Youth Culture

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The term youth culture is used generally in reference to the ways adolescents set themselves apart from the adult culture. Although age-based cultural differences have existed since the beginnings of recorded history, it was only in the 1950s, after the crystallization of “teenagers” as distinct social personae with their own music, lifestyles, fads, and characteristic slang, that the concept of a “youth culture” as separate from adult culture materialized in North American and European society. Before then anyone reaching the age of puberty was expected to conform to the norms of the larger adult culture.

The emergence of an autonomous youth culture was heralded in fictional form by the American novelist J. D. Salinger (1919–) in his still popular and controversial novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951. Salinger provided the first portrait of the new teenage persona—a portrait that was shortly thereafter enshrined in all kinds of media (magazines, songs, television programs, and movies), taking on a social life of its own. Since the mid1950s youth culture has evolved independently and primarily through lifestyle designations associated primarily with youth-generated musical trends and styles (rock and roll, disco, punk, and rap). This is why cultural historians tend to characterize the evolving forms of youth culture with terms such as the hippie era, the disco era, the punk era, and the hip-hop era. Each era is in fact marked by its own pattern of symbolism, ritual, slang, and overall lifestyle (clothing and body decorations) derived from attendant musical styles.

The study of youth culture in the social and human sciences has become a major academic enterprise since the 1960s. Three major cultural theories have come forth relating specifically to youth, as separate from the psychology of adolescence. One of these posits that any youth trend is perceived initially by the adult culture as subversive or transgressive, constituting a sign of impending apocalyptic danger or threatening societal values, but which gradually dissipates and blends into the larger cultural mainstream. Known as “moral panic theory,” the concept was proposed by Stanley Cohen (1972) in his insightful study of mods and rockers in the mid-1960s. An early twenty-first century crystallization of moral panic surfaced as a result of the trend of many youths to “network socially” on the Internet at sites such as MySpace and Friendster.

Another main theory is that youth culture has become the default form of all North American and European culture, spreading throughout the social landscape independently of age. As the social critic Thomas Frank (1997) has skillfully argued, youth has become a social and economic commodity since the 1960s. Because youth sells, trends in the adolescent world quickly become the cultural norm, dictating look, taste in music, and fashion.

A third major theory of youth culture is that it constitutes a form of carnivalesque theater in which the sacred, perceived to be anything authoritative, rigid, or serious, is “profaned” or mocked simply for the sake of it. This theory has been inspired by the work of the social critic Mikhael Bakhtin (1986). It would explain why, for example, emerging youth forms of culture seem to fly in the face of the adult official “sacred world” while at the same time not posing any serious subversive political challenge to it.

SEE ALSO Culture; Street Culture

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin, Mikhael M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee.

Danesi, Marcel. 2003. My Son Is an Alien: A Cultural Portrait of Today’s Youth. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Danesi, Marcel. 2006. Perspectives on Youth Culture. Boston: Pearson Education.

Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.

Palladino, Grace. 1996. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books.

Marcel Danesi

YOUTH CULTURE

Peer Socialization

A flamboyant youth subculture with its own ways of speaking, dressing, and acting flourished in the 1920s. Youth peer culture grew in the context of the family's retreat into a private emotional world and of the extended length of time teenagers and young adults spent in school. In the 1920s the high school, college, and peer group replaced the family's role in socializing adolescents; now these institutions defined the world of youth.

Mass Phenomenon

The new importance of schooling in creating peer culture was indicated by the marked acceleration in rates of attendance: between 1900 and 1930 highschool enrollments increased 650 percent, and attendance in colleges and universities went up threefold. Of the three decades, the 1920s witnessed the greatest rate of increase. By 1930 school attendance was a mass phenomenon for the first time: close to 60 percent of the highschool age population and almost 20 percent of those of college age enrolled in school. Thus school peer culture now reached youth from a wide range of economic classes and racial and ethnic groups, blending and homogenizing patterns of behavior and attitudes among these diverse groups.

