Page 233 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Youth culture The post-Second World War Western world has been marked by the
emergence and proliferation of distinct musical forms, fashion styles, leisure
activities, dances and languages associated with young people. These assemblages
of meanings and practices have become known as youth cultures. The question of
youth cultures has had a significant place in cultural studies and raises a number of
important concerns and themes that echo down and across the pathways of its
development. These include the cultural classification of persons into social
categories (youth), the demarcations of class, race and gender, the questions of
space, style, taste, media and meaning (that is, issues of culture), the place of
consumption within capitalist consumer societies and the vexed question of
resistance.
The category of youth is not a universal of biology but a changing social and
cultural construct that appeared at a particular moment of time under definitive
conditions. As a discursive construct, the meaning of youth alters across time and
space according to who is being addressed by whom. Hebdige has remarked that
youth has been constructed within and across the discourses of ‘trouble’ (youth-as-
trouble: youth-in-trouble) and/or ‘fun’. For example, through the figures of football
hooligans, motorbike boys and street corner gangs youth has been associated with
crime, violence and delinquency. Alternatively, youths have been represented as
playful consumers of fashion, style and a range of leisure activities. This is figured
by the partygoer, the fashion stylist and, above all, by the consuming post-1950s
‘teenager’.
While the concept of the ‘teenager’ has framed much popular discourse on
young people, cultural studies was drawn instead to the analytic concept of
subculture wherein youth subcultures were explored as stylized forms of resistance
to power. Youth subcultures are marked, it was argued, by the development of
particular styles that are said to ‘win space’ for themselves from both the parent
culture and the hegemonic class culture through symbolic resolutions of the class
contradictions they faced.
Today the lines of style that separated one youth subculture from another seem
to have collapsed. Consequently, it can be argued that we live in a post-subculture
phase in which young people are the creative bricoleurs of a postmodern consumer
culture. This involves picking and choosing aspects of a variety of styles and putting
them together in a process of mix and match. Further, contemporary
communications technologies have constructed commodities, meanings and
identifications of youth culture that cut across the boundaries of races or nation-
states, leading to global rap, global rave and global salsa. We might then ask about

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