ABSTRACT
Although “youth culture and the “sociology of youth”—and particularly critical and Marxist perspectives on them-have been central strands in the development of Cultural Studies over the past fifteen years, the emphasis from the earliest work of the National Deviancy Conference onward has remained consistently on male youth cultural forms. There have been studies of the relation of male youth to class and class culture, to the machinery of the state, and to the school, community, and workplace. Football has been analyzed as a male sport, drinking as a male form of leisure, the law and the police as patriarchal structures concerned with young male (potential) offenders. I don’t know of a study that considers, never mind prioritizes, youth and the family; women and the whole question of sexual division have been marginalized. This failure by subcultural theorists to dislodge the male connotations of “youth” inevitably poses problems for feminists teaching about these questions. As they cannot use the existing text straight, what other options do they have?
