Skate and create/skate and destroy: The commercial and governmental incorporation of skateboarding

Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s skateboarding was variously construed as a children's activity, a fad, or underground activity. More recently there has been a trend to consider skateboarding as respectable as it is increasingly incorporated into commercial and governmental processes. Yet despite the fact that it has been so incorporated into the mainstream, the theme of resistance continues to strongly resonate with skateboarding. This article develops an account of the incorporation of skateboarding which demonstrates that purely oppositional or resistive readings of skateboarding are problematic. Such an account demonstrates that commercial incorporation is not simply a case of gentrification, corruption or exploitation as some instances of incorporation are supported and resistance has a constitutive role in shaping incorporation. Similarly, governmental programs, strategies and technologies arise out of a complex field of contestation in which resistance does not operate outside of rule but is involved in actively shaping and altering the governmental incorporation of skateboarding.