SOCCER CASUALS: A SLIGHT RETURN OF YOUTH CULTURE

This article examines the different ways youth in rural Shaanbei, northcentral China participate in cultural production. It explores the media through which young people express themselves and the roles that social institutions (temples, schools, villages, households), modern technologies (video compact discs), and translocal/transnational mass media (satellite and cable TV) play in enabling youth to assert their presence as cultural beings and producers. Shaanbei youth do not choose between modern forms of entertainment (karaoke songs) or traditional forms (playing drinking games), or between institutionally organized activities and those self-initiated to express themselves. (Rural Chinese youth, cultural production, temple festivals, drinking games) ********** Anthropologists have a long-standing interest in studying the socialization of children and processes of enculturation cross-culturally, yet youth culture has largely remained the preserve of sociologists and specialists of popular culture. The study of Western youth culture has its roots in studies of youth social and cultural movements in the 1960s and 1970s: the Hippies, the anti-war protests, Punks, Beatles fans, etc. (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Skelton and Valentine 1998). Youth culture in the West seems to be predicated on a self-conscious, relatively coherent set of mental attitudes and behavioral patterns, often dubbed subcultural or counter-cultural. The most important characteristics of Western urban youth culture are the degree of expressivity (e.g., It's loud!) in terms of music, fashion, hairstyle, and manners, and the effort to counter what is perceived to be adult stiffness and conservatism. Though having originated in the West, analytical approaches for studying Western urban youth movements seem to be easily transferable to the Chinese urban context, with the May Fourth Movement and subsequent student culture as prime examples of a self-conscious Chinese urban youth culture. In recent years, the import of rock 'n' roll, disco, hip hop, and rave parties further consolidated and expanded an urban youth style distinct from adult and other cultural productions (Farrer 2002; Moore 2005). (2) One might think that because rural China is portrayed in the media as being impoverished in things cultural (wenhua pinkun), (3) its youth lack the opportunity to have or produce culture. But this depends on where in rural China one looks. In certain parts of rural China, some forms of metropolitan youth culture are emerging since urban cultural forms are rapidly penetrating rural areas, especially along the coast and the peripheries of large cities. In a village near a major urban center (Heilongjiang in northeastern China), Yan (1999) found the local rural youth culture largely derivative of urban popular culture in terms of taste and activities (e.g., billiards, music cassette tapes, printed T-shirts). In Shaanbei, many aspects of youth culture are also drawn from metropolitan pop culture. Although the more education a Shaanbei rural youth receives the more he or she is alienated from village culture and peasant knowledge, the attractiveness of traditional forms of cultural production persists with young people, especially in places like Shaanbei, where such forms of cultural production are still vibrant and popular. Yan (1999) included in his study rural youth's increased consumerism and materialism, increasing premarital sex, the assertion of individual rights and independence, resistance to parents and local state authorities, and a tendency to try new ways of life such as working in the city or traveling. As the focus of this article is on youth cultural production, other aspects of youth life are de-emphasized. Cultural production here refers to the ensemble of mostly expressive cultural activities, and not instrumental activities such as agriculture, employment, and trade. Expressive culture also includes the consumption of cultural products, such as karaoke songs and the necessary accompanying equipment. …

This article explores the ways, forms and meanings of Korean pop culture for teenagers in Surabaya. Several studies show that Korean pop culture has developed in Indonesia since the early 2000s through Korean films, followed by music, food and beauty products. However, studies that focus on the ways, forms and meanings of Korean pop culture for Surabaya youth in metropolitan city are still very limited. This article, on the other hand, wants to discuss this in field research through in-depth interviews with 5 Surabaya teenagers, members of KLOSS (Korea Lovers Surabaya Community). This article shows that Korean pop culture has become a new culture for youth in Surabaya because its novelty values. They get the Korean pop through television and social media. The prominent forms of pop culture used by the majority of youths are Korean cultural symbols represented in everyday life. Meanwhile, the meaning of Korean pop culture is in the form of information about Korean youth, Korean artists and other “Korean-ness”.Keywords: Korean Pop Culture, To be Korea, Korean-ness, Surabaya Teenagers.

