Deeply tanning their skin and braiding their hair into cornrows, Japan’s Ganguro Girls mix contemporary Japanese make-up and attire with that of American hip-hop into a striking new form of personal expression. By incorporating previous subcultures and utilizing camera phones and online promotion, the Ganguro Girls emerged in the 1990s as a new subculture paradigm. In the past, subcultures grew slowly over time and in relative seclusion. Now, such subcultures like Black Metal Music, to Burners, and the dandies of the African Bakongo increasingly engage with the media to broaden their profile and recruit new members. Bringing together sociologists with real members of these communities, Ecstatic Skin explores the impact of digital and social media on the evolution of these subcultures, an environment of cultural production which shapes personal identity as intensely as any physical space.
About the Participants
Terence Hannum is a Chicago based musician and visual artist. His drawings, paintings and video installations cull the periphery of heavy metal music subcultures to analyze the nexus of music, myth, audience and ritual. In addition to the above work, Hannum is a prolific zine maker and for 2010 made a zine a month that culminated in the exhibition "Negative Litanies" at Western Exhibitions in Chicago in early 2011. He has exhibited at the Richard Peeler Center at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, Peregrine Projects in Chicago the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Light & Sie in Dallas, 40000 in Chicago and The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois. His collaborations with New York-based artist Scott Treleaven have been shown at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago and The Breeder in Athens. He performs music solo and in the group Locrian.
David Koren is the Founder and Executive Producer of FIGMENT (figmentproject.org), a large free participatory arts event inspired in part by Burning Man. FIGMENT 2011 will take place in New York (June 10-12), Boston (June 4-5), Detroit (August 6), and Jackson, Mississippi (May 14-15). He is also a Burning Man Regional Contact for New York City, having first attended the Burning Man event in 2000. An Associate Principal and the Director of Marketing at Perkins Eastman, the largest architecture firm in New York, David has significant experience in the areas of arts, architecture, marketing, event production, and management. He is the author of The Architect’s Essentials of Marketing, a basic guide to marketing for architects, published by John Wiley & Sons. In 2008, David was named one of the"40 under 40" in Building Design & Construction Magazine. He is a graduate of New York University (BFA in Dramatic Writing) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland (M.Phil. in Irish Theatre). Two of his plays are published, and are performed frequently around the United States and abroad
Monica L. Miller, associate professor of English, joined the faculty of Barnard in 2001. In addition to her teaching duties in the department of English, she is affiliated with the Africana studies, the American studies, and the film studies programs at Barnard.
Professor Miller specializes in African-American and American literature and cultural studies. Her research interests include twentieth- and -twenty-first-century African-American literature, film, and contemporary art; contemporary literature and cultural studies of the black diaspora (especially black Britain); performance studies; and intersectional studies of race, gender, and sexuality.
Her book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, was published by Duke University Press in 2009. It has received the 2010 William Sanders Scarborough Prize for the best book in African American literature and culture from the Modern Language Association; it was shortlisted for the 2010 Modernist Studies Association book prize.
She is currently at work on a new project entitled Affirmative Actions: Ways to Define Black Culture in the 21st Century, which examines very contemporary black literature and culture from five vantage points (the novel, contemporary art, documentary film, museums/archives, and politics) in order to assess the consequences of thinking of black identity as “post-black” or “post-racial.”
Professor Miller is the recipient of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Yuniya Kawamura is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Fashion Institute of Technology/State University of New York. She is the author of "The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion" (Berg, 2004) and "Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies" (Berg, 2005). She is currently working on her new book "Fashioning Japanese Subcultures" which is scheduled to be published at the end of 2011. She earned her PhD from Columbia University in 2001
Brandon Stosuy is the Senior Writer of Stereogum, a Contributing Editor for The Believer, and a Music Curator at MoMA/PS1. He organizeslive events under the name of his heavy metal column, Haunting The Chapel (formerly Show No Mercy) and for Housing Works Bookstore, where he's a Board Member. His anthology of downtown New York literature, Up Is Up, But So Is Down, was selected by the Village Voice as one of their 25 favorite books of 2006. He just completed a collaborative WOLD-themed zine called TUBAL CAIN with Matthew Barney and Ari Marcopoulos and is currently at work on a small-press book about a Mexican grindcore band and a feature-length black metal road movie with Sasha Grey titled I Am The Destroyer.
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