Careless men, careless masculinities? Understanding young men's risk-taking with motor vehicles as violations

Abstract

Young men's risk-taking with motor vehicles regularly generates public debate as a traffic safety issue, often resulting in various policy suggestions, such as curfews or raising of the driving licence age. This article is based on an ethnographic study of the ‘Volvo greasers’, young men and women aged 15 to 19, in a peri-urban community in Sweden. The focus is particularly on the greasers' risk-taking practices with motor vehicles, such as speeding and drifting. In order to understand how the greasers' risk-taking with vehicles is manifested, talked about and practised, the article critically engages with the contexts of the risk-taking practices and their effects at both the material and the discursive levels. Through contextualization as an analytical tool, a situated concept of risk-taking is developed, which illustrates how intersecting norms and conceptions around age, gender, class and place are practised at the local level. The aim is to explore the greasers' risk-related talk and practices through the notion of ‘control’: how different activities, practices and recountings of particular situations together function to control vehicles, the narrative around risk-taking and the emotions involved. I argue that the foregrounding of these controlling practices in the greaser culture legitimates a lack of care for oneself and others, which constructs the greaser men as not only carefree, but also careless. Consequently, I suggest that an approach to risk-taking practices as a kind of violation would be beneficial, due in part to their potentially harmful consequences and in part to the construction of careless men as a consequence of the controlling practices.

Keywords:

• masculinity
• age
• risk-taking
• violation
• Volvo greasers

Note on contributor

Tanja Joelsson has a PhD in Gender Studies and is currently working at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Sweden. Her doctoral research among young vehicle interested people in a peri-urban community in Sweden addresses issues of risk-taking, age, gender, class and place. Her thesis Space and Sensibility: Young Men's Risk-Taking with Motor Vehicles was published in 2013.

Notes

1. Technically, in drifting, the driver speeds while over-steering so that the car body eases off the road and causes loss of traction in the rear wheels. The front wheels are then pointing in the opposite direction from the direction of turn. The skilful and competitive dimension of this driving technique relates to the driver's ability to control the car. Drifting in this context should not be confused with the (illegal) urban sport developed by street racers in Japan, grown popular with the help of movies such as Tokyo Drift. In Sweden, organized drifting competitions are arranged, which are not the same as the kind of drifting the Volvo greasers engage in.

2. This article is based on a chapter from my dissertation (Joelsson, 2013).

3. Also, 17 pupils in grade nine at the local high school (not regular visitors to the youth centre) were interviewed at school. These are not relevant for this article.

4. Both Vaaranen (1999) and Hatton (2007) propose a more abstract level of control in their studies. Hatton's (2007) analysis of boy racers in New Zealand is firmly based within a socioeconomic framework, perceiving their risk-taking activities as part of a ‘momentary escapism from what they perceived to be their disempowerment and disenfranchised existences’ (p. 219) and in that sense is in line with what Hayward (2002) has termed a ‘controlled loss of control’ (p. 311f).