Youth subculture

Youth subcultures offer participants an identity outside of that ascribed by social institutions such as family, work, home and school.

Scenes are distinguished from the broad culture through either fashion; identification with specific (sometimes obscure or experimental) musical genres or political perspectives; and a strong in-group or tribal mentality.

Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson describe youth subcultures as symbolic or ritualistic attempts to resist the power of bourgeois hegemony by consciously adopting behavior that appears threatening to the establishment.

[8] Conversely, Marxists of the Frankfurt School of social studies argue that youth culture is inherently consumerist and integral to the divide-and-rule strategy of capitalism.

Interactionist theorist Stan Cohen argues youth subcultures are not coherent social groupings that arise spontaneously as a reaction to social forces, but that mass media labeling results in the creation of youth subcultures by imposing an ideological framework in which people can locate their behavior.

[12] Marcel Danesi argues that since then, the media, advertisers and others have made youth the dominant culture of Western societies, to the point that many people retain what others consider to be immature attitudes far into adulthood.