Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research, this paper seeks to understand the complex relationships between popular images, cultural definitions and everyday life through exploring how goths draw on, reject and fight against certain images in their practices, in how they define goth and police its boundaries.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research with goths to consider the complex and negotiated nature of meaning in contemporary life by examining how people draw from and contest the popular imagination. The paper examines how goths contextually fight and embrace popular images of goth, especially when seeking to define and defend its boundaries and relative distinctiveness. Here the popular imagination is understood to incorporate a range of 'popular' images of a particular cultural group constructed and reproduced through media and social interactions (e.g. word-of-mouth communication). The popular imagination is often central in shaping general understandings of the culture through tropes and stereotypes that have gained popularity over time through these various discourses and representations. As such, it can influence people's behaviour towards those they perceive as belonging to this culture, irrespective of the individual or group's actual affiliation.

Several strands of goth's popular image frame it and its participants in a negative way, demonising and/or trivialising it in the popular imagination. In light of this, this paper considers how goths selectively disassociate themselves from popular images that they interpret as 'harmful', seeking to protect the culture's integrity and the sense of difference that they perceive as fundamental to its existence. At the same time, the paper considers how goths selectively draw on the popular imagination to define and practice goth. The paper thus uses the negotiations of goths to gain insight into the complex ways that meaning and culture are constructed and negotiated in everyday life.