When Girls (and Boys) Just Want to Have Fun Naomi J. Wood (bio) Angela McRobbie. Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen.” Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991. Susan Willis. A Primer for Daily Life. Studies in Culture and Communication. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. In S. E. Hinton’s 1968 novel The Outsiders, adolescent struggle is divided into “Greasers” and “Socs,” the “have-nots” and the “haves” of class society. On the margins of the sympathetically portrayed Greasers’ world are the “greasy girls”; they are forever banned from the romantic discourse of heroic rebellion—associated in the novel with the southern gentlemen who ride bravely into certain death in Gone With the Wind—by their gender. All males in The Outsiders want “nice” girls, who are, by definition, Socs. Hinton’s narrator, Ponyboy, does not question the values that make Soc girls the prize in romantic sweepstakes, values that relegate Greaser girls to the also-rans; nor, until recently, have the many social and cultural critics questioned these values. In the 25 years since Hinton published her novel, definitions of adolescence itself remain masculine, with girls tacked on as an afterthought. In 1991, however, two books were published that examine the social construction of childhood and adolescence as intimately informed by class and gender. Both Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen” and Susan Willis’s A Primer for Daily Life focus on the ways cultural texts and their consumers both support and subvert the hegemonies that produce them. Both books provide important questions for critics and teachers of children’s literature to ask themselves about their field. Sociologist McRobbie’s book is a collection of landmark essays on [End Page 123] English working-class female adolescence. It grows out of her association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, but also poses questions that her colleagues had not thought to ask about what adolescence means for girls. Following a roughly chronological arrangement, the chapters reflect the growth and change of methodology of cultural studies over the last 18 years. The early essays, “Girls and Subcultures” (1978), “Settling Accounts with Subcultures” (1980), “The Culture of Working-Class Girls” (1979), and “The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text, and Action” (1982), provide an overview and critique of ostensibly radical sociological analyses that treat adolescent girls as uninteresting adjuncts to the real business of youth culture. McRobbie’s implicit point is that no sociological study can be complete without understanding the roles girls play in culture. Like other feminist scholars in the early 1980s, McRobbie is concerned with the silencing of female voices, with the absence of femininity as an object of study in male-dominated academic work. McRobbie wants to “combine a clear commitment to the analysis of girls’ culture with a direct engagement with youth culture as it is constructed in sociological and cultural studies” (17). For her, any real feminist intervention in culture must take place with understanding and dialogue between the objects and the subjects of study. The last, and most metacritical essay in this group concludes by criticizing the position of the researcher in relation to her subjects and by discussing the pros and cons of less “objectively scientific” and more participatory research. The crucial question for McRobbie is: “How can we make talk walk?” (79); she answers it by urging feminists to engage both in intellectual and political work, while “recognising both the value and the limitations of the kind of work we do” (79). McRobbie grounds the study of adolescent female culture by posing questions that need to be asked. She demonstrates how simplistic notions of class fail to consider the specificity of gender. In the second group of chapters, McRobbie focuses on literary texts as a way of understanding teenage socialization. This section reflects most clearly the revolution in popular culture study that the work of Cora Kaplan, Dave Morley, Janice Radway and others in the middle-1980s made in the understanding of the relationship between texts and readers. While “Jackie Magazine: Romantic Individualism and the Teenage Girl” (n.d., late 1970s) analyzes various codes of the teen magazine and suggests possible results of...

In an article in the Sunday Tasmanian shortly after the deaths of Melbourne teenagers Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in 2007, Tasmanian Catholic Schools Parents and Friends Federation president Bill Button claimed: “Parents are concerned because all of a sudden their child, if they have access to a computer, can turn into an Emo” (qtd. in Vowles 1). For a few months in 2007, the dangers of emo and computer use were significant themes in Australian newspaper coverage. Emo, an abbreviation of the terms “emocore” or “emotional hardcore”, is a melodic subgenre of punk rock music, characterised by “emotional” or personal themes. Its followers, who adopt a look that includes black stovepipe jeans, dyed black hair and side-parted long fringes, might merely have been one of the many “tribes” (Bennett 605) that characterise contemporary youth culture. However, over an approximately five-month period in 2007, the deaths of three teenagers in two separate incidents—the murder Carly Ryan in February and the suicides of Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in April—were linked to the emo subculture and to the social networking site MySpace, both of which were presented as dangerous and worrying developments in contemporary youth culture.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Popular Music Cultures, Media and Youth Consumption: Towards an Integration of Structure, Culture and Agency

The Punk Turn in Comedy: Masks of Anarchy

Issue 8(2) of this Journal included the article, ‘Little Hooliganz: The Inside Story of Glamorous Lads, Football Hooligans and Post-Subculturalism’ by Prof Steve Redhead. The author is professor of Sport and Media Cultures at the Chelsea School, Brighton University, and has been carrying out research on football fan sub-cultures, including but not limited to the issue of ‘football hooliganism’, for over 20 years. He describes his work on hooliganism as part of the ‘cluster’ of postmodern sub-cultural theory, which has been under-represented since extensive academic study on the issue of football crowd disorder began in the late 1970s. Redhead considers that the phenomenon of contemporary football crowd disorder has been diminishing significantly since the early 1990s (1993: 2) and he shares the views held by academics such as Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti that much of the attention given to the phenomenon, and indeed the actual social construction of it, is the result of a media-fuelled moral panic: ‘[football hooliganism] remains more or less an historical (and hysterical) mass media construction’ (1993: 3).

