Fitting in, Standing out: Multivocality and Far Right Youth Subcultural Style in Germany

This paper draws on 51 interviews conducted with youth in and around the far right youth subcultural scene in Berlin, Germany in 2013-14 that were part of a long-term, multi-phase research project on the commercialization of far right ideology and school-based reactions to transformations in far right subcultural style. Interview analysis explores how the complexity of style works in practice for youth in and around one particular subculture. Our findings center on two arguments. First, we show that subcultural style acts as a mechanism that helps youth process two emotional impulses of adolescence: fitting in, and standing out.  As youth navigate adolescence and the transition to adulthood, they play with style as a way of exploring what it means to be a part of a group and a community, and what it means to be noticed for being different. We also argue, however, that youth who are close to a particular subculture see far more ambivalence and multivocality within the style of that scene than do youth or adults who are outsiders to the scene. Across our interviews, youth consistently asserted that it was not completely possible to impute far right ideological motives from far right clothing styles, even in the co-presence of multiple contextual clues indicating far right membership. Thus we find strong data supporting previous theoretical work on the multivocality of subcultural styles, as youth insist that one cannot interpret the meaning of any particular image, symbol, code, clothing or style in the absence of other contextual clues.