Between Pleasure and Resistance: The Role of Substance Consumption in an Italian Working-Class Subculture
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan—Bicocca, 20126 Milan, Italy
Societies 2019, 9(3), 58; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc9030058
Received: 8 June 2019 / Revised: 7 August 2019 / Accepted: 12 August 2019 / Published: 14 August 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Youth Cultures and Subcultures)
In this article I discuss how illegal substance consumption can act as a tool of resistance and as an identity signifier for young people through a covert ethnographic case study of a working-class subculture in Genoa, North-Western Italy. I develop my argument through a coupled reading of the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and more recent post-structural developments in the fields of youth studies and cultural critical criminology. I discuss how these apparently contrasting lines of inquiry, when jointly used, shed light on different aspects of the cultural practices of specific subcultures contributing to reflect on the study of youth cultures and subcultures in today’s society and overcoming some of the ‘dead ends’ of the opposition between the scholarly categories of subculture and post-subculture. In fact, through an analysis of the sites, socialization processes, and hedonistic ethos of the subculture, I show how within a single subculture there could be a coexistence of: resistance practices and subversive styles of expression as the CCCS research program posits; and signs of fragmentary and partial aesthetic engagements devoid of political contents and instead primarily oriented towards the affirmation of the individual, as argued by the adherents of the post-subcultural position.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
subculture; young people; identity; resistance; working-class; substance consumption; CCCS; critical cultural criminology; post-subculture
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Placido, M.D. Between Pleasure and Resistance: The Role of Substance Consumption in an Italian Working-Class Subculture. Societies 2019, 9, 58. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc9030058
AMA Style
Placido MD. Between Pleasure and Resistance: The Role of Substance Consumption in an Italian Working-Class Subculture. Societies. 2019; 9(3):58. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc9030058
Chicago/Turabian StylePlacido, Matteo Di. 2019. "Between Pleasure and Resistance: The Role of Substance Consumption in an Italian Working-Class Subculture" Societies 9, no. 3: 58. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc9030058
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
Search more from Scilit