The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture examines the gothic mode deployed in a variety of texts that touch upon inherently US American themes, demonstrating its versatility and ...ubiquity across genres and popular media.
In this book, Spracklen and Spracklen use the idea of collective memory to explore the controversies and boundary-making surrounding the genesis and progression of the modern gothic alternative ...culture. They suggest that the only way for goth culture to survive is if it becomes transgressive and radical again.
Despite increased media exposure, bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism (BDSM) is a stigmatised subculture and this stigmatisation can have serious social and legal ...implications for practitioners even when the participation is consensual. Psycho-medical narratives have constructed practitioners of BDSM as perverse and pathological, and in opposition to heteronormative sexual expression. To reduce stigma, it appears that a process of normalisation is occurring with the aim of increasing broader acceptance and therefore reducing the transgressive nature of BDSM. This, however, is not unproblematic and may privilege certain types of BDSM while further marginalising others. Nine practitioners of consensual BDSM participated in in-depth, face to face interviews in the UK. Interviews were conducted within an interpretive phenomenological framework that focused on the lived experience of participating in consensual BDSM. The findings presented in this article relate specifically to lived experiences of transgression as a key element of BDSM and will be discussed with reference to the ways transgression can challenge narratives of acceptance via normalisation.
Recent debate on the conceptualisation of youth cultures has been characterised as an irreconcilable stalemate between materialist defenders of a version of subcultural theory derived from the Centre ...for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and post-subcultural theorists who favour more individualised understandings. This article suggests that, beneath this facade lies a more complex and reconcilable debate and that it may be time to move beyond the polarising presence of the CCCS as primary reference point for the discussion. Turning to substance, I go on to examine how enduring areas of disagreement within the debate can be resolved, establishing ways forward with respect to the interplay between spectacular groupings and individual pathways and the contextualisation of youth cultures, including with respect to material and structural factors. I advocate greater emphasis on the study of collective youth cultures as part of broader biographies as a way forward that can draw together these substantive strands and bring together insight from across the subcultures/post-subcultures debate.
As recently as the 1970s, gay and lesbian history was a relatively unexplored field for serious scholars. The past quarter century, however, has seen enormous growth in gay and lesbian studies. The ...literature is now voluminous; it is also widely scattered and not always easily accessible. In Toward Stonewall, Nicholas Edsall provides a much-needed synthesis, drawing upon both scholarly and popular writings to chart the development of homosexual subcultures in the modern era and the uneasy place they have occupied in Western society.
Edsall's survey begins three hundred years ago in northwestern Europe, when homosexual subcultures recognizably similar to those of our own era began to emerge, and it follows their surprisingly diverse paths through the Enlightenment to the early nineteenth century. The book then turns to the Victorian era, tracing the development of articulate and self-aware homosexual subcultures. With a greater sense of identity and organization came new forms of resistance: this was the age that saw the persecution of Oscar Wilde, among others, as well as the medical establishment's labeling of homosexuality as a sign of degeneracy.
The book's final section locates the foundations of present-day gay sub-cultures in a succession of twentieth-century scenes and events-in pre-Nazi Germany, in the lesbian world of interwar Paris, in the law reforms of 1960s England-culminating in the emergence of popular movements in the postwar United States.
Rather than examining these groups in isolation, the book considers them in their social contexts and as comparable to other subordinate groups and minority movements. In the process, Toward Stonewall illuminates not only the subcultures that are its primary subject but the larger societies from which they emerged.
The production of micropropagated plants in plant-tissue-culture laboratories and nurseries is the most important method for propagation of many economic plants. Micropropagation based on ...tissue-culture technology involves large-scale propagation, as it allows multiplication of a huge number of true-to-type propagules in a very short time and in a very limited space, as well as all year round, regardless of the climate. However, applying plant-tissue-culture techniques for the commercial propagation of plants may face a lot of obstacles or troubles that could result from technical, biological, physiological, and/or genetical reasons, or due to overproduction or the lack of facilities and professional technicians, as shown in the current study. Moreover, several disorders and abnormalities are discussed in the present review. This study aims to show the most serious problems and obstacles of plant micropropagation, and their solutions from both scientific and technical sides. This review, as a first report, includes different challenges in plant micropropagation (i.e., contamination, delay of subculture, burned plantlets, browning, in vitro rooting difficulty, somaclonal variations, hyperhydricity, shoot tip necrosis, albino plantlets, recalcitrance, shoot abnormalities, in vitro habituation) in one paper. Most of these problems are related to scientific and/or technical reasons, and they could be avoided by following the micropropagation protocol suitable for each plant species. The others are dominant in plant-tissue-culture laboratories, in which facilities are often incomplete, or due to poor infrastructure and scarce funds.
