Goth's Dark Empire

Introduction

In In In In Introduct troduct troduct troduct troductiiiiion on on on on I. Death, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Invisible, Or Why Take Goth Seriously? I begin this extended look at the subculture called Goth with an allusion to Linda Williams’s landmark feminist study of pornographic films, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” because, just as Williams did when she addressed that topic fifteen years ago, I am entering an area of inquiry that has attracted an enormous amount of attention in popular media but relatively little serious scholarly study. Moreover, like Williams, I must confront the dominant view among American academics that this subject is at best embarrassingly silly and at worst another dismal sign of the degeneracy of our times. And just as Williams set out to examine the Foucauldian “knowledge-pleasure” produced as “the frenzy of the visible” through the convergence of “a variety of discourses of sexuality” within pornography (36), I set out to examine the Deleuzoguattarian becomings1 that are produced through the discourses of sexuality that converge within Goth. The greatest difference between the objects of my study and those of Williams’s is that in this case they are, in effect, invisible. It may seem odd to refer to Goths as effectively invisible, because immediately after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado , the press erroneously, but very insistently, attributed the tragedy to the Goth subculture. As a result of the moral panic that followed, anyone with the slightest interest in youth cultures, rock and roll cultures, or popular media has probably heard of Goths by now. But until very recently Goth was nearly invisible within the academic world in the sense that, despite the presence of Goths in most of our classes, few academics had much to say about them. Although Goth emerged as a named subculture at the end of the 1970s, cultural studies scholars did not turn their attention to it for another twenty years, and still there is only one book-length study of Goth in this field. Where one might most expect Goths to be discussed, in overviews of Gothic traditions in literature and art, they have rarely been mentioned.2 2 G G G G Go o o o ot t t t th’s h’s h’s h’s h’s D D D D Dark Empire ark Empire ark Empire ark Empire ark Empire Despite the omnipresence of Goths in America throughout the 1990s, almost all the serious attention they have received has been from British scholars concentrating on Goth in Britain, which, like other permutations and offshoots of British Punk, can differ markedly from the American subculture that shares the name. The only explanation I have been able to find for American academics’ lack of interest in Goth is that they have, for the most part, seen the subculture’s radical engagements with gender and sexuality as an ephemeral trend, a superficial experimentation with images rather than substance typical of the sort of expression of youthful rebellion deemed nearly meaningless by scholars because it is structured almost entirely by niche marketing to bored young consumers, who move on to the next trend advertised on MTV so quickly that to study any of these trends individually would seem foolish. I disagree with this assessment of Goth because I agree with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari that physical pleasures—particularly the consensual sadomasochism (S/M) I find intrinsic to most Goth subcultures—can function as radical technologies of resistance to the oppressive regimes of sexual normalcy upon which the maintenance of consumer capitalism depends, a topic I will take up in the first chapter. This study will focus throughout on how an array of styles, practices, and aesthetics described as Goth by substantial numbers of people who also identify themselves as Goths make possible ways of thinking that depart from mainstream American values, as constructed by corporate advertising and the rhetoric of political conservatism. This construction predictably centers on acquiring corporately produced or marketed consumer goods, especially cars and houses, as well as clothing and cosmetics intended to create a specific appearance associated by advertisers with health, youth, and success. What passes for success here depends upon disciplining desire in the Foucauldian sense, or territorializing it, as Deleuze would have it, so that it serves the goals of consumer capitalism in corporate America. As I intend to show, when popular interpretations...