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Abstract

This dissertation explores how contemporary rave subculture facilitates the demand for the increasingly unmet human needs of collectivity and safety in mainstream society. Distrust of political institutions have left marginalised youth perceiving the political system as unwilling to provide solutions to the challenges they face. Young women especially are facing the erosion of moral standards in the political sphere and increasing threat of violence in their social sphere, contributing to their powerlessness. In this study, the gendered experience of British rave culture will be explored with a focus on modes of embodiment as a response to anomie. Drawing on early to late Durkheim as an analytical tool, I document the experiences of an alternative interactional realm in which rituals of collective effervescence – through drug taking and music – allow women the possibilities of an alternative social solidarity that is absent from mainstream youth culture. The female participants in the study give us a glimpse into an organic feminist solidarity that arises in the secular domain of leisure rather than consigning us to the haphazard association of the workplace in an increasingly anomic economy for the generations to come. 

Course: Sociology - BSc (Hons) - C0315

Date Deposited: 2024-01-30

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14336.html