Sarah Thornton

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Sarah Thornton is a writer, ethnographer, and sociologist of culture. She writes about art and the art world for artforum.com, Art Review, Art Monthly, and The New Yorker. Her forthcoming book Seven Days in the Art World will be published by Granta (UK), WW Norton (USA), and Random House Kodansha (Japan) in autumn 2008. Once a full-time lecturer at the University of Sussex, then a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, Thornton has authored and edited several works about subcultures.

Academic Works

Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital is widely acknowledged as an influential work in the study of youth subcultures. Anchored in an ethnographic investigation of the authenticity and "hipness" of British rave culture and analyzing the changing cultural context of recorded music, the book both builds on and critiques earlier theories of subcultures, particularly that of Dick Hebdige. While Hebdige's analysis of British punk subculture is typical of the now-defunct Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in that it suggested that youth subcultural aesthetics rise out of calculated stylistic subversion of dominant societal norms, Thornton instead posits that youth subcultures (beginning as "taste cultures" united around shared media consumption) evolve as an alternative to the constructed dichotomous opposite: the "mainstream." She highlights the role micro- niche-, and mass- media play in the formation of subcultural ideology:

"Local micro-media like flyers and listings are means by which club organizers bring the crowd together. Niche media like the music press construct subcultures as much as they document them. National mass media, such as tabloids, develop youth movements as much as they distort them. Contrary to youth subcultural ideologies, ‘subcultures’ do not germinate from a seed and grow by force of their own energy into mysterious ‘movements’ only to be belatedly digested by the media. Rather, media and other culture industries are there and effective right from the start. They are central to process of subcultural formation" (117).

She goes on to suggest that these alternative social realities, rather than entirely re-inventing a system free from class hierarchies united under a particular style (as Hebdige proposes), "duplicate structures of exclusion and stratification found elsewhere" (115). She demonstrates this stratification by proposing the idea of "subcultural capital," drawing from the theories of French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu as outlined in his book, Distinction. In short, Thornton's work attempts to dissolve the mythic status subcultures had gained through the Marxist class-revolution analysis of the Birmingham school while examining the specifics of rave culture.

Thornton also co-edited the first edition of The Subcultures Reader with Ken Gelder.

Notes

External links

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