ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is first to review and update work on youth falling within the fields of both sociology and cultural studies; second to consider in more depth questions of ethnicity and questions of sexuality within this overlapping field; and third to argue for a new convergence of cultural studies and sociology where each might benefit from the strengths of the other and in so doing overcome the tendency to disciplinary boundary-marking and hostility which has become disappointingly commonplace over the last few years. Cultural studies has been characterized as excessively concerned with texts and meanings and has been seen by many sociologists as lacking in methodology and in rigour. Sociology in turn is often regarded in cultural studies as being uninterested in questions which cannot be contained within the existing language of 1970s Marxist/feminist theory. Cultural studies flaunts its wild style while sociology prides itself on its materialist steadfastness. This is not a conflict which has come out in the open. Instead it has bubbled underneath and has taken the form of barbed references and footnotes, with occasional outbursts of overt hostility. The debate has emerged more clearly in the contents of the academic curriculum, where sociology sees itself as concentrating on the real world while castigating cultural studies for daring to suggest that there is no ‘real’ world, an issue to which I will return in the course of this chapter.1
