15.11.08

goths and politics: a survey

Unlike punk, goth has never been associated with the raised fist of revolutionary fervour. Yet with goth being so notoriously difficult to pin down beyond “I’ll know it when I see it,” could it really be so easy to separate politics from goth?
Discover the answer in Goths and Politics at Morbid Outlook.

The results of a survey I conducted to find out what, if any, relationship there is between politics and goth culture have been published at Morbid Outlook...Limited space forced me to set aside some specific questions. For example: how did self-described anarchists respond? Were there any conservative goths? But stay tuned to future blog posts for a breakdown of the survey's results...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One could argue that anyone who would vote in America's political system could not, by definition, be goth.
The first reason is that voting is an act of faith. You must believe that the system works. A gothic person could only think the system is corrupt beyond repair, or that that it does indeed work - and we are its prey.
The second reason is the implication that a mainstream candidate could represent the interests of an alternative person. This is logically not possible.

Frederik Sisa said...

Thanks for the comment. I regret that I don’t see your logic, however. You make some awfully questionable assumption, beginning with the notion that a mainstream candidate could not represent the interests of an alternative person. There are plenty of situations in which the mainstream pays heed to the needs of minorities. Race, for example, such as when blacks were given the same right to vote as majority whites. In a similar vein, the struggle for equal civil rights for gays also exemplifies how the mainstream can account for the interests of the non-mainstream. Most people are not gay, but many straight politicians and citizens are campaigning in the interests of a minority group. Insofar as goths are concerned, though, I have to wonder: exactly how would a goth politician represent goth interests?

As to your statement that voting in America’s political system is incompatible with being goth, that depends entirely on you how you define goth. By most accounts, goth is a culture, not a political ideology. In this sense, goths do not have political interests unique to them, not even freedom of expression along with freedom from violence and intolerance.

In any case, that so many people in the survey (64.7%) reported themselves to be registered voters indicates that many goths have no problem participating in the system. Perhaps it is a tad presumptuous to tell these folks that they are not goth, especially since it’s a false dichotomy to suggest that our options are limited to rejecting a hopelessly broken system (that the system is hopeless is also assumption) or surrendering to it.