Abstract
Subcultures and social movements are both empirically and analytically quite different creatures. In one formulation, youth subcultures are seen as groups subordinate to the dominant middle‐class culture because they derive from a working‐class “parent” culture, although they “exhibit a distinctive enough shape and structure to make them identifiably different from their ‘parent’ culture” (Hall & Jefferson 2006: 7). Thus, subcultures might be characterized as “interests that operate within the confines of the existing social order,” while social movements are conceived as “forms of solidarist action which force the conflict to the point of breaking through the system's compatibility limits” (Melucci 1996: 28). It is largely for these definitional reasons that the study of subcultures and social movements studies have remained relatively separate and distinct. Fusing the fields, however, reveals two areas of commonality: (1) similar ideas and debates about how to conceptualize subcultures and social movements; and (2) shared concerns over the effectiveness of cultural politics (Martin 2002).