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Youth Subcultures

Hebdige, feminist and postmodern views of youth subcultures

  • 3 things to know
  • Component 01

Overview

Recall questions on Hebdige's bricolage and incorporation, McRobbie and Garber's feminist critique of subcultural research and bedroom culture, why girls were less visible in street subcultures, the postmodern supermarket of style, neo-tribes and Muggleton's post-subculturalists, and the main objection to postmodern claims of free choice.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

What is bedroom culture?

Who and when

Explain why feminists argue girls were less visible in street subcultures.

Key term

What is meant by the supermarket of style?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Define bricolage as Hebdige uses it.

    Model answer

    It is the reworking of ordinary everyday objects into a new subcultural style that carries subversive meaning, such as punks turning safety pins, razor blades and bin liners into clothing.

  2. 2

    Hebdige argues subcultural resistance never lasts. What process defuses it?

    Model answer

    Incorporation: in its commodity form the market mass-produces and sells the style, while in its ideological form the media redefine members as harmless eccentrics or as ordinary misbehaving youngsters.

  3. 3

    What criticism did McRobbie and Garber make of earlier subcultural research?

    Model answer

    That it was carried out by male sociologists studying boys on the street, which left girls invisible and ignored the private settings where girls' culture actually happened.

  4. 4

    What is bedroom culture?

    Model answer

    McRobbie and Garber's term for girls' leisure organised in the private space of the home, built around close friendships, music, magazines and talk rather than public street-based subcultures.

  5. 5

    Explain why feminists argue girls were less visible in street subcultures.

    Model answer

    Girls were supervised more closely by parents and were policed by a sexual double standard, so being out in public with a street subculture put their reputation at risk in a way it did not for boys.

  6. 6

    What is meant by the supermarket of style?

    Model answer

    Polhemus's idea that young people now browse and combine elements from many past and present styles as consumers, instead of committing to one fixed, class-based subculture.

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Introducing Socialisation, Culture and Identity
Families and Relationships
Youth Subcultures
Media

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Murdock identified sexual, , economic and educational functions.
reproductiveemotionalpolitical

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AVictims may fear reprisal, or feel shame or economic dependence.
BAbuse in the home has historically been treated as a private matter.
CMany incidents are never reported or recorded.

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Sex refers to the biological category of male or female.
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