Thursday, September 18, 2008

Goth!

Cintra Wilson on misspending one's youth in a vampire costume.

3 comments:

  1. I read this with gleeful rapture today, as I read most of her Thursday Style pieces. But today she was in especially rare form. "Mr. Nocturne!" "rebaiting the trap!" As Joe Biden would say, "oh lordy day!"

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  2. I was sort of struck by how oddly racialized Goth is. I hadn't really thought about it until so much of the "look" is having that ghostly whiteness. And that term whiteface. I know it's literal, but I guess blackface is literal, too. That one young woman said "It doesn't matter if you're black, white, fat, thin..." But of course that's not true, right?

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  3. I went to high school in the Southwest, where there were plenty of Latino goths, but I can see the point about the racialization of the look. There was a great article in Spin several years ago about the sub-culture of Latino kids in late '90s Southern California who idolized Morrissey. They seemed to take something different from Morrissey that hadn't shown up the first time around in the '80s with the Smiths. They didn't pay as much attention to the Manchester identity stuff, and maybe even the issues about sexuality weren't as present as the sense that he could tell them what it felt like to be an outsider, even without the specific referents.

    It would be interesting to see the goth subcultures that have developed and how the co-optation of the look in mass market stuff like Hot Topic and Emily the Strange changes who adopts it and what they do with it. I bought my bone-pattern hoodie at H&M (and then my dad wanted to know where he could buy one); I bought several pairs of skull-patterend sandals at Payless.

    This summer as I was walking down Houston, I saw a midnight-colored dress hanging from a chain-link fence. It looked just like a dress from an old Siouxsie Sioux video. I bought it in homage (even though it has a hole I need to fix) but I think it's post-goth rather than goth. And I can't really say post-goth without laughing.

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