Geek Culture: A Deviant Subculture Analysis

Introduction

Geek culture is an arguably deviant subculture that originated from the term "geek," which was originally a pejorative term for a highly intellectual outcast. Nowadays geek culture refers to the subculture that surrounds activities such as collecting and reading comic books, participating in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, dressing up as an animal or superhero, boys enjoying the children’s television show “My Little Pony," and even just being computer and technology savvy. The main individuals that are found engaging in these sort of activities are middle class male whites or Asians in their twenties to forties. The level of consensus that these activities are deviant is very low and may soon become part of mainstream culture. As this subculture slowly makes its way toward popularity it is becoming more and more diverse. Its societal growth also results in relatively little social controls to stop people from engaging in otherwise unusual activities that are included in geek culture, such as dressing up in costumes in public. Although the …show more content…
I’m A Nerd!’ Hegemonic Masculinity on an Online Forum” and it examines the identity of participants in a text-only forum game called BlueSky. More specifically it observes how the participants in this game and others like it are primarily young, white, middle class, heterosexual men who are sophisticated computer users involved in a technical field or university. The only minority increasing in their demographic, according to the study, is Asian. Additionally the article explains that in order to maintain this homogeny, potential members who do not fit this criteria are sometimes blocked from joining. It is also noted that despite being referred to pejoratively as nerds by people on the outside, the gamers of BlueSky embrace the stereotype and use it to refer to each other in an affectionate way (Kendall,