Skinhead style fuses sexual transgression with racial authoritarianism in contradictory combinations

Evidence

Such combinations of sexual transgression and racial authoritarianism complicate a simple reading of the meaning of skinhead style. The important point to be stressed here is that the outward rigidity of white chauvinism often masks variegated and dissonant combinations of subjectivity. These might be carried and resolved by individual people; Healy argues that the growing public awareness of gay skins has corrupted the association between skins and a conservative, white racist straight masculinity. It is interesting that the skin quoted above invoked the association between skin style and gay London through the Creole homophobic epithet “Batty Man.” The fear of being identified as gay is augmented here because these associations are being directed at white skins from a black location. As skinheadism is being globalized, its association with a hypermasculine straight image is being decoupled at “home.” However, this may well be confined to London and there is little evidence to suggest that skinhead style has lost its currency as sartorial racism elsewhere in Britain (see Nayak, 1999). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2989

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that sound cultures resist fixed racial identity because sound is ‘preontological’ feels worth chasing — does this argument appear in fuller form elsewhere in the book or in the author’s other work?
• XREF: Connects to work on style as subcultural resistance (Hebdige’s Subculture) and to the claim that racial identity is fixed visually (Fanon’s epidermal schema).