My reading today 今日讀書進度

-Several important indicators are raised by style. It expresses a degree of commitment to the subculture, and it indicates membership of a specific subculture which by its very appearance disregards or attacks dominant values. Style I shall define as consisting of three main elements:
a　'Image', appearance composed of costume, accessories such as hair-style, jewellery and artefacts.
b　'Demeanour', made up of expression, gait and posture. Roughly this is what the actors wear and how they wear it.
c　'Argot', a special vocabulary and how it is delivered.

-We may use clothing to challenge dominant norms, but we also make statements about our environment.
-Style also indicates a life style, and as such has an appeal to subterranean values which combine to make a visual challenge at both a structural and an existential level.

-Style as a subcultural level acts as a form of argot, drawing upon costume and artefacts from a mainstream fashion context and translating these into its own rhetoric.

-A new style is created by appropriating objects from an existing market of artefacts and using them in a form of collage, which recreates group identity, and promotes mutual recognition for members.

-It has been suggested that subcultures offer, on the one hand, solutions of a 'magical' (that is they appear to be solutions rather than are rather than of a real nature to inherent contradictions in the socio-economic system experienced at some level by the actor... on the other hand, the style of the subculture allows an expression of identity through a deliberate projection of a self-image, which claims an identity 'magically' freed from class and occupation.

-Actors, then, attracted by subcultural reference groups, select those within the parameters set by the social structure which contain an attractive self-image, and an apparent solution to structural problems. In this way actors enter into subcultural interpretations of the dominant hegemony, which presents them with a different perspective of social reality, or sometimes a different social reality. As such they are important agents of secondary socialisation. They introduce the values of the world outside work and school.

-For the young, however (and of course not all the young are involved in subcultures), subcultures assist them in dealing with both structural and individual problems. Some of them, especially in working-class youth subcultures, are transient solutions to specific problems. Others are of a more enduring nature leading to social change. Subcultures address themselves to structural problems, and implicitly contain a critique of society, admittedly often inarticulate and tangential.

．Brake, M. (1990) Comparative youth culture: the sociology of youth cultures and youth subcultures in America, Britain
and Canada. London: Routledge.