ABSTRACT
Given that subcultures have often been regarded as a vehicle through which young people resist dominant norms and structures, one might expect that such groups would have raised signifi cant challenges to the boundaries of gender. However, there exists a long-standing connection between subcultures and dominant ideologies of masculinity. Girls have traditionally occupied a marginal position in the terrain of youth culture and academic studies about it. McRobbie (1980) deplores an exclusion of female presence from subcultures on two levels; fi rstly, the male domination of subcultures and their leisure spaces, and secondly, the masculinist bias of early subcultural studies. The second factor, she argues, is rooted in academic sociology and its tradition of researching male-defi ned issues centring on public spaces and delinquency, which led to an exclusion of girls from youth cultural theory. The fi rst presents itself as a typical feature of the classic postwar subcultures (e.g. rockers, mods, skins), which McRobbie dismisses as offering no attractions to girls.
