Youth Culture and the Body - Studying Social Life - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Social Work

Download Youth Culture and the Body - Studying Social Life - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Social Work in PDF only on Docsity! Lecture 21 Youth culture and the body Studying Social Life 1 Whichever way life course stages are classified, 'youth' appears as a significant transition between childhood and adulthood. However, like childhood, 'adolescence' was only officially 'discovered' relatively recently (by G. STANLEY HALL in 1904). Why? Rites of passage associated with youth relate to the movement between dependence and independence, and the length of time spent in this transition has increased due to the separation of home from work entailed in modernity. Industrialization required that young adults left home to hold independent positions in the labour market. And they had to be trained for their new roles. A gap in the life course was created in which a tension arose between biological and sociological aspects of maturity. TEENAGE CONSUMER or JUVENILE DELINQUENT? There are significant connections between consumer culture and the social construction of youth. Style is central to the presentation of the youthful body. As we have seen, from the 1920s Hollywood increasingly glamourized the youthful body and the trappings of youth. Nevertheless, the discovery of 'youth culture' was a more recent phenomenon. In 1959, ABRAMS, then a market researcher, published The Teenage Consumer in which he claimed that the 1950s had seen the emergence of a new consumer group, distinguishable by its preference for leisure goods like records, clothes and motorbikes. Demand arose because, for the first time, young people were in full employment and freed from the need to contribute to their families - they had disposable income, which as spent on goods expressing pleasure in 'not being grown up' (FRITH). Recurrent moral panics over 'hooliganism' were met with- and attempts to control youth by institutional means like higher education and training schemes. MAKING SENSE OF MARGINALITY Youth culture wears many uniforms, but they are always distinguishable from the conventional styles of middle-aged adulthood. What is of interest to us is how this difference is manifested in the presentation of self via the body - through clothing, hairstyles and colouring, tattooing, piercing, and so on. Sociologists have interpreted youth subcultures in relation to the demands of a work-based, consumer society. MERTON saw juvenile delinquency as 'blocked access to social rewards': where social success is measured by personal wealth, but the economic climate is one of depression/recession, people cannot achieve success because the normal routes - through work - do not exist. Instead, kids turn to crime to finance a desirable lifestyle (ramraiding video stores). Other theorists dispute this model. However, it does usefully juxtapose youth as a phase with the contradictions brought about by socio-economic change, e.g. the 1960s skinhead as visible expression of the tension between his parents' respectable working-class ideals and the vogue for consumerism, neither of which he fits. HALL and JEFFERSON termed the assertion of alternative lifestyles and dress codes 'resistance through rituals'. Style (see HEBDIGE) works as 'bricolage' (pick + mix of symbols from a range of contexts worn to subvert their original meanings - e.g. punk uses of swastika; soccer casuals and knitwear). Such symbolic undermining engages public attention and raises awareness of social problems: How can we be expected to 'behave reasonably' and 'settle down' if jobs are unfulfilling or non-existent? So much for the 1970s and eighties. In the 1990s, the focus shifted from subcultures to clubcultures (THORNTON, REDHEAD), youth priorities moving to commodified forms of pleasure-seeking. The relationship of young people to the labour market is critical. But in a period when increased attention is turned towards leisure consumption, the rise of an income-rich older generation may mean that the market focuses more on another marginalized life course phase, that of retirement. ‘Youth’ has been idealized by advertisers as being about sexiness, having a good time, beauty and fun. Is this imagery of desire now being foisted upon the over- fifties and, if so, what might be the consequences for the social construction of other age groups? docsity.com