1. Youth, Crime and Media MEP208 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