Self-images, emotions, and music videos: studying reflexivity and the emergence of subcultural selves for 'emo kids' in Singapore

Abstract

In this thesis, I investigate the ways that interactions with music videos shapes emotions and sense of self for participants of the emo subculture in Singapore (comprising those who self-identify as ‘emo kids’). My interest is in how music videos become symbolic, reflexive resources for youths as meaningful, subcultural self-meanings and self-images emerge—in other words, how they began to see themselves as emo kids during their teenage years. Specifically, I explore how these self-images represent reflexive, emotion-based embodiments that culminate towards the emergence of meaningful subcultural selves in emo kids’ everyday lives. Based on interviews with 15 emo kids, my analysis focuses on interpretive processes of meaning-making as interviewees interacted with various emo music videos from the early 2000s-2010s. Taking a grounded approach, I draw from both socio-cognitive and symbolic interactionist frameworks as sensitizing concepts that are useful to unpack my findings and analysis. Overall, my emo kid interviewees expressed that interacting with emo music videos on YouTube facilitated three ways of reflexively “seeing themselves in music videos”. First, self-images embedded in music videos represented ways that my participants were able to internally articulate discrete feelings and reflexively understand these emotional embodiments as “feeling emo”. Second, self-images embedded in music videos represented ways that my participants could reflexively embody a subcultural worldview grounded in affective, social dispositions. These self-images were made meaningful as “naturally seeing myself as an emo kid”. Third, self-images embedded in music videos represented ways that my participants reflexively embodied a subcultural experience of self-awareness—an affective subcultural meta-reflexivity. These self-images were described as “seeing myself as emo kids see themselves”. Overall, I discuss how these findings about digital media interactivity and reflexive, emotional embodiments relate to the ideas about subcultures, self-making, and sociality. This study thus offers important insights that bridge central concerns across the fields of self and identity, sociology of emotions, subcultures, music sociology, and digital media studies.