Movements

We agree with Siegel that Goth is a meaningful form of resistance to “regimes of sexual normalcy” that buttress consumer capitalism (Siegel, 2005, p. 2). Indeed, we underscore how Goth’s “new eroticisms” and unique visual styles “make possible new ways of thinking.”

The lyrics of the opening track on Bauhaus’s debut album, ‘In the Flat Field’, are a fitting opening, because they signal the characteristic ambivalence of the gothic “underground.” As someone who has frequented the gothic scene for almost fifteen years, and as someone who has worked to provide a more sympathetic portrayal of the subculture elsewhere, I can easily say that the “shielding pride” of gothic performativity makes it difficult for those on the outside to understand the complexity of being goth, including a recognition of a real dark side (Gunn 1999a and 1999b).

As illustrated in our article Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture, goths have now made appearances in television shows, movies and music. Yet, goths have also made their way to several areas in pop culture and even sports, which may surprise you.

My title suggests a rather straightforward enterprise: I want to account for the enormous popularity of the Gothic — both novels and films — since the Second World War. However, the title proposes more questions than it answers.

After the collapse of the communist system, it was not only the established denominations (the Russian Orthodox Church, various Protestant churches) that experienced a boom in Russia, as people tried to fill the spiritual and ideological vacuum left behind by the previous system.

Since their animation out of folk materials in the nineteenth-century by Polidori, as Varney, and in Le Fanu and Stoker, vampires have been continually reborn in modern culture.

Blind. Vampire. Amputee. Zombie. These labels serve to identify and categorize the subject to whom they are applied. In some ways, they are essentializing. Each conjures up a specific image: dark glasses, fangs, prosthetic limbs, rotting flesh.

In the thirteenth-century, a group of people called Luciferians attracted papal attention for Devil worship, and this time there can be little doubt that this is exactly what was going on. The Pope sent Conrad of Marburg, a gentleman described as a “sadistic fanatic who had been spiritual director of St. Elizabeth of Thuringia and had delighted in beating and humiliating her,” to Germany in order to squash the heresy taking place there.

One of the first groups accused by the Church of worshipping Satan in the traditionally accepted way were the Paulicians. They were a group of Armenians who lived in the Southeastern part of the Empire, out of the direct control of the Armenian Church.

The Gothic as a phenomenon is commonly identified as beginning with Horace Walpole’s novel ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (1764), which was followed by Clara Reeve’s ‘The Old English Baron’ (1778), the romances of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis’ ‘The Monk’ (1796).

In the last days of the year 2004, an undersea earthquake located off the coast of Indonesia caused a colossal tidal wave that engulfed the shorelines of the Indian Ocean and drowned approximately 300,000 people.

Late in the summer of 1924, a small book was published in Paris. Although it garnered little attention at the time, this ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ heralded the existence of an avant-garde movement that would prove to be one of the most influential of the twentieth-century.