Introduction: Dermatophytosis is frequently associated with relapses following the interruption of antifungal therapy. The incidence of fungal infections, including resistant infections, has ...increased during the last few years, may be due to inadequate use of drugs or increased incidence of immunodeficiency states. Aim: To compare disk diffusion and broth microdilution methods and to determine in vitro activity of antifungal agents which are most commonly used to treat the dermatophytic infection. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study which was conducted from November 2016 to April 2018 on 50 dermatophytic strains isolated from skin, hair and nail specimen collected from Dermatology Outpatient Department (OPD) of Shri Ram Murti Smarak Institute of Medical Sciences, Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, India. All samples were cultured on Sabouraud Dextrose Agar (SDA) and Sabouraud’s Cycloheximide, Chloramphenicol Agar (SCCA) medium and incubated at 25°C upto 21 days. Then antifungal susceptibility was done using disk diffusion and broth microdilution method. Result was analysed Statistical software namely Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 20.0 and graph pad were used to analyse the data. Results: Data analysis of drug susceptibility tests involved a standard 2×2 contingency table. The isolates belong to two genera and five species namely Trichophyton menatagrophytes (44%), Trichophyton rubrum (32%), Trichophyton violaceum (18%), Trichophyton verrucosum (4%) and Epidermophyton floccosum (2%). The kappa value for fluconazole, itraconazole, terbinafine and griseofulvin were 0.419, 0.464, 0.444 and 0.451 respectively for disk diffusion and broth microdilution methods. Conclusion: A good agreement was observed between disk diffusion and broth microdilution method.
This paper first investigates why the main strands in conventional subcultural and post-subcultural research have neglected the collective and material aspects of subcultural practice. It then ...investigates more recent attempts to include collectivity and materiality in the analysis and seeks to further develop such perspectives. In this way the paper seeks to demonstrate the need for a new embedded perspective on the material and collective dimensions of subcultural practice. In the first part of the paper, I embark on a critical reading of the traditional 'schools' of subcultural and post-subcultural theory. I seek to show that they all suffer from a blind spot in regard to collective and material embeddedness. In the second part, I analyse a number of 'thick' empirical accounts of subcultural collectivity, creativity and interchange with material and musical objects. I attempt to develop these descriptions further and seek to show how they may benefit from having more attention paid to collective and material embeddedness, as well as to the interchange between these two dimensions in subcultural practice. I hope to thus demonstrate how the embedded perspective may contribute to analyses of subcultural creativity and lived subcultural experience.
Bass booms from custom speakers, pick-up trucks boast lowered suspensions, chrome rims reflect stoplights, and bare arms dangle from open windows. Welcome to Santa Clara Street in San Jose, ...California, where every weekend kids come to cruise late at night, riding their cars slow and low. On the surrounding, less-traveled streets you can also find young men racing customized cars to see who has the go, not just the show. And, in the daylight hours, in a nearby suburb, you might find a brand new SUV parked in the driveway, a parents' Sweet 16 present.
In Fast Cars, Cool Rides Amy Best provides a fascinating account of kids and car culture. Encompassing everything from learning to drive to getting one’s license, from cruising to customizing, from racing to buying one's first car, Best shows that never before have cars played such an important role in the lives of America's youth as they do today. Drawing on interviews with over 100 young men and women, aged 15-24, and five years of research—cruising hot spots, sitting in on auto shop class, attending car shows—Best explores the fast-paced world of kids and their cars. She reveals a world where cars have incredible significance for kids today, as a means of transportation and thereby freedom to come and go, as status symbols and as a means to express their identities. But while having a fast car or a cool ride can carry tremendous importance for these kids, Best shows that the price, especially when it can cost $30,000, can be steep as working-class kids work jobs to make car payments and as college kids forgo moving out of Mom and Dad's house because they can't pay for rent, car payments, and car insurance.
Fast Cars, Cool Rides offers a rare and rich portrait of the complex and surprising roles cars can play in the lives of young Americans. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a cool ride.
This qualitative, multiple case study explored the role of involvement in a particular university subculture, Latina/o sororities and fraternities, in how Latina/o college students develop and make ...meaning of their sense of belonging within predominantly White institutions. Findings address ways Latina/o college students described their institutional sense of belonging in addition to a discussion of five primary characteristics of belonging: where I have a role or responsibility, where people look like me, where I am valued and cared for, where my racial identity and culture is recognized and valued, and where I share interests or values with others. The results underscore the significance of the role of belonging in campus subcultures for Latina/o college students. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
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