ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in important ways the contradictions of collective identity in suburban settings have generated recurrent themes of a concern with authenticity in the appropriation of mass cultural forms. A quest for authenticity can then act as a reflexive rationale, both appropriating mass cultural idioms for forms of local cultural activity and as a further point of reference for groups to use in constructing critical subterranean positions towards suburbia from within. By clothing the contradictions of suburbia in the mythical guise of an identity that transcends the mundanity and a complex process of a simultaneous accommodation and denial can be accomplished. The chapter suggests that the ideological orientation represents values of seeking to transcend the ambiguities and inconsistencies of experience, which in turn generate a persistent reference to ideas of authenticity. The quest for authenticity in suburban culture is therefore both mythical in function and endlessly contestable in character.
