‘My Bedroom Is Me’: Young People, Private Space, Consumption and the Family Home

Abstract

A bedroom in the family home is often regarded by young people as one of the first spaces over which they are able to exert a level of control, ownership and regulation and in which they can achieve some level of privacy away from the challenges of everyday life. It is a space that young people can call their own, can decorate according to their current tastes and can regulate in terms of who and who cannot enter that space. While bedrooms are in many ways functional spaces for young people, e.g. they provide a space to sleep or do homework, they are also meaningful spaces that can tell us much about teenage life, youth culture and consumption. Bedrooms are worked upon, albeit at varying levels, and even when the space seems to change very little visually, the mere presence of a young person consuming within it, living out their social and cultural lives, means that it is a space that is never static. Moreover, for many young people, these are ‘worked upon’ spaces of identity and biographical display and representation, capturing both through cultural practices and the materiality of the space itself those often turbulent transitional years of growing up (Griffin, 1993; Roberts, 2008). Young people’s bedrooms are also quite complex spaces to understand, often spaces of contradiction.