Youth, Crime and Media MEP208

1. Youth, Crime and MediaMEP208 6. Rethinking Subculture

2. Some important questions • Which kinds of young people can be convincingly attached to a subculture? • Do youth subcultures always identify along clear class and gender lines? • How do subcultures emerge, develop, change and fade away? • Are subcultures always resistant to mainstream commercial exposure?

3. Defending ski-jumpers (G. Clarke 1981) • Subcultural theories of youth ignore the everyday lives of most ‘ordinary’ young people • Subcultures spread from and grow out of other youth cultures • “Any empirical analysis would reveal that subcultures are diffuse, diluted, and mongrelised in form” (p.83)

4. Interactionist analysis of subculture (Fine and Kleinman 1979) • Synchronic, static analysis assumes that “the content of a subculture during the research is the content of the subculture across time” (p.6) • Subcultures need to be re-analysed as diachronic, dynamic and fluid • It is mistaken “to conceive of group members as interacting exclusively with each other” (p.8)

5. Female subcultures? (McRobbie and Garber 1975) • The concept of ‘youth’ implies ‘young men’ • Young females are uncritically deemed to be objects of sexual attractiveness by male-dominated subcultures • “If we look for the structured absences in this youth literature, it is the sphere of family and domestic life that is missing” (McRobbie 1990 p. 71)

6. Cross-cultural perspectives (Brake 1985) • Canadian youth are not considered resistant like their British counterparts • Canadian youth culture is “largely derivative, and uses elements of borrowed culture, and any oppositional force is highly muted” (p. 145). • They have fragmented – not homologous – national and ethnic identities

7. Post-subcultures? (Muggleton 2000) • Youth subcultural identities are no longer understood as fixed and uniform • Individualistic tastes and styles • Style over substance (postmodern youth are less politically resistant) • Subcultures play an increasingly commercial function

8. Subcultures or neo-tribes? (Bennett 1999; 2000) • Social shift from collective subcultural activity to individual consumer choice • Eclectic experiences of urban dance cultures (e.g. clubs with separate zones to cater for varied tastes) • Youth cultures are locally and globally fused, do not identify with national networks of subcultural resistance