted to see how they perceived gender and what they believed their participation gave them. Over the course of two years, I have interviewed and followed 73 women in the skateboarding and rave cultures. Their experiences, appearances and stories indicate that previous research has missed a lot. The women did not regard the subcultures as masculine, but rather claimed that it does not matter which gender you are. The most important thing for them is that you are true to yourself and that you are dedicated to the subculture. However, there are different ways of ‘being yourself’, and there are even different ways to show your ‘dedication’. This finding agrees with previous research conducted on men. The most central finding was a distance, a freedom, from everything that was considered as not being a part of the subculture. By constructing such a distance, a difference between the subcultural and that which was not the subcultural could be maintained. For female participants, this distance could contain gender, but this only became meaningful through the other differences and distances from the non-subcultural. With this conclusion, it becomes obvious that we need to look over how we view women within subcultures, as well as other deviant activities such as criminal networks, to better understand their actions.

• author: Nilsson, Filippa
• supervisor: Erik Hannerz
• organization: Sociology; Department of Sociology
• course: SOCM04 20211
• year: 2021
• type: H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
• subject: Social Sciences
• keywords: cultural sociology, subcultural theory, gender, ethnography, rave, skateboarding, authenticity
• language: English
• id: 9053740
• date added to LUP: 2021-06-14 15:52:14
• date last changed: 2021-06-14 15:52:14