Countercultures of consumption: Teenage heavy metal affiliates’ coping responses to deviant labeling

International audience; Consumption activities are governed by social norms that mark a division between accepted and rejected behaviors. The latter grow in importance when they are shared by many individuals as a part of affinity-based consumer gatherings. It is particularly the case of the heavy metal counterculture, which arouses explicit rejection by several institutional and social actors, and which takes the form of negative social labeling that can affect all heavy metal affiliates including teenagers, at school or in their homes. Following an ethnographic research design, we conducted a qualitative study upon which we drew up a typology of heavy metal labeling along with a taxonomy of the teenagers' coping responses according to their respective interaction contexts.