Graduation Semester and Year

2013

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Penelope Ingram

Abstract

This project seeks to examine the emerging cultural significance of the modern hipster and determine their contribution to the greater discourse of counter-cultural formations of subversion and identity. Hipsters are depicted as and expected to live life and form tastes using irony. They come to represent the insincerity and lack of authenticity of a group that builds its identity using material representations of previous generations. Their use of irony comes to shape how they interact with each other and with mainstream society, which surrounds them. Whether reinforcing sexism through the use of ironic rhetoric or questioning dominant culture, irony plays a distinctive role in how hipsters are perceived.The second chapter explores how identities are formed within hipster culture. I analyze modes of acceptance in Its Kind of a Funny Story, Skins and Girls in an attempt to demonstrate hipsterdom's connection to dominant cultural positions of social class and patriachal hegemonies of sex, sexuality and gender.The final chapter analyzes the role of consumerism within hipster subversion. I delve into how mass markets have capitalized on hipster aesthetic, leading to a dilution of the subculture's subversive capabilities. From the outset it would appear that because of all of the mitigating circumstances that serve to recycle hipster identities back into a dominant, mainstream societal fold that hipsterdom offers littler in the way of affecting social change. On the contrary, the hipster contribution to society represent a complex interplay between a subculture's ability to simulatneously exist within and outside the dominant order.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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