They belong to a collective—a landfill of trash, a world of trash, heaping with loyalists to the biggest boy band in history. One Direction ruined their lives.

“Derogatory media coverage is not the verdict but the essence of their resistance,” the sociologist Sarah Thornton wrote in her 1995 book Club Cultures, a history of dance clubs and raves.

She was like, Oh, everything will make sense when the album comes out. And it came out in December and of course had nothing to do with anything.”

For decades, scholars had been debating whether popular culture made a person into a rebel or an acquiescent. Vroomen was interested in the way lifelong Kate Bush fandom showed a middle way: neither “spectacular resistance” nor resignation to “being dull and trapped.” While they were self-proclaimed feminists, many of the fans she spoke to took

These applications debuted as blank slates, and the people who came to them filled them with culture. They innovated the language and rhythm and aesthetics and norms of websites that they didn’t fully understand but saw instead as raw material.

The two were, she argued, gender blurrers, who performed emotion-filled and romantic music appreciated by women and feared by many men, who were threatened by this alternative mode of what masculinity could be.

Thirty years after the original essay was published, Mary Celeste Kearney reviewed its legacy and then filled in its largest gap, declaring girls’ bedrooms “sites of cultural production,” not just consumption.

With Instant Acolytes’ inclination to go online from home and for fun, the Internet may be evolving much like the telephone into a domestic tool for sociability used more heavily by women. Rather than a mysterious technology that is the province of men, the Internet is on the cusp of becoming a household appliance whose applications are as much

“Boybands are marketed with a majority teenage female public in mind, and the assumption is that these female teens are all heterosexual and therefore the band should be sold to them as ‘romantic interests,’” she told me. “That assumption can make LGBTQ+ fans feel like they are not seen, like they don’t matter. It can make other fans and the press