Instructions:
Compare and contrast two subcultures, focusing on race, gender, or class.
Steps for Writing a Comparative Analysis
- Choose Two Subcultures
- Pick two essays/chapters that interest you or share a connection (e.g., punk vs. gamer, religious youth vs. drag performers).
- Read Actively
- Annotate both texts. Mark language that describes values, identity, community, struggle, or resistance.
- Organize Your Comparison
- Block Structure: Discuss all of subculture A, then all of subculture B.
- Point-by-Point: Compare both subcultures across 24 key themes (e.g., resistance to norms, community building, identity expression).
- Develop a Thesis
- Your thesis should not just say “they’re similar and different”it should make a specific claim about what the comparison reveals about culture, identity, or society.
- Example Thesis:
- While both punk and drag cultures challenge mainstream norms, punk emphasizes individual rebellion through music and aesthetics, whereas drag culture relies on community performance to redefine gender identity.
- Support Your Points with Evidence
- Quote from both essays.
- Use paraphrasing when appropriate.
- Cite all sources using MLA format.
Length: 9001,100 words
Subculture 1 Text:
The State of Black Subcultures in 21st Century America
Brittany Julious
In this short selection from 2014, Brittany Julious touches on important issues of racial performance and identity as she traces the brief life of GHE20 GOTH1K (ghetto gothic), a monthly party founded in 2009 by DJ Venus X. Julious is a journalist, essayist, and oral storyteller. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian, Vice, and many other periodicals. She also writes the local music column for the Chicago Tribune and hosts The Back Talk, an award-winning podcast featuring stories from women of color.
Earlier this year, DJ and party organizer Venus X announced she was ending her long-running club night, GHE20 GOTH1K, partly because mainstream public figures like Rihanna had manipulated and discredited her creation. This wasnt the first time someone accused Rihanna of stealing a subculture. Two years earlier, she appropriated the seapunk microculture, but her dedication to seapunk, which really only included an aqua-celestial backdrop during a performance of Diamonds on Saturday Night Live, was as short-lived as the aesthetic movements lifespan. GHE20 GOTH1K proved to be a completely different and long lasting subcultural source for the singer. Once Rihanna embraced the subculture, she kept embracing it.
Long before Rihanna began adopting the GHE20 GOTH1K aesthetic in her numerous, and fabulous, Instagram photos, GHE20 GOTH1K existed as a life force in New York City nightlife. Most importantly, it was a sustainable and physical life existing in an actual nightclub. Hundreds, if not thousands, of young people especially young people of color embraced the club nights aesthetic.
In an interview with The Fader,Venus X described GHE20 GOTH1K as encompassing art, fashion, music, and nightlife. Aesthetically, she noted, Its a combination of what people consider to be very white and very black. There are staples: North Face jackets, Timberlands. And then staples of the traditional punk and goth. It was a mix or rather, a birthing of something born out of her two distinct interests: the ghetto of where she grew up and the aesthetics of goth. GHE20 GOTH1K is extremely political. Its not about expensive clothes, she told The Fader in the same interview. GHE20 GOTH1K was one of the first places that successfully created nightlife around music that was just on the internet, like alternative rap music from gay people and a lot of different club and bass music that didnt have a home in mainstream, house, or disco.
DJ Venus X photographed during a performance in New York City.
The subculture was more than something of their own, something that helped define their multifaceted interests and identity as young people of color it was a response to mainstream cultures ideas. Like GHE20 GOTH1K, hood futurism, another subculture, was also a response to the images and sounds of the mainstream. Hip-hop and R&B musicians developed hood futurism in the 90s. In a Tumblr post by the creator of a hoodfuturism.tumblr.com, a popular blog documenting the style, the author writes that Afro Futurism inspired hood futurism, which is centered around contemporary black artistry combined with themes like sci-fi, science, and other components that have futuristic elements. Think spaceship-like rooms with sleek lines and coppery bodysuits that feel at home in our predictions of the future. The most definitive image of this is Michael and Janet Jacksons Scream video, which literally takes place on a hospitable, livable space ship.
