Read an Excerpt
Skate Life
Re-Imagining White Masculinity
By Emily Chivers Yochim THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2010 University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-07080-0
Chapter One
"The mix of sunshine and rebellion is really intoxicating"
American Mythologies, Rebellious Boys, and the Multiple Appeals of Skateboarding's Corresponding Culture, 1950-2006
First commercially released as a toy in 1959, the skateboard has "rolled in and out of the public's consciousness" over the course of almost five decades. Several popular histories of skateboarding suggest that the first skateboards were born of youthful imagination in the early twentieth century when children made milk crate scooters from two-by-fours and old roller skate wheels. The skateboard quickly grew into a popular childhood toy that would later be remembered, with both nostalgia and derision, as a fad akin to hula hoops and yo-yos.
More than a simple fad, by 1995 skateboarding had come to be a key discursive marker of white male youth. That is, throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, extreme sports-and skateboarding in particular-became a powerful marketing tool, the go-to lifestyle for appeals to white male teenagers, who by 1995 comprised the largest group of adolescents in history. During its many moments of popularity in each of the decades since 1959, layers of mythology have been built into skateboarding's practice and portrayal. By considering the articulation of these mythologies, as well as their particular connections to ideologies of gender, race, class, and nation, we can begin to understand both the relationship between youth subculture and mainstream culture and skateboarding's contemporary symbolization of white male youth.
Michele K. Donnelly rightly contends that academic discussions of skateboarding have relied on the idea that the practice was at one time an "authentic" subculture rooted in resistance to the mainstream. While most contemporary accounts ground themselves in the myth of skateboarding's subcultural origins, skateboarding's earliest roots in the nostalgically remembered children's culture of suburban postwar America provide it with a distinctly mainstream origin myth. Remembered either as a childhood creation or a commercial toy enjoyed by white, middle-class kids, skateboards sometimes represent a more carefree time when the streets were safe and children could go out alone. This early history associates skateboards with the conformist but simple Middle America of the 1950s and thus with dominant society.
These roots have certainly been eclipsed of late, as skateboarding has come to represent "extreme youth" via media texts such as MTV's Jackass, Viva la Bam, and Wildboyz, which each feature skateboarders' gross-out humor, and the award-winning documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which rewrites skateboarding's beginnings as the product of working-class teenage boys' energetic rebellion. Skateboarding, in short, has experienced a discursive evolution from innocuous childhood game to rebellious youth subculture.
The contours of this evolution-the various moments at which particular mythologies of the skateboarding culture are solidified and disrupted-demonstrate skateboarding's flexibility as both a discourse and a practice built into and outside of mainstream culture. Skateboarding traverses mediascapes and youthscapes, moving in and out of-and accepting and rejecting-a host of cultural locations that define it, variously, as a diverse and dangerous subculture, a mainstream marketing mechanism, a childhood toy, and a creative enterprise. This discursive flexibility, I argue, allows skateboarding fans to imagine themselves as both inside and outside of dominant culture and consequently as both resistant to and in possession of dominant modes of power. That is, skateboarding's multiple locations of engagement-or correspondence-with both dominant ideologies and images of resistance situate skate culture as a corresponding culture in which notions of resistance are fluid.
By tracing the movement of the key ideas, heroes, and innovations of skateboarding into and out of mainstream media, I highlight the ways in which enduring ideas associated with skateboarding-enterprise, innovation, individuality, and creativity-correspond with values embedded in American origin myths and associated with white masculinity. Despite these associations, however, skateboarding maintains its status as a culture on the edges of mainstream American life. By mapping these seeming contradictions, this chapter accomplishes three goals: (1) expand the boundaries of subculture theory to make clear the ways in which American subcultural values may interlock with key values of American mainstream culture; (2) illuminate the specific ways in which subcultural and mainstream media overlap and correspond with one another, highlighting mainstream media's use of skateboarding's multiple performances and portrayals of masculinity and whiteness; and (3) explain the scope of skateboarding discourses with which contemporary skateboarders contend, thereby locating my analysis of a skateboarding community's proclaimed pleasures and politics in the current discursive moment.
