Doing Scene

Recently, scholars have analyzed phenomena like punk, hip-hop, and rave as “scenes,” networks of individuals who converge in local, translocal, and virtual spaces. While researchers conceptualize scenes as collectively produced entities, they have not closely explored the micro-processes by which they develop, as well as how those processes affect participants. In this article, I ask how members “do scene” by coming together to construct these settings. Drawing on ethnographic research on a punk scene in a small college town, I argue that members produce a scene through the establishment, transformation, and management of scene space. The construction of space in turn shaped the identities of participants, including differing levels of power among them. This case further underscores the interactional and context-specific groundings of scenes, scene space, and the identities of participants.