The concept of scene is now a primary conceptual framework for studying the production and consumption of popular music. In a formative essay, Straw (1991) offered the important observation that scene could be theorized as both a local and trans-local phenomenon. Peterson and Bennett (2004) have added a new dimension to this conceptualization of music scenes through positing virtuality as a further medium for scene involvement. Missing from each element of this tripartite model of scene – local, trans-local, and virtual – is any consideration of how music scenes are enacted through the process of embodiment. In this article, we argue that embodiment is critically important for how music scenes are constructed, enacted and maintained by participants. The corporeal element of scene introduced through its embodiment by social actors, we argue, is key to our understanding of the music scene as an anchoring place within everyday urban, regional and, increasingly, rural landscapes.

Hegemonic masculinity pays patriarchal dividends' because it is achieved by the few. For example, on numerous occasions in the research on Australian hardcore, respondents articulated the qualities lacked by sweaters in much broader corporeal terms. Hardcore' was originally a term of qualification that delineated the speeded up, more aggressive sonic and stylistic manifestations of punk rock that were emerging particularly in Los Angeles and Washington, DC during the late 1970s. This chapter draws on interview data collected during doctoral research on the hardcore music scene on Australia's Gold Coast. It investigates how attributed levels of personal authenticity correlate with participants' perceived potential to contribute to the vibe' or atmosphere' of hardcore music events. Many of the respondents in the study deployed the notion of the sweater' to identify participants whose over-zealous attempts to construct a social identity around the hardcore scene were perceived to reveal their lack of subcultural authenticity'.

Subcultural Theory: Traditions and Concepts J. Patrick Williams Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011

Much of the debate surrounding the scholarship of music-based youth cultures has been organised around an epistemological assumption that focuses upon the discursive and representational value of cultural practices and artefacts. As such, contemporary writers are widely polarised on the issue of the degree to which young people commit to the cultural meanings that are attached to such performance, and divided on questions about how such meaning is manufactured in the first place. But understanding cultural performance as a solely symbolic undertaking is not only methodologically problematic; it marginalises the felt and affective experiences of participants and misses the significance of the shifting limitations and potentialities that define subcultural bodies. Contra all of this, and drawing on interviews with participants of the hardcore music scene on Australia's Gold Coast, this article instead seeks to position 'subcultural' attachment as an embodied process of becoming, where perceptions of 'authenticity' are grounded in the ongoing enactment of incorporated practical (rather than symbolic) competencies. For it is only in the transformative potential of embodied performances that identities are (re) produced. In considering such competence as contingent upon predispositions towards particular modes of action - that is, 'what a body can do' - I argue that Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' offers a way of moving past the quotidian sociological emphasis on the symbolic and towards an engagement with youth cultural forms at the level of affect and emotion.