This paper describes some of the ways in which popular culture may be a site of social resistance. The subculture of skateboarding is described as one form of popular culture that resists capitalist social relations, and the skateboarders’ particularly overt resistance to an amateur contest provides a framework for characterizing their daily and more covert behaviors of resistance. Although social resistance has the potential to change dominant social relations, it is often limited by contradictions and accommodations. In this case, the skateboarders’ sexist behavior is one of their significant contradictions. Finally, some implications of social resistance are addressed.
This paper explores gendered relations and identities which evolved amongst street skateboarders. Drawing from Bourdieu, we suggest that various social fields such as 'skateboarding media', 'D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) culture', and 'lifestyle/ action sports' overlapped and worked to maintain gendered divisions within street skateboarding based upon the logics of individualism and embodiment. Masculine habituses were most closely associated with risk-taking behaviours and technical prowess; they became significantly rewarded with social and cultural capital. Conversely, women's habituses were considered as lacking in skill and aversive to risk-taking. Women thus came to be positioned as inauthentic participants in the street skateboarding social field and were largely excluded from accessing symbolic capital. Corporate-sponsored and supervised skate events which were explicitly set up to be gender inclusive provided a strong counter to 'street' practices. These 'All Girl' events were considered 'positive' and 'empowering' spaces by the women in our study. We explore how these spaces might work alongside women-focused niche media forms in order to support resistant femininities and practices which might underpin more egalitarian gender relations in street skateboarding.
This article examines the consumption of alternative sport's subcultural media. Our research is situated in the context of `post' CCCS subcultural research which has explored how the media and the market are central to the authentication of popular cultural practices. Qualitative audience research was conducted with windsurfers from the UK and skateboarders from the US, examining the meanings that the niche magazines have for the participants of those alternative sports in the construction of their sporting identities. We focused on participants' readings of magazine advertising images, exploring their discourses about `authentic' identity and status in their subcultures, particularly through their complex and `creative' readings of the meanings of images and brands. Our empirical research suggests that the magazines played an important role in providing and circulating cultural knowledges, but also were an avenue for the participants to display their subcultural capital. We map the interpretive frameworks used by both groups to discuss `authentic' discourses of their sports. These centred on action photos of people `doing it' and their associated lifestyles and social worlds. Inauthentic images included those that portrayed equipment simply as commodities, or brands that could not demonstrate long-term commitment to the sports and lifestyles, or were targeting outsiders/beginners. Additionally authentic status was based on assumptions of maleness and whiteness, making full inclusion complicated for females and non-white participants.
Within sport ethnography, the term “subculture” has been employed so broadly that the term has lost much of its explanatory power. In this paper, we attempt to reclaim the explanatory powers of the concept subculture by differentiating it from the concept “subworld.” The paper reviews the theoretical foundations of the concept of subculture and subworld, proposes definitional distinctions, and finally makes recommendations for the use of these concepts in future ethnographic research in sport.
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