| The publication of Dr. Ross Haenfler’s sociological study, Straight-Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean-Living Youth, and Social Change (Rutgers University Press, 248 pp), marks a growing trend in academic circles towards more critical analysis of late-20th century subcultures. In the late 1990s for example, the University of Calgary library had three books on punk, whereas now its holdings number over 50.
Haenfler, who is in his early 30s and grew up in the no-alcohol, no-drugs straight-edge scene, comments on the recent academic interest.
"An interesting demographic change is occurring. There has always been, in sociology and cultural studies a study of youth cultures – that’s nothing new. But as the number and variety of those subcultures have grown over the last 25 years, there are now a lot of people who have grown up in those youth cultures and are passionate about their subculture and are entering academia. One of the first things they tell you when you’re trying to write a dissertation or first article, is write what you know. So you have all these young people and it really does look like an explosion.
"A lot of it is coming from insiders. The first and second generation of cultural studies has been criticized by the new wave of academics as being so distant and so removed from the actual subjects themselves. The current wave has really tried to emphasize talking with the participants and their subjective reality, trying to record their experience and meaning, rather than putting it into some kind of grand theory. It’s more of a bottom-up approach."
Throughout Straight-Edge, Haenfler consistently avoids referring to straight-edge and punk as countercultures – a notion that carries with it specific social and political agendas. He notes that his own preference for the term "subculture" is not completely shared within the field.
"You have people talking about club cultures, neo-tribes and even post-modern cultures. It’s kind of a mess. In the book I try to explain that while I think straight-edge has recognizable boundaries, those boundaries are still kind of fluid – they tend to overlap with different groups we call subcultures. Some scholars even question the notion of subcultures – that’s something that scholars are really going to have to deal with, especially with the advent of the Internet. Can we really talk about Goths or straight-edge as meaningfully distinct cultures anymore?"
Aging within a subculture is another aspect of identity blurring that Haenfler is keen to explore.
"There has been some work on punk, and my own work, trying to figure out what happens as people grow older in a subculture. Right now, the general consensus is that while some people drop out completely and move on to other things, others take pieces of their subcultural belief and try to customize it to their current identity as parents or workers. There’s growing work in this area, but a lot of room for more. The old joke used to be that all the old hippies grew up and became corporate executives, but a lot of hippies grew up to be teachers or social workers or carried on activism and counterculture lifestyles."
Haenfler admits that straight-edge is tough to talk about because it blurs progressive and conservative values.
"In a sense it’s countercultural and political in some very important ways, but in many ways they’re advocating the same middle-class values parents would wish for their children, except in terms of spiky hair or stretched ears. It comes back to the language that we use and how we define our concepts. Any subculture is going to stress and maintain certain aspects of the dominant culture it tries to rebel against.
"I think it’s real easy for scholars or the media to present these things as monolithic blocks of culture," Haenfler cautions. "People are searching for an identity and might feel an affinity for an established subculture. But once they get comfortable with it, on top of it they add their own. Once they get into and learn about the history of it, they explore it and begin to wonder ‘what can I really do with this identity?’"
The trend among contemporary youth to "try on" or "customize" subcultures is leading to increased splintering among social groups, providing scholars like Haenfler a fertile ground for further research. |
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