Karl Spracklen - The Evolution of Goth Culture: The Origins and Deeds of the New Goths

What is goth? This book is an attempt to answer that question by exploring the history of the evolution of goth culture, that is, the origins and deeds of the goths. Goth, like culture or sub-culture or alternativity, is a problematic concept, having multiple meanings and uses. We want to avoid any attempt to provide a definitive story to what goth is, or where it started, because these are stories that are strongly contested by people who identity as goths. People who write popular narratives about the origins and deeds of the goths, what goth culture is or goth style is, may have some insider understanding, or they may be outsiders reproducing stereotypes about what the Internet thinks goths do and what they look like. We want to explore the construction of the collective memory of goth. That is, we want to explore what goths think are the important moments in their evolution and important aspects of their culture, and how that is reflected in wider accounts of that history and culture. Having said all that, for those unfamiliar with the history and culture of goth, a short explanation follows. First, gothic or goth emerged as a sub-genre label for a number of bands in the post-punk movement in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the 1980s. Since, it has survived and become globalised as a cultural practice associated with being alternative and transgressive. How that happened, what the evolution entailed and how goths and non-goths make sense of the history and culture will be made clear in the rest of the book. So, read on.

This book builds on work the authors have already published on goths and other alternative sub-cultures, some it by the two of us, some of it just by Karl alone or with others (Spracklen, 2014; Spracklen, Henderson, & Procter, 2016; Spracklen, Richter, & Spracklen, 2013; Spracklen & Spracklen, 2012, 2014). All our research is ethnographic and qualitative; we use our own ethnographic experience of being alternative combined with interviews of key respondents and content analysis. We follow a discourse-tracing approach (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009), which combines grounded theory with ideas from semiotics to try to make sense of how goths and others make sense of their histories, communities and cultures. In Spracklen and Spracklen (2012), we explore the paganism and Satanism on the fringes of one part of the goth scene and make the claim that such dark leisure represents some authentic, communicative rationality in defence of the lifeworld (Habermas, 1984, 1987; Spracklen, 2009). In Spracklen and Spracklen (2014), we examine how the Whitby Goth Weekend has changed the perception of Whitby and the goth scene, and how the gothicness of people attending the festival has been questioned by other goths (a theme we return to through this book). Spracklen, Richter, and Spracklen (2013) discuss the impact of gentrification and privatisation, what we defined as eventisation, on the spaces of alternative scenes in one city, and suggests that alternative scenes were shrinking. Karl Spracklen (2014) argues that the communicative rationality of goth and black metal has vanished in online spaces, and has written extensively on extreme metals precarious status as a communicative leisure space (Spracklen, 2009, 2014, 2015a). Finally, Karl Spracklen, Henderson, and Procter (2016) explore how people remember being members of the F-Club, a crucial formative space for post-punk and goth in Leeds (again, which we will return to later in this book).

Goths have been the subject of a small body of work amongst sociologists (Hodkinson, 2002), cultural studies/gender theorists (Brill, 2008; Siegel, 2005) and popular music studies/musicology (van Elferen & Weinstock, 2016). Hodkinsons book on goths takes an ethnographic, sociological approach to understand social identity and belongingness in the scene as it was in the late 1990s, when his books research was undertaken. It is an important starting point for research on goth; but it is dated, and limited in its lack of sustained critique of the commodification at work in goth. Siegels book