"Ginas," "Thugs," and "Gangstas": Young People's Struggles to "Become Somebody" in Working-Class Urban Canada

Introduction So the street becomes the arena where the 'growing up' game is played out, a social space and time of apparent freedom from the more insidious forms of parental control and consent. Here the group assembles itself to enact its rivalries, and so the game of identities and differences between the sexes and between the generations can begin. (Cohen, 1972 as cited in Cohen, 1999) Drawing upon the theoretical insights of cultural (e.g., Massey, 1999) and the sociology of youth culture, this paper explores perceptions of peer rivalries (2) and accounts of social exclusion on the part of economically disadvantaged male and female youth (aged 14-16) in one inner city urban concentration in Ontario, Canada. In particular, we examine the inter-relational impact of contemporary urban youth class conflict and neo-liberal school cultures on the social of youth sub-cultural identities in the modern urban Canadian inner city. In so doing, we seek to assess the ways in which economically disadvantaged male and female youth perceive and understand the influence of gender and urban schooling in shaping their conceptions of their social futures, which are viewed here, following Reay and Lucey (2003), as to the geography of urban cities and school life. Our overarching aim is to establish a preliminary hermeneutic and praxiological framework for understanding the formation of new youth subcultures which may function, in some degree, both as a response to, and a connection between, macro and micro forces of social change (Gardner, Dillabough, & McLeod, 2004, p. 11). At the same time, we also wish to offer a phenomenological reading of youth sub-cultural identity and social exclusion which represents neither the view of an outsider nor that of an insider, but which instead reflects a mediated reflexive view. Such would be a view which both accounts for youth culture in its contemporary expressive forms but also remains ultimately tied to a materially informed analysis which seeks to expose its stratified, historical and symbolic character. An account of this kind is important in exposing how young people negotiate, in the world of the everyday, the varying degrees of alienation they experience and they do with the cultural commodities they encounter (Williams, 1977, p. 17). In common with Goffman's (1959) concern with modes of representation in everyday culture, we too are interested in the ways in which the particular modes of representation young people construct for themselves, and for each other, constitute the ground for particularly powerful forms of sub-cultural identification through the socio-cultural practices of rivalry. But how do we establish such a theoretical framework in relation to the changing social landscapes of urban Canada? Our starting point is that any such framework needs to address the complex ways in which the differentiated effects of contemporary class conflict, cultural elements of social and educational change, and gender relations conjointly impact upon young people, and are negotiated by them, at the level of the local urban spaces and the educational institutions to which they find themselves tied. We do not, therefore, simply look to the concept of peer as a property peculiar to working-class life, leading in the direction of a normative fate as criminals, deviants, or kids who get into trouble, and standing somehow outside the realm of political economies of hierarchy and stratification. Rather, we are interested in the representational modes of gender conflict such rivalry takes and the manner in which cultural rules or deeply sexualized territorial discourses are manifest in the socio-spatial relations of conflict. We therefore view rivalry as a key site where identity work and sub-cultural youth engagement are undertaken. In so doing, we identify how gendered forms of symbolic domination--often articulated by young people as conflicts in style, symbolic control (3) and sub-cultural gender identity politics--are simultaneously embodied and utilized by young people to obtain what Thornton (1996, p. …

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