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Within social movement literature, the concept of collective identity is used to discuss the process through which political activists create in-group cohesion and distinguish themselves from society at large. Newer approaches to collective identity focus on the negotiation of boundaries as social movement agents interact with social structural forces. However, in their adoption of a perspective that holds identity as a process, these social movement studies ncglect the more tangible cultural elements that actors manipulate when they express collective identity. This research project adopts a subcultural perbpective in the Birmingham tradition to address the question of how social movement actors reappropriate symbolic expressions of identity and what meaning systems they draw from that enable them to redefine "stigmatization" as ''status." This article offers the concept of "oppositional capital" as a general framework for analyzing the symbolic work that social movement actors perform in their cxprcssions of collective identity. For the purposes of analysis, the primary clcments o l oppositional symbolic expressions are divided into the four categories of distinction, antagonism, political activism, and popular cultural aesthetics. This article applies the concept of oppositional capital to representations of collcctive identity of a radical branch of political activism within the social movement of harm reduction. Specifically, it analyzes the zinc, Junkphood to describe how actors within this social movcmcnt cohort are able to present their collcctivc identity as part of an alternative status system by drawing from an economy of signs that arc gencrally recognized as oppositional.Over the past decade and a half, the area of social movement studies has witnessed the continued interjection of cultural analyses into theoretical models of collective action (Lofland 1985: Melucci 1989: Rucht 1991 Larana, Johnson and Gusfield 1994;Johnson and Klandermans 1995). By and large, this concerted paradigmatic shift away from mass psychology and resuurce mobilization approaches to the study of social movements has been the result of both the emergence of new forms of collcctive action in advanced industrial societies and the flourishing field of social scientific interpretations of these "new social movements" (Tilly 1998). This emphasis on culture in the field Direct all correspondcnce to Neil WleloLh,

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