"This is How I Think": Skate Life, Corresponding Cultures and Alternative White Masculinities.

Abstract

This Is How I Think contributes to our understanding of the politics of youth consumer culture by discussing the ways in which white masculinity is presented in youth media and elaborating young men’s reactions to these portrayals. Contemporary media representations of white male youth present alternative masculinities that rely on both dominant American values and the mockery of non-whites, homosexuals, and women to maintain men’s power. Utilizing theories of the media audience, youth culture, race, and gender to discuss ethnographic data collected in a community of skateboarders, I contend that skate culture produces alternative modes of masculinity that are not anti-patriarchal, and thus do not disrupt normative power relations. Further, I suggest, skate culture creates a space in which young men can experience the mental and emotional pleasure of escape and self-expression – an experience often denied young men in a dominant culture that expects them to be emotionally reticent and in control. Considering the interplay of mass-, niche-, and independently-produced media and introducing the notion of “corresponding cultures,” This is How I Think bridges a false dichotomy between “subculture” and “mainstream” that perpetuates the notion that subcultures completely and continuously resist a dominant culture from which they are wholly separated. A “corresponding culture” is a culture that is both in constant conversation (or correspondence) with a wide array of mainstream, niche, and local media forms and finds various affinities (or corresponds) with these forms’ ideologies. Constantly in motion, a corresponding culture is a group organized around a particular lifestyle or activity that interacts with various levels of media and variously agrees or disagrees with those media’s espoused ideas. Skateboarding media and skateboarders frequently center these correspondences on nascent critiques of dominant masculinities that manage, at the same time, to maintain the power of white middle-class heterosexual American men via continued expressions of heterosexuality, dominance over non-white “Others” and women, and traditional American norms of freedom and independence.