Skater girlhood and emphasized femininity: ‘you can't land an ollie properly in heels’

Abstract

This study draws from interviews with 20 girls in British Columbia, Canada who participated to varying degrees in skateboarding culture. We found that skater girls saw themselves as participating in an ‘alternative’ girlhood. Becoming skater girls involved the work and play of producing themselves in relation to alternative images found among peers at school, at skate parks, online and in music videos. The alternative authority of skater girl discourse gave the girls room to manoeuvre within and against the culturally valued discourse of emphasized femininity. A subgroup of middle class skater girls, the ‘in‐betweeners’, used skater girl discourse as a way of distancing themselves from the sexism evident in skater culture as well as emphasized femininity. They used one discourse against another and took advantage of contradictions within skater discourse to forge a positive identity for themselves.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for providing support for this research. Interviews with the skater girls are drawn from a larger, ongoing study of alternative girlhoods.

Notes

1. Alternative culture is an umbrella term for various non‐mainstream styles (Hodkinson, 2002, p. 56). In the realm of music, the term alternative is used to signify difference from (or refusal to conform to) the mainstream in a wide variety of genres (e.g., rock, country, rap, folk). Alternative bands bend the rules, either from inside or outside of a musical tradition; they sometimes fuse together elements of different categories of music. They do not cater to mainstream sensibilities. Because major corporate recording companies want to market their artists to as wide an audience as possible, alternative musicians are more often represented by independent (‘indie’) labels.

2. The various youth cultures (punk, Goth, hip hop) that cross‐fertilize with skater culture should not be seen as clearly bounded and distinctive from one another. With this caveat in mind, punk refers to a genre of rock music and an antiauthoritarian subculture that has been associated with White working class youth in Great Britain. It dates to the mid‐1970s and such British bands as the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Style‐wise, punk is associated with shaved heads and spiked haircuts, dog collars (spiked leather necklaces), piercing and military attire (e.g., heavy boots and leather jackets). A DYI (‘do it yourself’), anti‐mass culture ethic and aesthetic also characterize the subculture (see Leblanc, 1999).

Goth is an offshoot of punk, associated with the darker themes of punk music developed by Siouxsie and the Banshees in the late 1970s. Fashion‐wise, goths commonly display black hair and clothes; horror‐style makeup (white facial foundation, black eyeliner, and dark lipstick for both women and men); and symbols of death (e.g., crucifixes). Subcultural themes include ‘horror, death, misery and gender ambiguity’ (Hodkinson, 2002, p. 61).

Hip hop names the culture surrounding rap music, including break dancing, graffiti‐spraying, and disc‐jockeying. Hip hop is linked with urban Black youth culture in the US and messages of rebellion and alienation. Fashion‐wise, hip hop has been associated with baggy jeans, gold jewelry, baseball caps, and certain designer brands like Tommy Hilfiger (see Rose, 1994; Spiegler, 1996; Kitwana, 2002).

3. In a recent review of research on youth cultures, Bucholtz (2002) remarks that ‘ethnographic research on many aspects of youth cultural practice is often surprisingly scarce’ (p. 526).

4. Further evidence that skateboarding is coded as ‘creative’: The City of Vancouver recently legalized skateboarding on city streets in an effort to cultivate innovation. A city planner noted, ‘If we want to attract the creative people, we have to accept that they are somewhat on the edge and want to do different things’ (quoted in Anderson, 2003).

5. Architects in downtown Vancouver have begun to design buildings and public spaces to discourage skateboarders from ‘trespassing’ and to ‘protect property and landscaping’. One property manager noted, ‘It's a constant battle. This building's on a web site as one of the recommended places to skateboard’ (Bellett, 2003, p. G2).

6. According to the High Definition Dictionary, ‘skank’ means a promiscuous person, especially one who transmits sexual diseases, as well as an undesirable, irresponsible or dishonest person or freeloader. See www/hdd.rox.com.

7. The girls in the skater study used the word ‘popular’ to mean both someone who was widely liked by her or his peers as well as a member of the ‘ruling’ group. We capitalize the word Popular to indicate the latter meaning.

8. ‘Carving’ means to make a long, curving arc while skateboarding; ‘grinding’ refers to skateboarding tricks where the hanger/s of the truck (the part of the skateboard that connects the deck with the wheels and allows the board to turn) grind along the edge of an obstacle.

9. Bettie (2003) noted, in her ethnography of working class girls in a small town high school in California, that ‘Many students who believed they were unusual in their ability to cross groups were in fact not as widely accepted as they thought by the groups they crossed into’ (p. 110).