Table Of ContentYOUTH
CULTURE
AND
PRIVATE
SPACE
Siân Lincoln
Youth Culture and Private Space
Youth Culture and Private
Space
Siân Lincoln
Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Palgrave
macmillan
© Siân Lincoln 2012
Foreword © Andy Bennett 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012978-0-230-23326-3
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First published 2012 by
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
For Carys
My sister and my best friend
Contents
List of Figures ix
Foreword x
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
My bedroom(s) 3
Youth culture 5
Private space 6
1 Exploring the Private in Traditional Youth Cultural
Theory and Beyond 16
Private space and traditional subcultural theory 25
Youth culture beyond the CCCS: creating room
for the private? 33
Conclusions 38
2 Researching Young People’s ‘Private’ Space 40
Ethnography and the study of young people’s
private space 42
‘Keep out!!!’ The problem with ethnography in young
people’s private spaces 48
My approach 51
Finding participants, gaining access to young
people’s private space 61
‘How did you get into young people’s bedrooms?’
The ethics of research in young people’s private spaces 65
Conclusions 68
3 The Role of Private Space in Contemporary
Youth Culture 70
What is a young person’s bedroom for? 71
Family dynamics, ‘age’ and bedroom use 76
Teenage bedrooms as ‘sites of transition’ 89
Bedrooms and contemporary youth cultures: public
versus private spaces 93
Bedrooms: from private to social spaces 100
Conclusions 104
vii
viii Contents
4 Young People, Bedrooms and Materiality 106
Materiality in traditional ‘bedroom culture’ 109
Materiality, consumption and ‘bedroom culture’ 112
Conclusions 145
5 Mediating Young People’s Bedrooms: ‘Zoning’
Bedroom Cultures 148
Young people, the media and everyday life 150
‘Traditional’ bedroom culture and the media 154
‘Contemporary’ bedroom culture and the media 159
‘Zoning’ young people’s bedroom spaces 163
Conclusions 187
6 Mediating Young People’s Bedrooms:
The ‘Virtual Bedroom’? 189
Using spatial metaphors 192
Virtual bedrooms as ‘identity spaces’ 195
Social network media as extensions of bedrooms 199
Virtual bedrooms as ‘transitional’ spaces 213
Bedrooms as ‘portals of communication’ 217
Conclusions 219
Conclusion: Youth Culture and Private Space 221
Which (bedroom) door to open next? 223
Notes 227
Bibliography 233
Index 243
List of Figures
3.1 The Manhattan skyline in James’ room 83
4.1 A ‘DO NOT ENTER!’ variation 115
4.2 Millie’s football and Disney memorabilia 116
4.3 The bookshelf in Nicola’s room 119
4.4 On top of Millie’s wardrobe 1 122
4.5 On top of Millie’s wardrobe 2 123
4.6 LFC clock and fairy lights 124
4.7 LFC scarf, fairy lights and purple curtain 125
4.8 Evie’s wardrobe door and gig tickets 129
4.9 Evie’s desk 130
4.10 Lisa’s display of photographs 135
4.11 A ‘display’ of Lisa’s first year at university 137
4.12 ‘Vero Moda’ bags in Nina’s bedroom 141
4.13 A collection of photo frames in Sonia’s room 142
4.14 Sonia’s wardrobe door 143
4.15 A photo frame decorated with lights 144
5.1 The left hand side of Nina’s desk 167
5.2 The middle of Nina’s desk 168
5.3 Evie’s dressing table 173
5.4 The sink in Richard’s room 175
5.5 Richard’s music zone 176
5.6 James’ music zone 181
ix
Foreword
Issues of space and place have been core to the study of youth culture
since the formative work of the CCCS on post-war working class
‘ subcultures’. Problematically, however, much of that work, in keeping
with its emphasis on ‘spectacular youth’, has focused on young people’s
appropriation of public space and place as arenas for displays of style-
coded resistance. Only very rarely has there been any acknowledgement
of youth’s relationship to private space or, indeed, the connections
between the private and public spheres of youth cultural practice.
McRobbie and Garber’s mid-1970s study of teen girls’ use of bedroom
space in the domestic sphere of the family home was an innovative
moment in this respect, presenting a very different account to the
majority of youth cultural studies which tended to focus on predomi-
nantly male, street-based examples of style-centred youth cultures. By
contrast, McRobbie and Garber’s work demonstrated another aspect of
youth cultural activity in which patriarchal authority and gender roles
forced a particular set of relationships to space among teenage working-
class and lower-middle-class girls. Excluded from the more public, male-
based forms of youth cultural activity, these teenage girls were instead
forced to utilise the private, domestic spaces available to them, typically
the bedroom, for their own symbolic rituals of stylistic and musical
practice. Innovative as this study was, however, it remained relatively
unique in its insight for many years; a central aspect of McRobbie and
Garber’s argument, that the academic gaze remained transfixed on
male-based and publicly spectacular youth cultures, was reinforced as
youth cultural research continued to produce scholarship broadly situ-
ated within that vein. But at the same time, McRobbie and Garber’s
work began to look increasingly dated, its key arguments effectively
summing up a period of pre-digital late twentieth-century history in
which the bedroom could more easily be represented as a hermeneuti-
cally separate space free from the blurring of the public and private that
would become evident as the latter were increasingly impacted by new
media technologies.
Youth Culture and Private Space is thus a very important book in many
ways. Most crucially it offers an in-depth account of an area of youth
cultural practice that has been decidedly overlooked since the study of
youth culture became a bona fide aspect of academic research. Drawing
x
Foreword xi
on very high quality ethnographic data, the book offers a sophisticated
analysis of young people’s appropriation and use of private space in the
family home in an era where both gendered dimensions of identity have
begun to shift and reliance on digital media technologies is increasingly
the norm. Highly significant here is Lincoln’s concept of ‘zoning’ which
she uses as a means of explicating the various means to which contem-
porary youth, both female and male, use and understand ‘private’ space
with reference to the level of interface between the ‘public’ and the
‘private’ afforded by digital media. As Lincoln masterfully demonstrates,
the connections between private and public space are continually
rearticulated by young people with the effect that the contemporary
young person’s bedroom takes on inherently multi-f unctional quali-
ties, being at once an individualised space for relaxation, study or rec-
reation and a place for collective gatherings often associated with the
preparation for a ‘night out’ or a space to chill out in following a night
on the town. Through the connectedness offered through new media
technologies, the zonings that Lincoln identifies in the youth bedroom
space acquire complex dynamics of their own as young people use the
internet and iPhone as a means of keeping in touch with friends, sourc-
ing information for their school and academic studies, or downloading
music to listen to individually or collectively.
Critically important too is Lincoln’s overall reconceptualisation of
space and place as this pertains to the cultural practices of young peo-
ple and the relationships they build with each other. All too often the
language of youth cultural studies assumes a crude equation of youth’s
spatial politics with dimensions of resistance that overlook the ordi-
nary everyday lives of youth. In Youth Culture and Private Space, this
over-emphasis on space appropriation as ‘resistance’ is readdressed and
rebalanced, giving equal – and long overdue – attention to the more
mundane ways in which private space is utilised by young people. In
Youth Culture and Private Space Lincoln has produced a very important
book; highly original in its approach this is a study that is set to make a
major impact on youth studies and provide the foundations for a major
new area of research in the sphere of contemporary youth culture.
Andy Bennett
Griffith Centre for Cultural Research
Griffith University