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Although hood futurism is more driven by aesthetics, its sound a clinking, clattery array of sounds and samples that shouldnt make sense, sounds that seem as contemporary now as they did ten years ago can be traced back to its biggest purveyors: Missy Elliott, Aaliyah, and Timbaland. The aesthetic felt like the first visual response to hip-hops mainstream imagery and aesthetics. If hip-hop was the mainstream and the storytelling of right now in the 90s, hood futurism was the musical landscape of a future that was cheesy as it sounds out of this world. Today, both small rappers (Azealia Banks) and large artists (Nicki Minaj) embrace hood futurism, proving the subcultures relevancy as a viable alternative to the mainstream.
Hood futurism and ghetto goths names connect them to black culture.
Linguistically, these terms are most frequently shared through the prism of rap and hip-hop, if we can embrace the terms hoodand ghetto as terms of places and not just as derogatory terms employed in times of insults.
In a series of essays for Vultureabout the current state of hip-hop, The Roots Questlove broke down the mainstreaming and dominance of hip-hop culture: Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once its everywhere, it is nowhere, he writes. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant.
Stealing from and commodifying these subcultural movements feel especially wrong. If these are movements By Outsiders and For Outsiders (or by The Other and for the Other), taking them from people of color is cruel. In some ways, despite an artists race, mainstream success begins to deteriorate a performers racial identity. A celebrity can transcend the limitations and community inherent in racial and cultural identity. For many people, to live within the experience of race or a minority status is to actively and automatically embrace people who are like us. To appropriate without citing a source is a slap in the face to traditional solidarity. A black or brown celebrity becomes nothing more than another cog in the machine of capitalism, another person buying and selling back to us the things we created in the first place.
To appropriate without citing a source is a slap in the face to traditional solidarity.
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In her book Implications and Distinctions: Format, Content and Context in Contemporary Race Film,conceptual entrepreneur Martine Syms writes about the visuals and visibility of blacks in images. In the last chapter, Syms asks, Why not subvert the charge of being Black into an identity that we own and explore the possibilities of such a platform? And soon after she writes, For these possibilities to exist, the Black viewer/spectator must sit comfortably with the tension of bad portrayals, unrealistic experiences, and/or a non-diasporic stylistic approach. Black audiences are also complicit in constructing race . . . because the viewer/spectator is instructed to read the images and situate them in reality.
Although Syms speaks about blacks in films, this theory translates to many aspects of black culture in particular, black identity. Creators and members of subcultures have wrestled with the experiences of the limiting mainstream and have created something that speaks to their individual interests and needs. Syms explains how she too has embarked on this cultural journey on an individual basis: As a child nerd, a teenage punk, an art student, and beyond, Ive always had eclectic interests. Somehow my parents created the perfect symbiosis between forcing me to be a token introducing me to disparate sounds, styles, and conventions and rooting me in Blackness, she says. I learned who we are, what we eat, how we talk, but I was encouraged to renegotiate that construction to better fit me.
The ubiquitousness of hood futurism as a viable alternative to the mainstream, and the end of GHE20 GOTH1K, reminds me of other subculture movements. On my Tumblr dashboard, Im often treated to a number of surprising yet enjoyable images and ideas: black people shrouded in flowers on Black with Flowers, young black women riding bicycles on Bicycles and Melanin, and the sort of raw vulnerability and pursuit of connections otherwise known as Black Girl Feels. All offer alternatives to many ideas of blackness and black culture; they are at once feminine and joyful. Although they dont specifically talk about responding to the stereotypes and limitations of hip-hop culture, I see them as pursuits of alternatives and multiples. Maybe all of these can exist together. As one subculture ends, people give birth to other ideas and images waiting for new voices to embrace them and a celebrity to copy their look at an award show.
- seapunk: aquatic-themed subculture that originated on social media site Tumblr in 2011.
- Questlove: professional name of Ahmir Khalib Thompson (b. 1971), percussionist for Philadelphia-based hip hop ensemble The Roots (formed 1987).
- Tumblr dashboard: a blogging site especially popular in the early 2010s, Tumblr refers to its users homepages as dashboards.
Subculture 2 Text:
Black Nerds Are Necessary to Fandom Culture
Avery Alexander
Avery Alexander writes about popular culture for The Ithacan, a publication of the students of Ithaca College. About herself, she says, When Im not putting books back in their correct places or studying for my classes, Im playing tabletop roleplaying games with my friends, reading a riveting novel, trying a new baking recipe, or writing creative short stories, all of which position her as an authority on the character of the Black Nerd or blerd. In this article from 2020, written while she was a student, Alexander comments on the problematic position Black nerd culture.
