Joe Penny

"Skate and Destroy"?: Subculture, Space and Skateboarding As Performance Joe Penny

This essay offers a critique of the subcultural discourse surrounding skateboarding. Skateboarding I argue has been represented in academia, popular culture and skateboard media as a subculture which resists mainstream society. First by identifying three central themes in the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies' theorisation of subcultures: resistance, societal reaction and subcultural identity, and by demonstrating how geographers have interpreted these themes spatially, I deconstruct the nature of the skateboarding as subculture discourse. Then, drawing on a qualitative set of methods, I argue that the everyday lives and experiences of skateboarders complicates the assumed naturalness of the subculture-mainstream culture binary. Indeed I end this paper by concluding that this core ontology in the study of skateboarding is unhelpful. Instead I propose an alternative framework, centred around the concept of Performativity, and a novel ontological starting point to argue that skateboarding, and potentially other subcultures, might be best understood as ordinary rather than marginal or different.