Using research examples, this article expands the theoretical premise that the 'new' reflexivity constitutes an element of cultural capital for contemporary youth. Employing the sociological ideas of cultural capital, habitus, reflexivity and risk, the authors propose that Beck's notion of 'risk' provides a useful way of understanding what drives the development of this reflexivity in the habitus of groups of young people, especially negotiation of risk. However, the emergence of this new reflexivity in youth habitus does not diminish the importance of socioeconomic class as some proponents of reflexive modernization claim. Quite the contrary. The capacity for reflexive negotiation of future risks, both real and perceived, has become another form of what Bourdieu calls embodied cultural capital -which remains inequitably distributed along class lines.
Young people investing themselves in DIY cultures have to negotiate the complex but now normalised nexus of employment, unemployment and underemployment to make ends meet, while maintaining space in their lives to pursue their creative and artistic passions. This article presents research with young people in an underground music scene across Australia who are balancing economic pressures with their desires to generate and uphold DIY and punk-influenced activities in a networked community of likeminded friends and collaborators. Many of the participants actively ‘choose poverty’, that is, they knowingly and strategically make decisions that ‘keep overheads low’ to free up temporal and mental space to continue to be creative. Their ideas of being successful are not expressed in material terms, but are contingent upon a future where they continue to have the opportunity to invest themselves in their interests even if that means living in relative poverty. Using the oft-ignored Bourdieusian concepts of illusio, struggle and strategy, this article provides a case study of some of the ways young people deal with the risks and opportunities of a precarious existence. In this case, living an ethical life trumps material concerns, projecting a hopeful attitude towards the future.
This article explores the ways that gender, sexuality, pleasure, and risk are entangled in affective labour and the production of value in ‘front of house’ bar work. Through their work as bar staff at ‘hip’ inner-city Melbourne venues, the young women we discuss produce affects in the form of a ‘vibe’ of relaxation, fun, pleasure, and release. We address McRobbie’s call for the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour to be explored and highlight the ways gender relations including the heterosexual matrix of desire are mobilised in the production of value in young women’s bar work. We discuss the tensions at play in this context where women are required to generate both a positive and a pleasurable feeling in their interactions with others while negotiating the complex politics of heterosexual desire while at work, including managing and negotiating harassment from male customers. This management requires complex sensate and embodied practices that are both conscious and unconscious (described, for example, as an ‘instinct’), involving constantly ‘scanning’ and ‘reading the crowd’ and monitoring their own embodied and affective responses to particular men while they carry on other conversations or pour drinks. We argue it is critical to study the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour in order to expose the ways relations of inequality can be mobilised in the production of value in this context.
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