Interesting! I would add that all of this really only happens in hindsight? Like, for music, if you look at the first wave punk bands as well as the proto-punk bands, there just isn’t a lot of musical coherence there. That really only comes later with the rise of HC punk, and with the social panic around punk. It becomes a coherent genre only once it’s already coalesced. I mean, the first band to use the term “punk” (that I can find anyway) to describe their music was suicide, which most people classify as a post-punk or snyth punk band. But they advertised their early shows as “punk music”… prior to that, it was Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs applying it willy-nilly to whatever they liked…
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That seems to be the way it works. Superhero movies are another good example.
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Indeed! Of course, the problem with that is that it naturalizes stuff and makes it seem inevitable, rather than a historical process that we can study and understand… And people often seem incredibly incurious about it, too. Like, there is time, money, power, invested in the production of culture, and what makes it into the mainstream (and what does not) I think matters greatly. We know that having diversity on the screen, in music, in literature, etc is (generally speaking) a net good for society, as it relates to diversity and equity. If we understand how some people’s stories, music, thinking came to be centered, and others get marginalized, we can understand better how power works in society…
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