Throughout this chapter, I argue that many of the values associated with skateboarding ally themselves with fundamental tropes of American origin myths produced in stories of the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the pioneers, and the American frontier. These stories construct the foundation of the United States as a fight for freedom from religious persecution and as a quest for independence. Almost needless to say, these are the myths of white male America that completely ignore or whitewash the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, the denial of women's rights, and the destruction of land that accompanied white American men's pursuit of "liberty." In his analysis of late 1990s popular news stories about extreme sports, Kyle Kusz notes that extreme sports are aligned with "a set of traditional American masculine values and pursuits: rugged individualism, conquering new frontiers, and achieving individual progress." More, he argues, because it is white men who are depicted as participating in extreme sports, these stories "represent whiteness as American-ness" and thus further deny the multicultural history of the country. As such, Kusz rightly contends, the extreme athlete as frontiersman trope reinscribed white male dominance during a moment when that dominance was being challenged by feminism, civil rights, gay and lesbian rights, and economic decline. Not insignificantly, the rise of the powerful, white, male extreme athlete coincided with and responded to rising fears about the role of white men in sports. Sports Illustrated published an article in 1997 titled "Whatever Happened to the White Athlete?" Kusz characterizes the article as "a panic-driven news story focusing on the increasing absence of the white athlete in contemporary American professional sports."
Beyond assuaging fears of white male decline, the change in extreme sports' image-from the domain of Gen X slackers to that of mainstream, white male adventurers-was, as Kusz suggests, marketers' response to the newfound buying power of Generation X ("$700 billion in individual and familial spending power per year"). While extreme sports' new image was undoubtedly a marketing ploy, it was also a move made in the context of mythologies that from the beginning have moved back and forth between mainstream America and subcultural rebellion.
Moreover, it is important to note the ways in which America's foundational myths privilege rebellion and populism. In many ways, these myths present the United States as a land of subculturalists, a country founded on the backs of brave and independent-minded individuals fighting for nothing less than the freedom to live their lives as they wish. The Pilgrims and the Puritans, in other words, were "sticking it to" the man of all men, the Church of England. Contemporary discourse frequently locates American discomfort with sexuality in our Puritan roots, but we must also consider the ways in which these stories might contribute to a particularly American mode of engaging with subcultures. While individual subcultures may produce specific ideologies that directly confront a variety of American mores, arguably their broader appeals to individuality and freedom align closely with values learned in kindergarten. American subcultures, then, may correspond quite easily with dominant culture while at the same time critiquing it in specific and subtle ways. In the case of skateboarding, enthusiasts regularly refer to the freedom and independence that it allows them while also producing a nascent critique of dominant norms of white teenage masculinity.
In the American context, then, it makes sense for a subculture, or a corresponding culture, to find itself in advertisements, on television shows, and in the movies, for subcultural stories can be refashioned as stories of the American spirit. What's more, in this refashioning the fundamental claims of that subculture need not necessarily be forfeited or even reworked. As Angela McRobbie notes, much subcultural practice is entrepreneurial, and even when it is not explicitly market based, I argue, it is about the creation of a culture and the production of cultural codes, modes of communication, gathering places, and so on. These independent productions can find their roots in stories of the development of the American colonies, and entrepreneurs can surely place themselves in the context of the American dream. As such, the correspondence between American subcultures and American mainstream cultures may take on a different shape or tendency than that in other cultural contexts. This chapter takes the specificities of American identity into account, keeping firmly in mind the ways in which the values of the subculture parallel those of the mainstream.
In tracing the evolution of skateboarding discourse, this chapter sheds light on the dynamics of corresponding cultures, noting the moments at which they converge and diverge. It will also serve to characterize the cultural moment in which current skateboarders exist, elucidating their ideas about resistance and subcultural identity and their relationship to dominant cultural ideas and institutions. Most broadly, this discursive history should showcase the ways in which institutions imbued with economic and discursive power open up and close down spaces in which individuals and institutions with less power formulate ideas about whiteness, masculinity, and youth.
Boyhood Creativity: Skateboarding Pre-1959
Popular accounts of skateboarding's early history locate its origins in the hands of creative and enterprising male youths looking for entertainment in the mundane world of the neighborhood. From the early 1900s through World War II, the stories suggest, restless young boys borrowed the wheels from their "sister's rollerskates" and worked with "backyard mechanics (dads)" to fashion milk crate scooters. Recollected distinctly as a boys' culture, the practice in which youths tinker with found objects to build their own skateboards is highly reminiscent of other boy-dominated subcultures. 15 Such nostalgic accounts, laden with myths of a better time when children didn't turn into zombies in front of the television and fathers were available to their sons, belie the exclusionary and homophobic undertones of such cultures. For example, skateboarding fan Bob Schmidt remembered building skateboards with his group of friends in the 1950s: "We tried painting them, then we found out the girls liked 'em that way, so decided that was for sissies and we soaked off the paint and left them plain. But the girls got mad, mostly because it was usually one of their skates we were using!" While Schmidt's use of the word sissies is surely meant to evoke the simplicity and innocence of childhood, it also points to the way girls are excluded from discourses of early skateboarding and the creativity and hard work that these discourses are meant to conjure.
