“From Culture to Hegemony,” there is a discussion of “style”—that is, the symbolic significance of how people communicate through their appearance. This, suggests Dick Hebdige can be a “challenge to hegemony.” Because of the time in which this was written, he is thinking in particular of young people who attached themselves to the “punk” movement or subculture. (“Subcultures,” as the term suggests, are smaller groups within the dominant culture that are often at odds with or cut against the grain of the larger culture.) Hebdige claims that style interrupts “the process of ‘normalization'” and “challenges the principle of unity and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus.” I’d like you to support or refute this idea with examples from contemporary culture.
