Abstract
Various discourses contribute to ‘thinking’ youth in particular ways and this chapter examines a selection of these discourses and considers the question of what is at stake in such formations. The discussion references a range of contemporary issues about youth, but it opens with an examination of two controversial events and the media attention they generated as examples that mobilise a cluster of discursive responses concerning youth. In identifying a number of these discourses in their popular and academic forms – specific aspects of which will be addressed further in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 – I look to the discursive history that they emerge from. This involves an analysis of different conceptual paradigms and how they inform contemporary youth discourses. Starting with a developmental paradigm, I examine the work of Enlightenment thinkers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then analyse a developmental psychology perspective. Following this, I consider a critical political economy paradigm by focusing on the work of education theorist, Henry Giroux. Finally I look at youth within a (sub)cultural studies paradigm, addressing both classic subculture theory and more recent scholarship on ‘post-subculture’ theory1. I examine how each approach conceptualises youth, exploring what assumptions each approach makes about youth as a category, and how each approach contributes to a set of discourses which inform com-monsense understandings of youth.
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Notes
See, for example, Ariel Levy Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005);
Gail Dines Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010); Patrice Oppliger Girls Gone Skank: The Sexualisation of Girls in American Culture (2008);
Natasha Walter Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (2010);
M. Gigi Durham The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualisation of Young Girls and Five Keys to Fixing It (2009);
Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualised Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids (2009);
Melinda Tankard Reist (ed.) Getting Real: Challenging the Sexu-alisation of Girls (2009);
Sharna Olfman (ed.) The Sexualisation of Childhood (2008).
See Andy Bennet and Keith Kahn Harris’ ‘Introduction’ in After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture (2004) for an outline of key criticisms of the CCCS model of subcultural resistance. See also Muggleton (2000), Hodkinson (2007).
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© 2013 Fleur Gabriel
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Gabriel, F. (2013). The State of Contemporary Youth: Conceptual Underpinnings of Dominant Youth Discourses. In: Deconstructing Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317520_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317520_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34887-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31752-0
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