linguistic:translation
Subcultures and resistance

In the work of John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts of the Birmingham CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies), subcultures are interpreted as forms of resistance. Society is seen as being divided into two fundamental classes, the working class and the middle class, each with its own class culture, and middle-class culture being dominant. Particularly in the working class, subcultures grow out of the presence of specific interests and affiliations around which cultural models spring up, in conflict with both their parents' culture and mainstream culture. Subcultural groups emphasize voluntary, informal, and organic subordinate relationships formed in unregulated street public spaces. Facing a weakening of class identity, subcultures are then new forms of collective identification, expressing what Cohen defined "symbolic resistance" against the mainstream culture and developing imaginary solutions for structural problems.However, the Birmingham School believes that the symbolic rejection of mainstream bourgeois lifestyles by subcultures is illusory.

As Paul Willis and Dick Hebdige underline, identity and resistance in subcultures are expressed through the development of a distinctive style which, by a re-signification and " bricolage " operation, use cultural goods and services as standardized products to buy and consume, in order to communicate and express one's own conflict. Yet the culture industry is often capable of re-absorbing the components of such a style and once again transforming them into consumer goods for the mass society. At the same time the mass media, while they participate in building subcultures by broadcasting their images, also weaken subcultures by depriving them of their subversive content or by spreading a socially stigmatized image of them and their members.