Interrogating Subcultures

©1999 Subcultures have been broadly defined as social groups organized around shared interests and practices. The term "subculture" has been used to position specific social groups and the study of such groups, in relation to various broader social formations designated by terms like "community," the "public," the "masses," "society," and "culture." Use of the term "subcultures" in academic subcultural studies has shifted since the term was coined in the 1940s in the context of the Chicago School of sociology and its liberal, pluralist assumptions. This loosely defined interdisciplinary field has been altered and informed by Frankfurt School analyses of mass culture and society, by debates in anthropology regarding the methods and ethics of ethnography, by the critical synthesis of perspectives developed in the 1970s at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and by subsequent critique and revision of these earlier tendencies especially by feminist and poststructuralist writers.