ABSTRACT
Late-modern societies are widely claimed to have given an increasingly prominent role to the leisure industries, and new consumer activities (Featherstone 1991). There has been a shift in emphasis away from ‘production’ to a more fragmented social order, one where culture and consumption have more central roles (Jameson 1991; Lash and Urry 1987; Giddens 1991). These sites of consumption, it has been argued, offer a potentially broader, and more differentiated range of masculine identities from those discourses and practices produced around work or career (Nixon 1996; Jackson et al. 2001; Whannel 2002; Edwards 1997). Mort (1988: 194) suggests that ‘A new bricolage of masculinity’ is the noise coming from the ‘fashion house, the market place the terraces and the street’:
On the high streets, in the clubs, bars, brasseries, even on the terraces. It seems that young men are now living out fractured identities, representing themselves differently, feeling differently.
