Abstract
The practices of gang members, often depicted as responses to degrading local and structural conditions, have not been sufficiently appreciated as expressions of agency. The concept of edgework, which explains the modern compulsion to manage dangerous circumstances through finely honed skills, provides a means to recognize both the alienating circumstances out of which gang-banging arises, as well as the agency involved in the thrills members pursue. This article examines the alienation experienced by gang members in school and on the streets, which gives rise to the compulsion, for some, to skillfully manage the risks involved in molding a hard, masculine identity.
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Notes
For a remarkable exception, which celebrates the possibilities of gangs to forge a social movement, see Brotherton and Barrios (2004).
Fine (1995: 88) explores the category “at risk” as a social construction that “serves the interests of those educators and policy makers who do not want to ‘disturb’ the culture of the public high school, who want to effectively keep segments of the population out, more than it serves those who are classed as at risk.”
Lyng (2005: 20–47) now speaks of the inspiration to synthesize elements of Marx’s and Mead’s thinking as “promising but short-lived.” While not abandoning this critical basis for understanding the contemporary drive for edgework experiences, he has expanded it to include Weber’s insights into modern disenchantment, Baudrillard’s work on narcissistic self-referentiality, and Foucault’s emphasis on the nondiscursive realm, and lived practices. Edgeworkers might also be seen as searching for new experiential dimensions in a one-dimensional society (Marcuse 1964).
Lyng (2004: 363–364) has noted that, “Although the initial edgework study employed a conceptualization of ‘institutional constraints’ deriving from the Marx–Mead synthesis, subsequent work has moved beyond the structural conditions of alienation, reification, individualism and oversocialization to consider other structural imperatives implicated in edgework practices.”
Or as Meltzer (1994: 43) states, “The ‘I’… is the initial, spontaneous, unorganized aspect of human experience… The ‘Me’ comprises the organized set of attitudes and definitions, understandings and expectations—or simply meanings—common to the group.”
See Lois (2005) for a discussion of how masculinity is performed by retrospectively alluding to edgework experiences in unemotional terms. Also, Katz (1988: 247) uses the term “identity” at least 30 times, such as when referring to “the emotionally powerful attraction of the ‘bad-nigger’ identity as a transcendent response to the racial humiliation of ghetto blacks.”
Indeed, for quantitative research on the topic to be possible, a focus on the when, how, and why of invoking gang membership—what is important to members—constitutes “noise” or “muddying the waters.”
Although Norma Mendoza Denton (personal communication) has noted how cholas (female Mexican gang members in Northern California) orient their beds toward the north or the south depending on whether they affiliate with Norte or Sur gangs.
From an ethnomethodological point of view, we might consider a hard identity sustained through hard edgework in terms of Garfinkel’s (1984: 74) etcetera clause, “used by persons to normalize whatever their actual activities turn out to be.”
As Conquergood (1997: 367, 370) notes, “Street youth transform themselves into ‘the body of the signifier,” engaging, “the body as a way of knowing.” For a rare video depiction and analysis of such skills, see Dwight Conquergood’s film, The Heart Broken in Half. For young people’s perspectives on how to maintain or distance oneself from such skills, see Garot (2009a).
We might speak of this as a “strategic essentialization” of masculinity (see Colebrook 2002; Stone 2004). Such essentialization is reified by the criminal justice system, providing exacerbated sentences for those shown to claim a gang identity. For a list of gang statutes by state, see http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/Legislation.
Jones (2008:78) finds, for example, that while males are compelled to resort to violence to defend “manhood,” young women “typically considered the use of violence as a means to an end, rather than a defining characteristic of being a woman.”
For a refreshing presentation of multiple views of young people’s character, see Ferguson (2001).
As Katz and Jackson-Jacobs (2004) note, “The gang has been a rich resource for telling stories formatted as social theory. Yet gangs themselves never provide the origin of the theory. The gangs are the provinces, onto which theories developed at the theoretical center are imposed.”
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Thanks to Michele Grossman, Louis Kontos and Valentina Pagliai for their suggestions.
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A prior version of this article was published in German in Kriminologisches Journal 44(3):167–181.
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Garot, R. Gang-banging as edgework. Dialect Anthropol 39, 151–163 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-015-9374-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-015-9374-5