Teenage kicks: Urban narratives of dissent not deviance

Abstract

This article utilises contemporary social and cultural theory in an interrogation of the ideological construction of activities nominated as social problems. Specifically the article analyses the events of computer hacking, joyriding and raving, activities which are prevalent within youth culture. These activities have been subjected to criminal sanction and regulation and therefore bought within an arena of (governmental) surveillance. This article assesses these events not within the paradigms of criminology and deviancy but as examples of an affirmative cultural politics operative through the technologies of inversion and appropriation which are in excess. These subcultural events assume the status of resistant practices not in terms of ideology but rather in terms of alternative narratives of dissensus representing possible moments of community.