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"Too much traffic"
About Me
- Jenny Davidson
- I have published four novels and four books of literary criticism; I'm currently at work on a book called FOR THE LOVE OF BROKEN THINGS: MY FATHER, EDWARD GIBBON AND THE RUINS OF ROME. I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
A few pieces
Books
My other blogs
Blog Archive
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2008
(621)
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September
(45)
- Miscellanies
- Cosmological vertigo
- Two kilograms
- "Man swimmeth by nature"
- The abysmal depths
- The zoo's first Chinese panda
- "Better safe than sorry"
- Haber/Babel
- Musical alignments
- A drawer of umlauts
- Crime-busters
- Born yellow
- Simulation
- Vegetable beaux
- Gray brainspill
- "A mazurka is a Polish Dance"
- Goth!
- Serendipity
- Death and the maiden
- Lurking in the real
- Reading in Philadelphia
- The pull of the sea
- Studs
- "Il va vite"
- Jaunty tableaux
- Tupperware men and Melamine women
- Collaborative
- British delights
- Poached!
- Scale models
- "Let them see kitsch"
- Creaturely
- Strange matter
- Musical lunch
- Bucket lists
- Lotteries of life
- Flights of fancy
- What I have been doing this week
- Splitting
- Elective affinities
- A nursery of snails
- Wintering
- Three sandwiches
- "Line!"
- Dissections
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September
(45)
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!"
ReplyDeleteI 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?
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteIt 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.