The Idea of Resistance and Political Protest:
Political protest:
○ Attempts to change to laws or legislation
○ Organised political movements
○ Public protests
○ Petitions, marches
Political protest can be seen in terms of:
○ Cultural resistance
○ Everyday people
Why look at cultural resistance?
○ Overt political protest is uncommon. When it occurs, it often results in a backlash.
○ Even if overt political protest does results in changes in legislation, it won’t necessarily change public
opinion.
○ Culture is what influences people’s hearts, minds and opinions. This is the site of popular change.
Key idea: the political, personal and cultural are always intertwined
Cultural Hegemony:
Antonio Gramsci: Italian philosopher writing in the 1930s
Key Terms:
● Hegemonic: dominant, ruling-class, power-holders
● Hegemonic culture: the dominant culture
● Cultural hegemony: power, rule, or domination maintained by ideological and cultural means.
● Ideology: worldview – beliefs, assumptions and values
Cultural hegemony functions by framing the ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate
ideology.
The ideologies of the dominant group are expressed and maintained through its economic, political, moral,
and social institutions (like the education system and the media).
These institutions socialise people into accepting the norms, values and beliefs of the dominant social
group.
As a result, oppressed groups believe that the social and economic conditions of society are natural and
inevitable, rather than created by the dominant group.
Subcultural Theory:
Subculture:
● Working-class youth culture
● Unified by shared tastes in style, music and ideology
● A solution to collectively experienced problems
● A form of resistance to cultural hegemony
The Birmingham School (1970s)
● They argued argued that the formation of subcultures offered young working class people a solution to the problems they were collectively experiencing in society.
● Looked at working class cultures like the teddy-boys, mods, skinheads, and punks – subcultures unified by shared tastes in fashion, music and ideology.
Teddy Boys: 1950/60s
● Responding to: post-war social changes
● Music: influenced by American rock n roll
● Style: upper-class Edwardian fashion
(narrow trousers, lapelled jackets), fused
with an element of rebelliousness in the form
of exaggerated hairstyles and shoes (quiffs
and creepers)
Skinheads: 1960s
● Responding to: social alienation.
● Rejected: late 50s conservatism,
as well as the ‘peace and love’
middle class hippy movement of
60s
● Expression of: working class
pride
● Music: West Indian music (ska,
rocksteady, reggae)
● Style: shaven heads, Dr Marten
boots, braces, shirts, and cropped
trousers
● Politics: Original skinheads were
anti-racist, however the movement
quickly polarised
Punk: 1970s
● A Reaction to:
● 1) Capitalist middle class culture
that has achieved dominance and
legitimacy (hegemony)
● 2) Their alienation from the adult
working class culture of their
parents and grandparents
● 3) The social, political and
economic crisis of the mid1970s,
resulting in high youth
unemployment
● Values: anti-establishment,
emphasis on individual freedom,
on doing it yourself.
● Fashion: emphasised ugliness,
shock value, irony. Used items like
safety pins, ripped shirts, chains.
● Music: often self-produced and
independently distributed, the
music is loud and aggressive, with
lyrics expressing antiestablishment views and working
class concerns.
Positives of The Birmingham School’s subcultural theory:
● Validated the study of popular culture – previously considered superficial
Criticism The Birmingham School’s subcultural theory:
● Focused on white working class masculinity
● Ignored ethnic minority, female and queer youth cultures
Gilroy
Gilroy highlighted how black youth cultures represented
cultural solutions to collectively experienced problems
of racism and poverty
Racial otherness: ‘Ain’t no black in union jack’- His book
Civilisation: For Gilroy, the 9/11 World trade Centre terrorist attack in 2001, and it’s aftermath, radically altered both the tone and nature of the media-orientated representations regarding race and racial difference.
Legacy of the Empire: Gilroy suggests that we live in a ‘morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige’ (Gilroy, 2004) He argued that the British are undergoing a crisis of national identity: the loss of the British Empire has forced a collective question regarding British identification.
Race Relations
1970s and 1980s:
Racism from the State: The Police
● Frequent clashes between the police and black youth
● Widespread fears over law and order, black street
crime and the figure of ‘the mugger’
● SUS laws
● New Cross Fire (1981)
Racism from Far-Right Groups: The NF (national front)
● The National Front was a far-right group
● Advocated the an end to immigration and the
repatriation of non-white Britons.
● Blamed immigration for the decline in employment,
housing and welfare.
● In the 1970s, the NF gained the support of
disillusioned white youth
● Racial attacks, violence and intimidation
Margaret Thatcher:
● Prime Minister 1979-1990
● Militant campaigner for middle-class interests
● In an 1978 interview: ‘British national identity
could be swamped by people with different
culture’
● Hard line attitude towards immigration
● Conservative Manifesto: ‘firm immigration control
for the future is essential if we are to achieve
good community relations’
● British Nationality Act of 1981: introduced a
series of increasingly tough immigration
procedures and excluded Asian people from
entering Britain.
● Scapegoating
Rock against Sexism
Rock Against Sexism was British anti-sexist campaign that
used punk as a vehicle to challenge sexism, promoting
female musicians while challenging discrimination in the
music industry between 1979 and 1982.
Why was RAS needed?
– 1970s saw a plethora of sexist song lyrics,
record covers and band advertisements, many
depicting violence towards women.
– The terms ‘feminism’ and ‘sexism’ were not
in common currency during this time, and there
was widespread scepticism among young people
with regards to organised feminism.
BBC News
The Specials: How Ghost Town defined an era
Jon Kelly
Specials gigs began to attract the hostile presence of groups like the National Front and the British Movement. When vocalist Neville Staple sighed wearily on Ghost Town that there was “too much fighting on the dance floor”, he sang from personal experience.
“But you don’t listen to Ghost Town and think it’s weird. I was 11 when it was released and I don’t remember going, ‘What’s this?’ At the time there were a lot of political songs in the charts. But if a record like that got to number one today you’d go, ‘Wow, that’s bizarre.'”
“It sums up how it felt to be young at the time,” he says. “But at the same time it’s timelessly resonant. “There are a handful of tunes that do that and Ghost Town is one of them.”
The conversation (news)
‘Ghost Town’: a haunting 1981 protest song that still makes sense today
Abigail Gardner
It’s an odd, eerie song, nodding to pop convention and sitting wilfully outside of it. It’s included, in passing, in Dorian Lynskey’s beautifully written book on protest songs, “33 Revolutions Per Minute”, but unlike the band’s “Free Nelson Mandela” does not merit its own chapter.
Claude Levi-Strauss (Binary Oppositions)
This theory suggests that NARRATIVES (=myths) are STRUCTURED around BINARY OPPOSITIONS eg. good and bad.
As such, it encourages students to understand narrative as a structure of key (oppositional) themes that underpin action and dialogue to develop a set of messages that the audience are able to decode and understand.
It creates a dominant message (ideology) of a film, TV programme, advert, music video, animation etc. So in this way audiences are encouraged to make a judgements about characters, groups, places, history, society etc.
Texts can be seen to either support the dominant ideologies of a society, which would make it a reactionary text ,or to challenge, question or undermines the dominant ideologies of society, in which case it could be seen as a radical text.
