ABSTRACT
This ethnographic study tries to capture the moment of post-1997 sub-cultural formation in Hong Kong. The particular case of Hong Kong sub-culture is exploited to demonstrate the general theoretical question of how sub-cultural forms resist and collaborate with popular discourses. Sub-cultural researchers have taken the analytic tracks along the elite/popular and domination/resistance binaries (e.g. Cohen, Phil 1972, Fiske 1989, Hebdige 1979, Hall and Tom 1976, Willis 1978). In this paper, I try to experiment with a different approach by focusing on the emotionality of sub-cultural politics. The focus of analysis is not on semiotics or ideologies that have dominated sub-culture studies. Instead, I will examine the ‘emotional energies’ produced in everyday interactions within sub-cultural groups and between these groups and mainstream society (mainstream here is more a discursive or imagined than a descriptive term). These emotional energies are produced by discursive processes such as the inversion of ethno-methods, the oppositional impression management of self-stigmatization, the tactics of bodily control, and de-commodified forms of emotion production. This subverted emotionality differentiates sub-cultural from mainstream solidarity. However, at particular historical junctures, as in post-1997 Hong Kong, sub-cultural emotional energies may form an affective alliance with public unrest and consumerist populism. This socio-emotive approach is an attempt to de-particularize sub-culture studies by bridging sub-cultural and general cultural politics. In this case study, sub-cultural groups produce particularized emotional energies, but these emotional energies exhibit comparable socio-cultural configurations with those of the larger society.