Investigations into youth culture are marginal to the field of youth studies. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham published studies of the post-war youth subcultures, such as the teddy boys and the punks, in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see Hall and Jefferson, 1976). From the 1980s onwards, however, the main concerns for youth studies were the transitions that young people made into the labour market.Transitions research continues to dominate, although the advent of the rave and dance cultures of the late 1980s prompted a partial return to investigations of youth culture. In direct contrast to the influential theories of the CCCS, many recent accounts of youth culture have moved away from structural and class-based accounts of young people’s experiences and have produced studies that stress the ‘tribal’ (Bennett, 1999, 2000), ‘individualized’ (Miles, 2000) and distinctly ‘postsubcultural’ (Muggleton, 2000) nature of the contemporary youth cultural experience. Recently, however, questions have been raised as to how far these theoretical insights are useful across youth cultural identities and experiences (Hollands, 2002; Nayak, 2003; Pilkington and Johnson, 2003). This article adds to this slowly growing literature. By drawing upon data collected for a PhD, it is suggested that structural factors, such as neighbourhood residence, can be influential in shaping the cultural identities and experiences of some groups of young people.

Rock and Roll in Rocket City: West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985. By Sergei I. Zhuk. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. [vii, 440 p. ISBN 9780801895500. $65.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Historian Sergei Zhuk's often fascinating, thoroughly researched study of Soviet city of Dniepropetrovsk makes a valuable contribution to study of late Soviet society and culture. He opposes what he rightly identifies as dominant Moscow and Leningrad bias of most scholars by examining an intriguing, and in many respects sui generis, provincial Soviet city. Located in eastern Ukraine, Dniepropetrovsk represented the most important part of Soviet military-industrial complex (p. 18), as missiles designed and manufactured at its Yuzhmash factory were used for both space exploration (Sputniks) and military purposes (nuclear weapons). Unlike Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, or other major Soviet cities, in 1959 it became closed, meaning it was off-limits to foreigners, including visitors from other socialist countries. Yuzhmash even had an official cover: manufacturing agricultural tractors and kitchen equipment (p. 21). Its citizenry operated under unusually comprehensive oversight and in many respects was more beholden to Moscow than to local Ukrainian governance. Yet, as Zhuk discusses in detail, Western influences- literature, film, and popular music- streamed in nonetheless through a variety of sources, among them foreign radio stations and a thriving black market linking Dniepro petrovsk with other nearby open cities, chief among them Western (and Westernized) Ukrainian city of Lviv. These cultural influences and their ramifications for national identity, religious practice, political beliefs, and changing tastes form Zhuk's central subject. The main goal of this book, he writes, to show how an obsession with cultural products from West revealed most important trend in closed Soviet society-the Westernization of Soviet popular culture and Soviet ideological discourse not only in capital cities but also in provinces (p. 9). He later elaborates upon book's main themes as the construction of local idea of West through consumption of Western cultural products, and inclusion of this ideal in identity formation of Dniepropetrovsk's (p. 16). In arguing his thesis, Zhuk addresses a range of cultural objects wider than his title suggests: popular music receives most constant attention, but films and literature, including foreign fiction as well as Ukrainian nationalist writing, also receive focused attention. Beyond specialists in musicology and ethnomusicology book will be of interest primarily to cultural historians and social scientists of former USSR and its successor states, although scholars of global cold war culture will also benefit from comparative possibilities Zhuk's case study affords. Zhuk examines entire late Soviet period: his three larger sections move decade by decade from Khrushchev Thaw of late 1950s and early 1960s (part 1: Beating 1960s) through Brezhnev's Stag - nation in late 1960s and 1970s (part 2: Hard-Rocking 1970s) to beginning of Perestroika in 1985 (part 3: Disco Era). Each section is subdivided into several relatively compact chapters, each of which focuses on a single medium (literature, film, popular music) and/or issue (nationalism, religion, tourism, human rights). examples in these chapters are selected thoughtfully, and although often very meticulous and sometimes filled with dense statistics, discussion never really becomes bogged down. Zhuk's richly textured account reveals not only increasing Westernization and Russification of Dniepropetrovsk's youth culture but also near constant tensions between center and periphery-between local, republic, and all-Union factions- over goings-on in city. …

