Friday, September 05, 2008

Women and subcultures

Johan at Birdseed's Tunedown has posted on 'Feminine Men's Peculiar Misogyny', wondering about contemporary 'feminine' men subcultures in Scandinavia and where the women are in these pretty boy scenes. Hmm, not sure - I know very little about these particular 'subcultures' (if such they are), but a point of reference for this discussion might be Pop Feminist's questioning 'Can Women be part of counterculture?' Her basic point is that while men can play around with being outsiders (for a while), women have this status imposed on them whether or not they join any counter/subculture:

"Youth rebellion is the domain of young men, who tend to become progressively less radical as they age and assume the comforts of patriarchy (the power-structure isn’t so bad after all!). Women, on the other hand, lose sexual viability as they age and for those brave enough to confront the fact that the joke was on them, become rebels. This is where we get the stereotype of the “crazy old lady”—a revolutionary if ever there was one.

Let me suggest a basic foundation for counterculture:
Counterculture: Elective marginalization

Women and other disenfranchised groups, on the other hand, constitute a counterpublic:
Counterpublic: Forced marginalization'.

1 comment:

Birdseed said...

That's a very interesting perspective on the topic, and it goes right at the heart of a lot of the issue. I'm going to have to have a think about it, let it mature for a while and then prep a new blog post, I think.