Girls and Subcultures

Abstract

Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings. They are absent from the classic subcultural ethnographic studies, the pop histories, the personal accounts and the journalistic surveys of the field. When girls do appear, it is either in ways which uncritically reinforce the stereotypical image of women with which we are now so familiar … for example, Fyvel’s reference, in his study of teddy boys,¹, to ‘dumb, passive teenage girls, crudely painted’ … or else they are fleetingly and marginally presented:

It is as if everything that relates only to us comes out in footnotes to the main text, as worthy of the odd reference. We come on the agenda somewhere between ‘Youth’ and ‘Any Other Business’. We encounter ourselves in men’s cultures as ‘by the way’ and peripheral. According to all the reflections we are not really there.²

This article originally appeared in Resistance through Rituals, ed. Stuart Hall, London, Hutchinson, 1978.