Dick Hebdige's 'Subculture: The Unnatural Break' explores the ways in which subcultures represent challenges to the established social order and examines how subcultures are incorporated into 'mainstream' society (Hebdige 1979, p. 92). In the following paper I provide a brief summary of Hebdige's thesis and analyse his main supporting arguments.
'Subculture: The Unnatural Break' appears as chapter six of Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style and attempts to situate the phenomena that is subculture against 'mainstream' society (ibid.). Hebdige doesn't just establish a binary of subculture against 'mainstream' society, however, but argues that subculture is an aspect of 'mainstream' society (Hebdige 1979, p 97). It is this complicated relationship between subculture and 'mainstream' society that Hebdige addresses with this chapter.
