ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the construction of gender in youth cultures. Hardcore is a music-based, male-dominated youth culture that developed out of the early 1980s punk scene in the United States. The chapter explores the male-dominated hardcore punk scene and the Goth scene in the city of Rostock, which is the biggest city in Mecklenburg Pomerania, Germany. Gender-based positioning and the provocative overstepping of normative gender boundaries, as well as an extreme emphasis on certain attitudes and characteristics linked to one’s own gender, are part of the personal development process. In adolescence, teenagers are confronted with the dominant societal expectation of reproducing gendered identities and representations. The hegemonic gender model is based on heterosexual gender identity and gender roles, which are based on biological gender attributes. The rhetoric of blurring gender is replaced with precise observations of subtle differences between male and female Goths and their body practices.
