This article analyses the construction of skateboard masculinity as a performative visual culture, related to the conditions for masculine subject positions in upper secondary school visual art and media education. The empirical material comes from visual ethnographic research in classroom and discourse analysis of one pupil’s skateboarding video and an interview with the same pupil. The results show that the masculinity performed in both the visual art classroom and in pupil’s skate video is complex and moves between homosocial expressions and intimacy, risk-taking and visual culture enacted as being cool and an outsider. The analysis implies a linkage to a neo-liberal ideal in which the values of play and pleasure as a crucial aspect of counterculture are connected to entrepreneurial individualism, consumer creativity and market trends.
The current article links masculine leisure with bodily performances and playfulness connected to global neoliberal expressions of gender, class and ethnicity. This study draws from an analysis of a skateboard video of young white middle-class men skateboarding in an urban environment in one of Sweden's greater metropolitan areas. An interview with the young man who created the video was also conducted. The analysis brings together lines of inquiry that concern young males' playful use of urban space with the articulation of the visual culture of skateboarding as a homosocial, mainly white middle-class practice where bravery and risk-taking are essential articulations. We argue that the skateboarders articulate masculine subjectivity by a complex amalgam of playfulness, risk-taking, colonization of space and the visual style involved in their skateboarding. The construction and presentation of self in the skateboard video are integrated with the quest for individual identity, self-realization and meaning making that pertain to a global entrepreneurial mindset in which mainly white middle-class men are privileged. ABSTRACT I denna artikel länkas maskulinitet, fritid och kroppslig aktivitet samman med lekfullhet och uttryck för kön, klass och etnicitet i en global neoliberal kontext. I studien analyseras en skateboardvideo där unga vita medklassmän åker skateboard i en svensk urban miljö. En intervju genomfördes med den unge man som skapade videon. Analyserna för samman utforskande av unga mäns lekfulla användning av urban miljö med artikuleringen av den visuella kulturen i skateboard som en homosocial och i huvudsak vit medelklass-praktik, där mod och risktagande är väsentliga artikulationer. Vi menar att skateboardåkare artikulerar maskulin subjektivitet genom en sammanflätad komplexitet som består av lekfullhet, risktagande, kolonialisering av offentligt utrymme och visuell stil i deras skateboard-praktik. Konstruktionen av självrepresentationer i skateboardvideon är integrerad med sökandet efter en individuell identitet, självförverkligande och ARTICLE HISTORY meningsskapande som tillhör ett globalt entreprenöriellt tankesätt, där i huvudsak vita medelklassmän privilegieras.
Endnotes 1 The term "wicked problem" was first coined by Horst Rittel, design theorist and professor of design methodology at the Ulm School of Design, Germany. Typically, these problems involve a cultural or social problem that is difficult or impossible to solve. Many designers and activist believe that the best way to tackle such issues, not necessarily to solve them, is with a collaborative or interdisciplinary approach. 2 Visual essays normally integrate image and text in a creative way to document, evaluate or reflect on art-based research, learning, activities or events or projects.
This article investigates changes in visual art education through gendered visual, pedagogical and theoretical interventions. The research material is derived from a combination of two independent research projects and examples from published research. The material consists of images and video diary recordings by young people, and researched didactic examples of working with gender in visual art education. Young people's gendered cultures include 257 Synnyt / Origins | 2 / 2019 | Peer-reviewed | Full paper a growing vocabulary of gender definitions and ways to 'perform' gender. At the same time, everyday life experiences are largely structured around binary gender logics. This article answers questions regarding the ability of visual art education to change and transform stereotyped thinking and the binary oppositions of gender. Analysing visual and verbal material from a post-humanist perspective, the findings suggest that visual art education should engage with the gender problem, and that it has the capability to dissolve gender binaries and stereotypical thinking by facilitating fabulation, imagining, speculation and fantasising about the future. Visual art education seems to benefit from focusing on learning processes that are open-ended and acknowledging the affect and visual desires involved in image making. These are driving forces specific to visual art, which have the potential to differentiate gendered stereotypes.
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