This article looks at the controversial music genre Oi! in relation to youth cultural identity in late 1970s’ and early 1980s’ Britain. As a form of British punk associated with skinheads, Oi! has oft-been dismissed as racist and bound up in the politics of the far right. It is argued here, however, that such a reading is too simplistic and ignores the more complex politics contained both within Oi! and the various youth cultural currents that revolved around the term ‘punk’ at this time. Taking as its starting point the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ conception of youth culture as a site of potential ‘resistance’, the article explores the substance and motifs of Oi!’s protest to locate its actual and perceived meaning within a far wider political and socio-economic context. More broadly, it seeks to demonstrate the value of historians examining youth culture as a formative and contested socio-cultural space within which young people discover, comprehend, and express their desires, opinions, and disaffections.

Studies of youth subcultures have been carried out for decades from varioustheoretical perspectives (including functionalism, social ecology, neo-Marxism,deviance and labeling, cultural studies, sports and leisure studies) as well as fromvarious methodological standpoints (e.g., deductive and inductive approaches,insider and outsider perspectives, ethnographic, historical comparative, and semiotics).The sociological study of youth subcultures thus offers a wide range of oppor-tunities to bring together an interesting topic for young people and theoreticalor methodological pedagogies.

Postsubcultural theory, a more recent school of thought in the study of youth cultures, grew in popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s as a response to the Birmingham School's Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies' assumptions of subcultures. The Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), a school of thought that arose from the UK after World War II, argued that youth cultures were maled-dominated and largely the result of class inequalities. In looking at today's youth cultures, the characteristics presented by subcultural theorists are no longer the norm and subcultures are no longer seen as phenomena based entirely on class and gender. As a response, postsubcultural theory argues that contemporary subcultures are multi-faceted and diverse, and no longer meet the definition set forth by the Birmingham School. Using today's current punk rock subculture a case study, this dissertation explores the findings of fifteen interviews with members of the contemporary punk rock community. These interviews were conducted with a variety of participants within the community such as fans, blog editors, and band members, which were conducted through two separate studies. Through the application of discourse analysis literature to the interview data, the dissertation investigates the ways in which the values and norms of the subculture are perpetuated and demonstrated. Excerpts from interviews support the postsubcultural notion that today's punk rock subculture is not necessarily a working class response to the status quo, but instead, this subculture relies on its own set of norms and values that align more closely with the assumptions of postsubcultural theory. Common themes across these interviews were presented to support the notion that this specific community does, in fact, fit many of the qualities of a postsubculture. Though the contemporary punk rock community does, in fact, reflect many of the characteristics set forth by postsubcultural theory, the research conducted for this dissertation discovered some additional traits (such as the importance of diversity and early introduction of participants to the subculture) that further support the argument for more research of subcultures that exist today.

In the 1960s, Britain feared that the triumph of the television would mean that citizens all over the country stayed indoors. New formats such as pop programmes directly catered to the interests of British youth, allowing teenagers access to fashion, music, and youth culture without leaving their homes. This chapter investigates how public space such as parks and street corners were still used by teenagers for social interaction and cultural production, and thus still had an impact on fashion and other forms of youth cultural expression. The popularity of modern pop culture meant that it was soon so omnipresent that in London, municipal institutions such as the Parks Department before long began to reconceptualise their annual outdoor programmes, allowing pop concerts to take place in parks. Further, the chapter explores how, thanks to its role in the everyday cultural practices of youth, the street became a popular motif in pop culture. At the same time, loitering and the occupation of space provoked moral panics; people were alarmed when youth cultural tribes clashed on the streets, and by the late 1960s, Hippies had begun to turn squatting and the use of public space into a political statement. Similar hysteria accompanied the use of spaces and places around London, which young people were newly able to visit as a result of the growth in individual mobility. The arrival of London’s teenage crowd in seaside towns caused a spectacle and became the focus of public attention when local politicians and the media reported clashes between teenagers and police. The chapter adds a new perspective to the vast research literature on the history of the seaside town riots in 1965–66 by analysing the conflicts between youths, local authorities, and business owners that resulted from a lack of opportunities.KeywordsStreet cultureParksPolicingJuvenile delinquencyYouth riotsSeaside townsBrightonModsRockersHippie cultureMoral panicsLoiteringWorking-class cultureHoliday-makingPost-war BritainBomb sites

