The Straightedge Youth Sub-Culture: Observations on the Complexity of Sub-Cultural Identity

Through a disproportionate focus on the common norms, values, and beliefs that apparently bind sub-cultures together over time and space, past sub-cultures researchers often problematically imply that the members of a given sub-culture form and maintain a roughly similar sub-cultural identity in roughly the same way. In reaction to such implications of identity homogeneity, this article explores the complexity of sub-cultural identity through a case study of the contemporary straightedge youth sub-culture. Using data from in-depth interviews, with 20 self-proclaimed North American straightedgers, this article illustrates that sub-culture members may share commonalities in sub-cultural identity, but that sub-cultural identity also is a highly fluid, contingent, and contradictory phenomenon that is constructed and experienced idiosyncratically by the very same members. Findings encourage future researchers to examine sub-cultures not only in terms of their cultural commonalities, but also in terms of their internal complexities and contradictions.