Negotiating subcultural authenticity through interpretation of mainstream advertising

This paper explores how subcultural authenticity is constructed and negotiated as members of a subculture interpret mainstream advertising images. A reader-response theory approach was adopted, and empirical material was conducted through open-ended interviews of homosexual women. Four processes through which ‘lesbian authenticity’ are constructed were identified: (1) defining proper lesbian look; (2) problematising both heterosexualised and oversexed media representations of homosexual women; (3) constituting being lesbian as an intrinsic part of one’s being; and (4) constructing heterosexual women as the Other.