ABSTRACT
One of the major achievements of youth cultural studies in the last decade must be its success in removing itself from the academic arena. The concepts of ‘youth subculture’ and even ‘youth culture’ in general now appear part of a past discourse in which vertical divisions of dominance and resistance (sub- and counter-culture), fixed subjectivities (‘youth’), single reading positions and unidirectional action reigned supreme. In the 1990s it is the ‘discursively produced subject’ which defines the research agenda whose contours consist of horizontal relations, multiple incursions, grey areas, incorporations and spaces, and disparate and diverse identities. This is more than rhetoric; developments in macro social theory have had a significant impact on the study of youth cultural practice at the micro level. It is no longer possible to talk of a single ‘youth culture’ which facilitates socialization into a fixed social space during a ‘difficult’ period of life, thereby securing social stability (functionalist approach) nor of various ‘subcultures’ which resist this fixation into subordinate positions of ‘working-class’, ‘black’ or ‘female’ youth articulating their resistance through ritual or style (neo-Marxist and Gramscian-based resistance theories) (Pilkington 1994a: 8–43).