Boy/Girl Relationships

According to Middletown, sociologists Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd's classic study of life in Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s high school became "a place from which [youth] go home to eat and sleep." Young men and women met in classes, at evening socials, and in after-school activities. They found privacy in cars and went out with friends four or more evenings each week. Teenagers saw movies together, drove to the next town on the weekend for dances, and parked in lovers' lanes on the way home. According to the Lynds, nearly one-half of Muncie's male highschool students and one-third of its female students took part in the new practice of petting, which came into vogue because of the youths' economic independence and freedom from adult supervision. Petting parties attracted these youths, and girls who did not attend became less popular. The youth culture of the 1920s, in Muncie and beyond, provided a setting for sexual experimentation and changing moral attitudes toward sexual behavior. The new practice of dating permitted paired relationships without implying a commitment to marriage; it tested compatibility and encouraged experimental relationships with different partners. The privacy afforded by dating encouraged sexual exploration, and the practice of petting permitted a range of erotic physical contacts, while respecting the taboo against sexual intercourse.

Collegiate Style

Nowhere did the youth culture of the 1920s flourish more than on college and university campuses. Campus fads and behaviors (the emblems of group membership) symbolized youth culture and spread widely off campus. Magazines, movies, and advertising spread the word across the country about "collegiate fashions" and lifestyles, creating a mass culture and a big business. In clothing a special "flapper line" of styles and sizes was brought out, and according to a UCLA newspaper in 1923, ' "College style' has a definite meaning. To the layman it spells—debonair smartness—an individual trimness that is particularly the insignia of the young man of today. Fall '23 can almost be called the young man's season with the style pace set by the collegian." Everyone wanted to look and act "collegian," and the nation became obsessed with what glamorous college youth were doing, wearing, smoking, singing, and dancing.

Sources:

Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977);

Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929);

John Modell, Into One's Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989);

Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

youth culture Strictly speaking a subculture, the subject of an influential debate between (mainly) functionalist writers and their critics. Youth cultures are explained either by factors in the experience of adolescence, or by the manipulation of young people's spending and leisure, through advertising and other mass media. The functional separation of home, school, and work supposedly makes teenagers increasingly distinct from adults, more self-aware, and subject to peer-group rather than parental and other adult influences. But the relative affluence of teenagers in the decades after the Second World War, especially if they were in work, also encouraged the growth of a large and profitable market for goods and services specifically directed at young consumers. This has promoted the growth of distinctive youth fashions and styles in clothes, music, and leisure, many of them originating in the United States.

For some writers the cultural clash across generations has displaced social class as the primary form of conflict in modern industrialism. Yet class itself figures importantly in shaping the content of different youth cultures. Research in the United States distinguished the so-called college cultures of (mainly) middle-class youth from the rough or corner cultures of their working-class counterparts. The former were thought to manage the gap between conformist attitudes to achievement and the otherness of adolescent school life—of which the school itself is often the centre. Corner cultures, in contrast, were viewed as a response to working-class academic failure; centred around the neighbourhood gang rather than the school; and as reflecting a search for alternative, even deviant, status, identity, or rewards. In Britain, however, youth culture was almost exclusively identified with male working-class youth and the moral panic about its style and aggressiveness. Neo-Marxist studies saw this as a symbolic protest against, for example, the dissolution of the traditional working-class neighbourhood community, and mass control over what were once predominantly working-class forms of leisure (such as soccer). Much of this literature is reviewed in Mike Brake , The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures (1980)
.

Developments both in sociology and society itself, notably during the 1980s, greatly modified the terms of the debate. Feminist writers pointed to the invisibility of girls in the mainstream literature on youth and have researched gender variations in youth culture. The experiences of youth among ethnic minorities have also received more attention. But, above all, the period since the mid-1970s has seen the demise of the notion of the independent teenage consumer and rebel. The focus of research has switched instead to the youth labour-market, and the dependence of young people on the household, as a result of growing unemployment and the vulnerability of youth to flexible employment. See also Coleman, James S.