Introduction: Enacting Goth in Milan in the 1980s

Abstract

The introduction of the volume presents a first overview of the internal variations of Milanese goth—or dark, as the subculture is known in Italy—in the 1980s: the activist, the music club and the loner enactments of dark. It also introduces the conceptual triplet that will be employed in the book to address them: enactment, social practices and subcultural canon. This practice-centred approach is needed because Milanese goth cannot be accounted either through a subculturalist approach or through a post-subculturalist approach: on the one hand, in fact, it presented a high level of internal heterogeneity; on the other hand, its internal differences can not be attributed to the level of individual variations and idiosyncrasies. On the contrary, variations depended on plural structures of meaning inside the subculture, and had distinct and stabilised forms related to the different bundle of social practices in which subcultural participation unfolded. In its final part, the introduction discusses the literature on Italian subcultures in the 1980s, and the difficult relationship of the Italian academia with this topic of research.