sub culture research paper with field notes

After an explosive display of emotional vulnerability, you might hear a critical young person say, “Stop being emo.” The term emo is frequently thrown around as an insult or a weakness, yet it also identifies a subculture with a unique identity. The emo subculture, whose moniker is derived from “emotional hardcore,” or “emo-core,” a sub-genre of punk music that came into existence in the mid-1980s, consists of male and female youths transgressing beyond standard dress and expectations, often presenting an androgynous look as male and female “emo kids” share similar hair- and clothing styles. Though not specifically queer in gendered or sexual identification or orientation, the term “emo,” like the term “queer,” resists definition and is consistently in flux. Unique to emo, though, is the reason why it is a definition that others resist identifying with, even if they do not resist actually being members of the subculture. In a culture equally fascinated with creating and refuting labels, emo kids resist identification, while their identity consists of a clear set of contradictions.

Despite their resistance to identification as emo kids, it is fairly easy to recognize a young person—typically a teenager, although sometimes reaching beyond into early adulthood—who fits the classification of emo kid. Brian M. Peters describes emo boys as “the mods of the millennium: black hair; sweeping, dramatic bangs; heavy eyeliner [“guyliner”], and tailored clothing” (129). Twenty-one-year-old Bailey Smith, who has equal passions for anime and Eastern theology and has fluctuated between both goth and emo styles, explains emo as follows:

“Emo is kind of like gothic-light….To me, emo means not knowing how to deal with the large amount of emotions that rage through adolescent and teenage bodies so the emo-subscribing teens act as if they have no place in the world….They just don’t know where they fit in the world and don’t know how to deal with that lack of connection.”

Though often portrayed as “too cool to care,” the emo kids place importance on image. Andy Greenwald notes in his Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo that emo kids tend to be middle class and white. They are likely to have the necessary components in their lives to have ample opportunities to have money to stand in the lunch line and food on the table after school, graduate from high school, and attend college. Therefore, what does concern them are other “problems” (Greenwald 52)—problems that are emotions amplified for the typical teenager, problems that are sung about in songs with lyrics such as “We’re not twenty-one / But the sooner we are / The sooner the fun will begin” (Dashboard Confessional’s “The Swiss Army Romance”). This song, by one of emo’s notables, Chris Carraba of Dashboard Confessional, also provides insight into just who these emo kids are: kids, not even twenty-one years old in the song’s lyrics. Emo kids—both males and females—are considered emotionally sensitive and brooding, more so in particular than the average adolescent.

In this way, emo offers a space for the emotional release of androgynously-dressed, and sometimes androgynously behaving, individuals “who find [themselves] either negated or rejected” by the mainstream (Peters 139). In choosing to eschew typical standardized notions of masculinity, in particular the emo males find themselves in a safe space to dress alike and to interact with one another in ways that are not typically found within all subcultural groups of teenagers and young adults. Because they all participate in society differently than those not in the subculture, they gain social acceptance among one another, or, as Peters puts it, “the art of crafting oneself to be shunned means that the flip side is acceptance within the desired subcultural space” (139)

To the emo kid, musical taste trumps all else in discerning potential friendships and in assessing an individual’s coolness. This is perhaps troubling in a psychological sense because membership, or acceptance, often is extended to others based upon surface similarities, as well as similarities beyond the individual’s direct control, such as his or her socioeconomic classification. Musical taste does not exist in a vacuum but is instead developed and encouraged by many social and individual factors. It is, however, a primary method of including and excluding among many subcultures, with emo certainly being both excluded by others (including the emo kids themselves) who laugh at its silliness or femininity and by the emo kids who include those who wear the same band tees and attend the same concerts.

Formerly a private space not present in the mainstream, emo initially grew out of the hardcore punk music genre (abbreviated to “hardcore”) during the mid-1980s, reaching its peak in the summer of 2002. According to the 2006 documentary American Hardcore, the hardcore genre emerged out of “a bad economy, inflation, change of administration. [The election in 1980 of Ronald] Reagan was the kind of antithesis or the reaction, a whole new, like a paradigm shift. There was a lot of concern of, you know, what might that mean in terms of all kinds of issues: freedom of speech, repression, and civil liberties, and that was sort of that era.”

Although it originated in punk, “emo” or “emocore” bands opposed hardcore punk’s angry, loud, political messages, creating an apolitical, softer style of music, focusing on the emotional drama and conflicts of, generally speaking, the white, middleclass youth. Dick Hebdige explains that often, style is “a coded response to changes affecting the entire community” (80) and that punk rock style in particular was, when he wrote in the 1970s, “a form of Refusal”(2): refusal to blend in, refusal to associate with other groups, and refusal to conform to a particular hegemony. As a reaction to hardcore, emo, too, could be identified as a form of refusal but in a different direction. As hardcore ultimately grew to influence the mainstream styles that had become too soft and preppy, in their views, emo grew as a response by individuals to create a space where it was safe to be emotional, particularly for males who were not supposed to display raw, feminine reactions or to indulge in emotions.

In conclusion, though it is quite a contested space within which to place oneself, the emo subculture, consists of multiple facets. While they are certainly not the first group to do so, emo kids certainly embrace alternative expressions of dress, image, and music. What they face in doing so is the challenge of going beyond the emo kid status that is often derogatory in nature. Even though they often resist the label of emo, emo kids are easily identifiable and unmistakably “so emo.”

Works Cited

American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986. Directed by Paul Rachman, Sony Classic, 2006.

Greenwald, Andy. Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge, 1979.

Peters, Brian M. “Emo Gay Boys and Subculture: Postpunk Queer Youth and (Re)thinking Images of Masculinity.” Journal of LGBT Youth 7.2, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, pp. 129-146.

Smith, Bailey. Personal interview. 2 November 2011.

***Paper modified for education purposes from:

Schmitt, Kaci, "Exploring Dress and Behavior of the Emo Subculture." Dissertations, Theses and Capstone

Projects, Paper 465, 2011.