Goth: Undead Subculture

Since it first emerged from Britain’s punk-rock scene in the late 1970s, goth subculture has haunted postmodern culture and society, reinventing itself inside and against the mainstream. Goth: Undead Subculture is the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to this enduring yet little examined cultural phenomenon. Twenty-three essays from various disciplines explore the music, cinema, television, fashion, literature, aesthetics, and fandoms associated with the subculture. They examine goth’s many dimensions-including its melancholy, androgyny, spirituality, and perversity-and take readers inside locations in Los Angeles, Austin, Leeds, London, Buffalo, New York City, and Sydney. A number of the contributors are or have been participants in the subculture, and several draw on their own experiences.The volume’s editors provide a rich history of goth, describing its play of resistance and consumerism; its impact on class, race, and gender; and its distinctive features as an “undead” subculture in light of post-subculture studies and other critical approaches. The essays include an interview with the distinguished fashion historian Valerie Steele; analyses of novels by Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and Nick Cave; discussions of goths on the Internet; and readings of iconic goth texts from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to James O’Barr’s graphic novel The Crow. Other essays focus on gothic music, including seminal precursors such as Joy Division and David Bowie, and goth-influenced performers such as the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Gothic sexuality is explored in multiple ways, the subjects ranging from the San Francisco queercore scene of the 1980s to the increasing influence of fetishism and fetish play. Together these essays demonstrate that while its participants are often middle-class suburbanites, goth blurs normalizing boundaries even as it appears as an everlasting shadow of late capitalism. Contributors: Heather Arnet, Michael Bibby, Jessica Burstein, Angel M. Butts, Michael du Plessis, Jason Friedman, Nancy Gagnier, Ken Gelder, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Joshua Gunn, Trevor Holmes, Paul Hodkinson, David Lenson, Robert Markley, Mark Nowak, Anna Powell, Kristen Schilt, Rebecca Schraffenberger, David Shumway, Carol Siegel, Catherine Spooner, Lauren Stasiak, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction / Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby 1 I. Genders Dark Admissions: Gothic Subculture and the Ambivalence of Misogyny and Resistance / Joshua Gunn 41 Queens of the Damned: Women and Girls’ Participation in the Two Gothic Subcultures / Kristen Schilt 65 Peri Gothous: On the Art of Gothicizing Gender / Trevor M. Holmes 79 Men in Black: Androgyny and Ethics in The Crow and Fight Club / Lauren M. E. Goodlad 89 II. Performances This Modern Goth (Explains Herself) / Rebecca Schraffenberger 121 Playing Dress Up: David Bowie and the Roots of Goth / David Shumway and Heather Arnet 129 Undead Fashion: Nineties Style and the Perennial Return of Goth / Catherine Spooner 143 “Goth Damage” and Melancholia: Reflections on Posthuman Gothic Identities / Michael du Plessis 155 III. Localities “To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant”: Music and Death in Zero City, 1982–84 / Mark Nowak 171 “Ah am witness to its authenticity”: Gothic Style in Postmodern Southern Writing / Jason K. Friedman 190 The (Un)Australian Goth: Notes toward a Dislocated National Subject / Ken Gelder 217 IV. Artifacts Atrocity Exhibitions: Joy Division, Factory Records, and Goth / Michael Bibby 233 Material Distinctions: A Conversation with Valerie Steele / Jessica Burstein 257 Geek/Goth: Remediation and Nostalgia in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands / Robert Markley 277 The Authentic Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Hold on Vampiric Genres / Nancy Gagnier 293 V. Communities “When you kiss me, I want to die”: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gothic Family Values / Lauren Stasiak 307 The Cure, the Community, the Contempt! / Angel M. Butts 316 “We are all individuals, but we’ve all got the same boots on!”: Traces of Individualism within a Subcultural Community / Paul Hodkinson 322 VI. Practices That Obscure Object of Desire Revisited: Poppy Z. Brite and the Goth Hero as Masochist / Carol Siegel 335 God’s Own Medicine: Religion and Parareligion in U.K. Goth Culture / Anna Powell 357 Gothic Fetishism / Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock 375 The Aesthetic Apostasy / David Lenson 398 References 405 Contributors 425 Index 429

About the Author :
Lauren M. E. Goodlad is Associate Professor of English and a member of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Michael Bibby is Professor of English at Shippensburg University. He is the author of Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era and the editor of The Vietnam War and Postmodernity.

Review :
"Goth: Undead Subculture is a very engaging read--a nice melange of ethnographic anecdote, cultural criticism, and historical analysis--in which a multidisciplinary crew of contributors analyzes an important and complex subculture through its fashions, music, dancing, literature, sexual practices, aesthetic ideals, theatrical displays, historical precedents, and ideologies." Robert Walser, author of Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music "Goth creates its distinctive way of life by appropriating materials from a vast array of cultural phenomena--post-punk music, gothic literary tradition, pre-Christian mythology, sexual nonconformity, aesthetic avant-gardes--all of which it adopts primarily as style. Goth style is thus both dizzyingly heterogeneous and instantly recognizable. It is hard to imagine a single book that could do this subculture justice; yet by assembling contributors from a range of disciplines and judiciously including many voices of subcultural participants themselves, Goth: Undead Subculture manages to depict, while also reflecting critically on, this subculture's enduring appeal. This collection will be the definitive work on its topic." Tim Dean, author of Beyond Sexuality "... [an] intelligent collection of writings ..."--Times Literary Supplement, 13 April 2007 "Highbrow analysis of the genre that credibility forgot."--QP Magazine, May 2007