More than just male, these memories are almost exclusively white. While skateboarding's earliest history as a homemade toy can be located in urban neighborhoods, its commercial and more mainstream history is located in a space explicitly denied to African Americans through redlining practices: the suburb. The skateboarding magazine Thrasher's book-length retrospective includes a two-page, black-and-white photo from 1952 featuring an "'anything on wheels' derby" in New York City. This photo portrays white girls in bloomers, mothers pushing strollers, and both white and black boys pushing milk crate scooters. The photo's city scene, set in front of the Children's Aid Society on New York's East Side, connotes working-class simplicity and childlike lightheartedness.
This urban image of easy diversity is overshadowed by most nostalgic accounts. The skateboard's early incarnation as a milk crate scooter in urban neighborhoods is located only in industry retrospectives, and in most accounts its most significant origins are situated alongside other images of white youth rebellion in the 1960s. That is not to say, however, that images of skateboarding in the 1960s evoke the counterculture. In fact, 1960s skateboarding oscillated uncomfortably between, first, being defined as a harmless childhood game and a dangerous and annoying teenage craze, and, second, being associated with suburban childhood and California teen surf culture. As Thrasher asserts, "Product development and skating styles coincided with the invention and perfection of two other modern American postwar activities: Surfing and suburban sprawl," and "The dawn of skateboarding coincided with the realization of the industrial revolution in America and the increase in cheaper mass-production of steel products for car parts, tools, and toys." As it moved to the world of the suburbs and California, skateboarding also became distinctly white, as the availability of leisure time and access to the relative quiet and space of suburban streets and sidewalks were distinct to whites. At the same time, however, its surfing roots in both Polynesia and California and its relative danger, as well as its association with the burgeoning teen culture, lent skateboarding a rebellious and even exotic edge.
Suburban Roots/California Myths, 1959-66
Skateboarding emerged at a moment in U.S. history when the figure of the youth rebel was gaining prominence. Leerom Medovoi argues that figures such as James Dean, the beats, and Holden Caufield all served to shore up the cold war image of America as "antiauthoritarian [and] democratic." That is, in order to present itself as the better alternative to communism, the United States had to demonstrate that it would welcome rebellious characters even in the context of its homogeneous middle-class suburbs. Medovoi's genealogy of identity and identity politics demonstrates the ways in which countercultural symbols are a fundamental part of the imaginary of American myths. Along with images of middle-class America, they demonstrate that the United States offers the freedom and security to "be all that you can be."
Skateboarding, however, did not emerge into this context as a fully formed symbol of suburban youth rebellion. Rather, its location in a moment when youth rebellion was moving to the forefront of public consciousness, as well as its seemingly simultaneous existence as a commodity toy and a new symbol of California surf culture, set skateboarding up to take on a number of dualities that have followed it through its history and make possible the particular culture surrounding it today.
Shot through the contours of skateboarding's early history are two quintessential images of idyllic America: the postwar suburb and California surf culture. More than situated within such nostalgic American places, skateboarding in this moment is tied closely to suburban (white) children-mostly boys-and California surfers-mostly male teenagers. The ideas and values associated with skateboarding in its many guises, then, bespeak America's youthful identity. As I noted earlier, images of youth are tied strongly to American myths, and the United States is imagined as a youthful nation replete with the energy, desires, and modern ways of thinking of the young. Thrasher's retrospective comments, "Skateboarding has a rich history charged with youthful intensity and adventurous spirit." "Youthful intensity" and "adventurous spirit" quite easily evoke notions of American inventiveness and vigor, and skateboarding's origin narratives certainly call these traits to mind.
By 1959, surfers and suburban kids seem to have found skateboarding virtually simultaneously, and its suburban origins overlap and interlock with its location in California surf culture. While Michael Brooke's The Concrete Wave makes no mention of surfers until after the development of a commercial toy skateboard, both Thrasher and James Davis contend that surfers discovered homemade skateboards in the late 1940s and early 1950s before a toy board was produced. The particular sequence of events is relatively inconsequential to contemporary narratives of skateboarding, for it is the overlap that allows for its multiple meanings. What matters, in other words, is that both surfers and commercial interests play a central role in the early days of the skateboard, and the tension and cooperation between "independent" youth culture and consumer culture traverses the remainder of skateboarding's history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Skate Life by Emily Chivers Yochim Copyright © 2010 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
