In "Exploring the Meaning of the Mainstrem," Sarah Thornton details the subculture of club music both subjectively and objectively. She begins her essay with a personal account of attending a series of acid house raves, profiling the events as she experienced them. She then branches out into a larger social discussion of the culture and its ethnographic complications: how club culture deals with gender and class. As the subtitle indicates, she discusses the notion of "handbag house," and the Sarahs and Tracys that were icons of what some perceived to be the mainstream. The handbag being an image of housewifery and adulthood, Sarahs and Tracys are decidedly un-hip. This subjective approach (Thornton portrays the world as its participants see it) culminates with a discussion of subcultural capital--the knowledge of certain members of a subculture that ascends their status. Before transitioning into her objective account, Thornton acknowledges the impossibility of being both a participant in and an observer of club culture, as the two are implicitly disconnected. But as an objective observer, Thornton fails to "find a crowd [she] could comfortably identify as typical, average, ordinary, majority or mainstream." (106) This substantiates her main argument that the concepts of mainstream and subculture are fluid rather than rigid--"mainstream culture" is actually to broad and assumptive to view with a sociological lens.
Discussion topics: How does social media affect the hierarchy and exclusivity of club culture? How much cache lies in secrecy--does Twitter ruin this subculture or enable it? What happens to the idea of "mainstream" when there is no majority? Based on the data Thornton gives, women are far more likely to go out dancing than men. What does this say about the nature of socialization in the subculture?
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