Death and the Young: A Case of Gothic Psychosocial Identity (Dark)

Abstract

Contemporary youth identity is nourished by a series of projects that serve as models that contain a series of both ideological and iconographic references, as well as having expression in some music-cultural genre. The young people known as dark or gothic appear on the youth scene with their striking outfits and their own way of facing their relationship with one of those references: death. The results of the study that are presented below started from the need to know from social psychology about what was constituted as a community and at the same time clarify the meaning that the adoption of the references that they carry as a banner has for these young people. For this, the case study with a single subject was combined, with the consultation of Internet pages in which many of the followers of this music-cultural project express themselves. It culminates in recognizing this youth community for what it is and not for its appearance, in addition to discovering that the relationship with death is a way of not losing sight of who we are and expressing the set of feelings that overwhelm them. To this is added a set of symbolic elements that feed the beliefs and binding values ​​of the community, which in turn defends existence in this world as an individual project.