Ross Haenfler

The book, Goths, Gamers, and Grrrls, sparked an interest in me as I began reading through the chapters. I already was hooked on the subject, considering how I can relate to the book’s classification of the deviant behaviors. As noted on the back cover page, this book is meant to serve as a “concise, engaging, and affordable supplementary text for introductory sociology courses and any course that covers popular culture, youth, and deviance.” I believe the author, Ross Haenfler, did an excellent job of this. If those quoted words accurately represent the author’s intentions while writing the novel, then the book successfully achieves its goals. The whole book in total consists of ten chapters that include a wide-range of youth subcultures, from British mods - to an interesting phenomena as riot grrls.

These groups are listed as skinhead, punk, hip-hop, hardcore/heavy metal, straight edge, goths, hackers, gamers, online communities, virginity pledgers, and riot grrrls. Although the book itself is slender and small, each chapter is about fifteen pages. The chapters hold a brief description of the individual categories and explain the history of how the group became known to have that title. This comes hand-in-hand with identifying the sociological concept and theory. After providing a brief overview at the beginning of each chapter that introduces the sociological novice to some of the core elements of theories in deviance and subcultural studies, Haenfler combines a philosophical depiction of the variations that come with the subculture’s manifestations. These specific concepts help introduce the reader to more analytical/theoretical perspectives, in which these phenomena can be described and