The New Goth
I decided I wanted to be goth in 2014. I wasn’t completely sure what that meant, but it certainly seemed appealing. The aesthetic already fit my interests, and it seemed mostly like a fun joke to make for a little while. But then it stuck, and I read deeply about the subculture, and I became infatuated with everything about it. The fashion, the music, the academia behind it. Suddenly, my joke started to feel a little too real.
In simple terms, goth is the appreciation of darkness, or the ability to see beauty in what others might consider to be unsavoury or mysterious. They aren’t necessarily sad, because these things actually make them happy. They might dabble in the occult, or they might just enjoy The Cure and chokers. But don’t balk — goth is everywhere in our culture. It may not be the classically understood notion of what goth presentation looks like, but it’s here and we are all becoming goths, whether we realize it or not.
The New Goth is not an isolated trend, but a cultural recognition of what compels us. And it seems that a tragicomic awareness of the darkness all around us is the most effective way to tackle contemporary life. See it in the popularity of a Twitter account called @sosadtoday, run by poet Melissa Broder and constantly tweeting out not only lists of what is and isn’t goth (Diet Coke is but Gatorade is not), but also the everyday perils of anxiety, depression and darkness. See it in the ongoing androgyny in fashion, both haute couture and everyday, which has long been a staple of goth fashion ideals. See it in our social media selves, pure outlets of self-dramatization. See it in the academic development of affect theory, as goths are known to be emotive, sensitive and eager to express their feelings, however dark. See it in our massive societal struggles with identity.
People have been attempting to define goth for decades, and a proper definition has remained elusive. This is because it is no longer a subculture, it is the culture. Elements are found here and there. There are jokes about different types of goth: mall goth, health goth, beach goth (as seen on the latest episode of Portlandia, with guest star Glenn Danzig). World Goth Day is coming up again on May 22, where goths all over the world will celebrate whatever goth means to them. There are various other goth-related festivals and events every year around the world, from the Lumous Gothic Festival in Finland to SPECIES, a goth arts and culture gathering started in 2015 in Ireland, with its second annual event occurring June 3–5 this year.
Goth as a term is stunningly saturated, which makes it clearer how widely it has permeated our culture. The New Goth is an acknowledgement of this phenomenon, of the idea that an embracing of beauty in darkness has gone wholly mainstream. Rather than a subculture selling out, it is a realization that a goth resides within us all. “Goth has endured factionalizing, fluctuating popularity, and decades of changes to become one of the longest running contemporary subcultures,” Ross Haenfler writes in Goths, Gamers & Girls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures. “Their uncommon attitudes regarding gender, sexuality, and death challenge some very deep-seated cultural beliefs.” Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), these attitudes are no longer so uncommon. They are at the forefront of social, political and cultural discourse. Goth is fundamentally about not only the macabre, but the need for affection, for changing the status quo, and for reckoning their nihilism with their profound sense of acceptance.
For example, within goth there is an open invitation for the blurring of gender lines through self-presentation, reflecting our period of better understanding gender identity and challenging norms in a way that many of us can see ourselves in. Goths have also often been closely associated with the LGBT+ community. Lily Burana, a self-proclaimed “grown-up Goth”, wrote last year for The New York Times about her relationship with Halloween.
As a questioning teen, the trip to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade was a pilgrimage of incalculable personal value. The event illustrated that the ritual of dressing up — of choosing an alternate persona — can be the quickest route to self-affirmation. Show me a young man in a woman’s costume, and, as often as not, I see someone hiding in plain sight. Show me a girl entranced with Victorian mourning attire and other aesthetics of death, and I see someone who’s trying to figure out life.
And here we see how goth spaces become safe spaces. And we see how this is a familiar idea that has grown to be far more pervasive in recent years.
Our cultural interest in raw emotion and confessing our feelings can also be found within the goth world. The New Goth is aware of society’s artificiality, and insists on an authenticity to be found inside their own theatricality. When she coined the term ‘camp’, Susan Sontag probably didn’t have goths in mind, but it’s an appropriate way to signify the earnestness being shared inside a provocative but defensive bubble of stylistic posturing. Now that emotion is a currency in itself, the gothic sensibility has been appropriated by countless other models of expression.
Here’s a potentially groan-inducing assertion: goth expression is a way of coping with the overwhelming darkness of modern life. Hear me out. We are unquestionably faced with more bad news today than ever before thanks to the realities of the world we live in and our access to it, and it can feel exhausting and defeating. Expressing ourselves as a goth would can help us come to terms with the cruelty of the world, and thus turn toward hope.
John M. Skutlin researched goths in Japan for Asian Anthropology for an article published in January (“Goth in Japan: Finding identity in a spectacular subculture”), largely by interviewing as many goths as he could find. “Among them I discovered common narratives that reflected Goth fashion as a way of externalizing a sense of isolation from others, as well as a self-conscious irony in the ways that they deployed macabre and death-oriented imagery in their daily lives,” Skutlin writes. He describes several cases of goths, young and old, who appropriate the imagery of the macabre and the negative in an ironic or playful way, recalling the kinda-joking-but-also-serious tone of @sosadtoday and many Western goths in general. This goth performativity is not a case of being a poseur, but is a further nuanced complication of what it means to be goth today.
One interviewee Skutlin speaks to, Tomomi, describes the evolution of her goth identity as finding the ability to “enjoy the you that is sick”, which is an eerily beautiful explanation. “Goth provides an example of a spectacular subculture in Japan that…emphasizes an ethos of embracing the seemingly dark and negative aspects of life and expressing them through music, fashion, and an overall mindset.” That overall mindset extends to Western expressions of goth, and suggests the universality of the dream to “enjoy the you that is sick” and the rejection of goth as a simple aesthetic choice or subculture.
In many ways, goth is a constant performance, but one that simultaneously allows oneself to discover truths about themselves. As Lily Burana notes in that NYT article, sometimes all you need to do is wear a mask to find yourself.
