A Hipster Has to Die

Now, now, don’t go freaking out and calling the police just yet. This isn’t mean to be some sort of inflammatory statement commanding you to go out and kill a hipster–far from it. It is my belief that at this moment in time, the world of gender politics is in serious trouble, and will continue to be in serious trouble until a hipster dies. In this sense, I am not telling you that a specific hipster must die, or that he or she must die at a particular moment, but that a hipster will inevitably die and this will expose several social problems which I believe are patriarchal in origin.

The reason I am singling out a hipster as the one who has to die in this case is the simple fact that no hipsters have died yet. Our generation–“Gen-Y,” if we want to call it that–has not experienced the deaths of any of its contemporary cultural heroes. Look across the panoply of hipster cultural referents and we see nothing but bright, young faces and lithe, ageless bodies. Explaining to a hipster that M.I.A. or Alice Glass of Crystal Castles will some day experience the inevitable physical effects and ailments of mortality would probably be more difficult than explaining the theory of evolution to a 12th century Christian monk, or explaining the identity and cultural significance  of Osama bin Laden to a bagel. The much-publicized pregnancy of M.I.A. provides a small-scale example of what I am trying to say. Simply put, hippies have died, ravers have died, goths have died, punks have died, feminists have died, politicians have died, zoologists have died, but hipsters remain a young and recently-established enough subculture to have escaped the ravages of age as of this writing.

Of course, this has to change at some point–this is why I say, “A Hipster Has to Die.” Eventually, it will happen. One of the members of MSTRKRFT will overdose on a drug, or one of the members of Grizzly Bear will mysteriously vanish. It has to happen eventually. One day, a hipster will die. But what effect will this catastrophic blow to the hipster community have on the world of gender politics and feminism? I would like to quote late feminist theorist Iris Marion Young, who wrote that in patriarchal society,

“Pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself. It either is a state of the developing foetus, for which the woman is a container; or it is an objective, observable process coming under scientific scrutiny; or it becomes objectified by the woman herself, as a ‘condition’…Pregnancy omits subjectivity.”

-“Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9 (February 1984): 45.

I would add that death is very much the same. Death is viewed by our society as something that happens to people–you are a container for it, or it contains you. We do not often think that BIRTHING or DYING are experiences which can only be experienced, and never adequately described by a supposedly “objective” (or “scientific”) observer. A hipster’s death would catalyze a process of reconsideration, I believe, of the notion that death simply “happens” to people. The world of hipsters is one of extreme affect, of course, in which the relationship between humans and all of their physical attributes–aging, death, etc.–is obscured and made embarrassing. M83 and The Teenagers will suddenly seem less significant once a hipster dies, and perhaps we will collectively wonder whether anyone will really care about any of this in a decade or so, or whether or not the reason why anyone even showed up to their concerts is because the participants are mostly young, thin, white, in full possession of their physical and mental faculties, and male (or, if not male, at least closely conforming to male ideas of what females should look like). While they are not the direct cause of hipster culture, ableism, ageism, racism, classism and sexism are surely helpful in holding our generation’s attention. As Young writes, a dominant discourse robs the less privileged of subjectivity, and the dominant discourse of hipsters accomplishes this exactly, where the disabled, aged, non-white, non-upper class, and non-heterosexual male are either silenced or fetishized. Don’t get me wrong, the death of a hipster will not solve all these problems. But in some small way, it may enable us as a generation to move a few inches forward, closer, perhaps, to the discovery of our own blindnesses.