I am an anime-watching, comic bookreading cosplayer. I identify not as a nerd but as a blerd. My dad, the person who introduced me to most of my nerdy interests, also wears his blerd badge with pride. The term blerd stands for Black nerd, but many people of color from different backgrounds have found acceptance in the identity. While I would love to dive into what this label means for all people of color, I am limited by my experiences as a Black woman. As such, I will stick to exploring the ins and outs of African American nerd culture.
Before the popularization of the blerd identity in the early 2000s, Black nerds, especially Black men who were nerds, would hide their love for pop culture for fear of being judged. These people existed outside the all-too-common cool Black guy stereotype, and their nerdiness would often be perceived by other Black people as them pretending to be white or assimilating into white culture.
The term blerd was introduced into the mainstream in 2006 when Dr. Chris Turk (Donald Faison) from the medical comedy-drama series Scrubs proudly announced his status as a blerd in season 6, episode 2. Since then, cultural recognition for blerds has grown exponentially.
Many of you reading might be wondering why is there a separation between nerds of color and white nerds? One major reason is the ever-present gatekeeping in the nerd community. The typical depiction of nerds in the media is the anti-social white male archetype. These characters are in franchises like The Big Bang Theory and Ghostbusters. While these media are popular among nerds of all colors, they reinforce a narrow image of what nerd culture is. Certain white people in the nerd community may have seen themselves in these nerdy white male characters and latched onto them. Now that nerd culture is evolving to be more inclusive and accessible, many of these nerds have defended their interests from the unwelcome shift.
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This gatekeeping often comes with discriminatory undertones, including racism. In the cosplay community, in particular, people will often criticize cosplayers of color primarily brown-skinned ones telling them they are too dark for a character. I myself have received quite a few comments on my cosplays that smartly point out, That character isnt Black, or Youre too dark to cosplay her. Im the lightest Black cosplayer I know. My dark-skinned sisters and brothers have it even worse than me.
This gatekeeping leads nerds of color to try to form our own community, a place where we wont be discriminated against for our interests and where we combine our love for anime and fandom with our culture.
Although the mainstream understanding of blerd is fairly new, Black people being nerdy is old news. Specifically, the hip-hop industry has influenced the popularization of anime in America for decades. Older rappers like Kanye West and RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan have been vocal about animes influence in their work. RZA actually composed for the 2009 anime Afro Samurai: Resurrection.
Gatekeeping leads nerds of color to try to form our own community, a place where we wont be discriminated against for our interests and where we combine our love for anime and fandom with our culture.
This tradition of anime in hiphop has continued into today with newer rappers like Denzel Curry and Robb Banks. Curry said in an interview that he connects to anime because of the underdog narrative. In anime, the main character is often an outcast from the rest of the world, and they must fight to find their place among their peers. Anime like My Hero Academia and Naruto lean heavily into these themes and are incredibly popular among my blerd friends.
In the video, Curry tells his fans to evolve as much as possible . . . because thats what all my heroes did. Banks has expressed his passion for anime in multiple interviews, including one interview with HotNewHipHop, in which he ranks anime-themed rap lyrics. Throughout the video, Banks flexes his knowledge of anime and criticizes other rappers lackluster references to it.
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Black actors like Michael B. Jordan have also expressed love of the medium. Jordan went as far as creating a limited-time, anime-inspired clothing line with Coach. In a way, Black people have directly boosted the popularity of anime in this country.
In 2017, Hilton George decided to provide the throngs of blerds a place where they could fully invest in their nerdiness. This, along with his personal experiences as a blerd, led him to create Blerdcon, a three-day-long convention with a mission statement to promote intersectionality and acceptance in the nerd community. Georges idea has created a vibrant community that welcomes all, and the convention continues to grow.
The convention was postponed to 2021 because of COVID-19, but organizers anticipated the convention would attract somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 guests a massive increase from the 1,400 guests in 2017.
With the help of nerdy Black celebrities and inclusive spaces like Blerdcon, blerds are slowly working their way into the mainstream consciousness. This broadening of the nerd identity to include everyone shows no sign of stopping any time soon.
- Scrubs: ABC television show, 20012010.
- The Big Bang Theory: CBS television show, 20072019.
- Ghostbusters: movie franchise based on the original 1984 film.