ABSTRACT
Like Helmut Hartwig (1993), I too feel a sense of acute anxiety at the thought of writing about youth. It is at once too close and too far away. I am too old. I have a daughter of 15 who lives these experiences and in talking or writing about them I feel I am encroaching on her private space. Frequently the difference between being a sociologist interested in youth and being the parent of a teenage girl reaches a crisis point. Sometimes this entails the simple recognition of the huge gap between the loose and tentative sociological observations of my own early work carried out in Birmingham in the late 1970s, and the psychological complexity of growing up, a process which now, as I see it happening on a day-to-day basis, causes me to question almost everything I ever wrote about teenage girls (McRobbie, 1991). At other moments the crisis is of a different nature, more like that described by Dick Hebdige (1987) when he too is given cause to ponder his earlier writing on youth and his present position as somebody who, when kept awake for nights at a time by the loud music played by his young neighbours, eventually gets dressed and goes out in the middle of the night and angrily complains. Getting dressed and going out in the middle of the night and sometimes in the early hours of the morning to pick up my daughter from ‘raves’ held in empty warehouses on trading estates on the outskirts of North London precipitates the same kind of reaction in myself, though this time it is extreme anxiety rather than anger and frustration which I feel, driving out into the early light looking for the appointed spot where I wait, as the sweat-drenched, pale-faced youths come out in straggly bunches.