Reviewed by: The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II Gigi Peterson The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II. By Luis Alvarez. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 336 pp. $34.95 (cloth). Luis Alvarez adds an important comparative dimension to the growing body of works on Mexican-descent youth in 1940s Los Angeles, works which discuss the so-called Zoot Suits Riots and the Sleepy Lagoon case. In The Power of the Zoot, he argues that through counter-cultural forms of "zoot" and jazz culture (the two intersect), minority youth asserted their dignity in the face of segregation and other white-dominated norms of propriety and power. Alvarez offers a broader exploration of "zoot culture" as "multiracial, gendered, and transregional" (p. 5). To accomplish this, he compares and connects Mexican American and African American manifestations of zoot culture in both Los Angeles and New York City. He integrates other ethnic strands (Asian American, Euro-American) into discussions of youth cultures and also provides national context, including discussion of race riots across the United States in the summer of 1943. Alvarez builds on earlier scholarship on both African American "hepcats" in New York and mostly Mexican-descent pachucos/as in Los Angeles (though often used interchangeably with "zoot suiter," the terms are not quite synonymous). His greatest innovation, in terms of the historiography, lies in uniting the two scenes and in adding interview excerpts and readings of primary sources that "place the youth themselves as central figures" (p. 6). The work is admirably wide and deep, though essentially US-focused (others have treated the inter-American dimensions of wartime antidiscrimination struggles). His study is bicoastal without disorder, alternating successfully between Los Angeles and New York thanks to thematic organization and solid transitions. The book's structure follows a logic seen in some previous works. Part 1 explains histories of discrimination that shaped communities and the lives within, including through labor markets, residential and other modes of segregation, law enforcement, and ideas of deviant minority youth. Part 2 provides a richly textured discussion of jazz-zoot culture, including commonalities and differences between its New York and Los Angeles variants. Central to Alvarez's argument is that "Body Politics"—the display of style—and claiming of "Public Space" in segregated cities were "Struggles for Dignity"—including the rejection of racialized, class-laden norms for proper comportment. Part 3 details the 1943 riots in Los Angeles and offers a fine synthesis of those that [End Page 551] followed in cities across the nation. A thoughtful epilogue discusses "the interethnic and internationalist dimensions of youth culture" that developed after World War II, underscoring the long-range historical significance of 1940s countercultures. The study is enriched by multiple voices of those who lived these developments. Explaining or recalling youthful days, they articulate the sense of self derived from living "the politics of cool." Alvarez deftly blends analysis with letting historical actors speak for themselves, and the resulting work underscores the complexities of identifications and the ironies of some forms of resistance against stereotype and oppression. As Alvarez notes, in constructing and asserting alternative masculinities (in the face of a dominant cultural ideal of "white" manhood), some zooters questioned the masculinity of white servicemen and "denigrated the dignity of young African American and Mexican American women, gays, and lesbians" (p. 164). Through lines such as this one, The Power of the Zoot suggests some interesting avenues for future research. The work is well grounded, with a bibliography that includes a substantial array of secondary works, including studies of youth and subaltern cultures far removed from U.S. locales. Notably, Alvarez thus reminds readers how global reading and comparative angles can aid analysis. Indeed, he explains that his "understanding of dignity [a key concept in his study] is deeply influenced by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico" (p. 248 n. 19). In noting intellectual debts, particularly British culture and subaltern theorists, he is meticulous in the text as well as citations, a practice to be applauded. This underscores, however, a puzzling standard of acknowledgment for Eduardo Obregón Pagán's Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon (University...

Richard Hoggart’s academic career during the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the emergence of distinctive national and international youth cultures in Britain and across the world. Hoggart, first as a provincial WEA tutor in the 1950s and then as a Professor at The University of Birmingham during the 1960s, had first-hand knowledge of some of the most significant youth movements and cultures to emerge in the post-war period; from the Teddy Boys of the early 1950s to the global student revolts of the late 1960s. Moreover, his work is infused with references to Youth Culture. These range chronologically from his vivid description of ‘juke box boys’ lounging in the milk bars of Northern England, and described in The Uses of Literacy (1957) — ‘boys aged between fifteen and twenty, with drape suits, picture ties and an American slouch’ — to the early identification of the teenage consumer in the Albemarle Report of 1960, which he co-wrote with Leslie Paul, and on into the late 1960s and beyond. He wrote about provincial Youth Culture in the ‘Swinging’ Sixties; about the student protest movements of the late 1960s and even, briefly, about Oxbridge youth under Thatcherism.KeywordsLabour PartyYouth CultureYouth LeaderInaugural LectureYouth MovementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.