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New Media & Society
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What's this?

The search for authenticity

An exploration of an online skinhead newsgroup

Alex Campbell

The University of New England, USA

In the popular imagination skinhead identity has come to be inextricably connected to a white-racist identity. This article explores this tenet through an ethnographic exploration of an online skinhead newsgroup, a milieu where racial markings are seemingly absent. The empirical findings expose that ‘racism’ is read ambivalently by the newsgroup's skinheads. ‘Racism’ is not viewed as a constituting component of skinhead identity; however, there is widespread commitment to a ‘white identity’. This article concentrates on the processes which give rise to a digitalized (white) skinhead identity, (re)established online in and through textual performances. Narratives of whiteness articulated through the node of skinness, reveal the salience of racial bodies in the virtual world. However, the imagined relationship between skinheads and racism is not straightforward. The skinheads of this research do not enact an explicit discriminatory racism, but rather they imagine whiteness as a performative condition of skinness, a notion that necessitates a figurative (and literal) aggressive relation to ‘otherness’.

Key Words: culture • ethnography • identity • online community • performativity • race and racism • skinheads

New Media & Society, Vol. 8, No. 2, 269-294 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1461444806059875
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Home page
 Journal of Contemporary EthnographyHome page
A. C. Garcia, A. I. Standlee, J. Bechkoff, and Yan Cui
Ethnographic Approaches to the Internet and Computer-Mediated Communication
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, February 1, 2009; 38(1): 52 - 84.
[Abstract] [PDF]