Performing masculinity and the micropolitics of youth cafés in Ireland: an ethnography

Abstract

This paper contributes to the literature on geographies of masculinities by examining how young men’s (aged 12–18) performances of masculinity through humour was mutually constitutive of and constituted by the spaces of the Fusion and Retro youth cafés in the city and suburbs of Cork in the south of Ireland. Research on open access youth provision such as youth clubs, centres and youth cafés have found that they can afford young people the opportunity to ‘be themselves’, reflecting the ideals of safety and inclusivity that are meant to be sustained in these spaces. Using ethnographic observations, this paper shows that such ideals are never a given as the inequality embedded in gendered performances mean the spaces must be continually (re)produced as inclusive. It contributes to an understanding of youth cafés as micropolitical spaces of becoming that shape and are shaped by negotiations over meanings of gender and masculinity in particular. Furthermore, it advances two new concepts - ‘humorous improprieties’ and ‘humour bombing’ - to the performative geographies literature, highlighting two nuanced ways in which young men construct themselves as men in relation to space.

Keywords:

• Masculinity
• humour
• ethnography
• youth cafés
• space

Introduction

Schools and urban public spaces have received much scholarly attention in geographies of masculinity (Ahmet 2013). This paper adds to this literature by examining how young men’s (aged 12–18 years) performances of masculinity through humour were mutually constitutive of and constituted by the micro spaces of the Fusion and Retro (all titles and place names are anonymised) youth cafés – two recreational type of youth cafés located in the city and suburbs of Cork in the south of Ireland. The paper contributes to the literature on ‘performative geographies’ (Curtin and Linehan 2002) by exploring a form of youth provision untouched by ethnographic inquiry. It conceives youth cafés as micropolitical ‘spaces of becoming’ where the (re)production of the cafés as safe and inclusive is contested by the inequality embedded within young men’s performative pursuit of becoming men through ‘manhood acts’ (Schwalbe 2014). In doing so it advances two new concepts - ‘humorous improprieties’ and ‘humour bombing’ - and shows how youth cafés are not pre-existing spaces of inclusivity and individuality where young people can ‘be themselves’ but must be continually (re)produced as such.

A ‘youth café’ is ‘a dedicated, safe, relaxed, friendly and inclusive meeting space for young people, primarily ranging in age from 12 to 18 years’ (Forkan et al. 2015, 1) and is named as such due to the basic availability of tea and coffee facilities within it. To upkeep these facilities, some youth cafés charge a fee per session as well as raising money primarily through fund-raising activities (Forkan et al. 2015). Youth cafés are a ‘centre-based’ (Ritchie and Ord 2017) and ‘open access’ form of youth provision, meaning ‘a young person may access them regardless of their background, needs or position in society’ (Ritchie and Ord 2017, 270). In this regard they are similar to youth clubs and youth centres, which have predominantly constituted a form of youth work provision, where the non-formal education of young people takes place (Kiilakoski and Kivijärvi 2015).

The majority of youth cafés in Ireland similarly operate through a youth work model (Forkan et al. 2015), whereby key youth work principles of equality and inclusivity are upheld (Forkan et al. 2010). What differentiates them from youth clubs and centres however, is that they are more unstructured and the activities and programmes are offered ‘á la carte’ (Forkan et al. 2015). Youth cafés are in sum, primarily spaces where young people can ‘hang out’ and engage in recreational activities first (for examples see Forkan et al. 2015, 23) and can voluntarily participate in non-formal educational opportunities and/or avail of information (for examples see Forkan et al. 2015, 24) second, depending on the different levels of service they offer.

Recent research on these three forms of open access provision have found that young people feel they can ‘be themselves’ (Forkan et al. 2015, 34; Eriksen and Seland 2021; Ritchie and Ord 2017) in these spaces without discrimination, prejudice and which may provide shelter from adult demands and expectations (Eriksen and Seland 2021). Such research neglects however, how ‘being yourself’ is not simply natural but contingent on relations of power which moderate what sort of self is possible. The self is socially constituted through interaction and in ways which depend on sameness and difference to others implying exclusionary possibilities. Indeed, the literature on open access youth provision acknowledges that such exclusions can and do occur (Kiilakoski and Kivijärvi 2015) and in ways that are gendered (Forkby and Kiilakoski 2014; Robertson 2005): despite them being open to both young men and women, young men have been found to use these spaces more frequently and references have been made to how a ‘masculine atmosphere’ (Forkby and Kiilakoski 2014, 8; also Robertson 2005) can make it difficult for young women to attend and express their own identities in these spaces (Robertson 2005).

This research suggests that open access youth spaces may be spaces of exclusion, but more importantly, not statically so, due to changeable social constructions of gender. Though scholarship on the ‘geographies of masculinities’ has proliferated (Gorman-Murray and Hopkins 2014), we lack insights into how masculinities are performed and constructed in designated youth and youth work sites. In contrast to schools, such sites emphasise equal power relationships, yet this article shows how gender dynamics may complicate the values of safety, inclusivity and equality that are supposed to be upheld within these spaces (Forkan et al. 2010).

The analysis focuses on performances that some young men themselves felt be humorous for three reasons. First, the enactment of humour was a large part of the performance of masculinities in both cafés. Second, these humorous performances best exemplify the ways in masculinity was constructed in relation to both others and the norms upheld in the café spaces themselves. Other performances included the competitive playing of pool, brief, rage-based defensive performances, moments of intimacy and closeness between young men and quieter wide-ranging conversations between young people and between young people and café workers. Third, focusing on what the individual young men themselves felt to be humorous opens up a broader scope of analysis and allows for the inclusion of material that was productive of exclusionary dynamics. In this paper, I borrow from Kehily and Nayak (1997, 85) usage of the term ‘humour’ to refer to it ‘in its broadest sense’ as encompassing a continuum of performances ranging from expressions of smiling, sniggering and laughter and including forms such as joke telling, insults, imitations, ‘game-plays’, the use of vulgarities, disruptions and pranks. Drawing upon the various technologies of humour young men use to socially construct themselves as men and interpreting youth cafés as spaces of becoming rather than static, immutable containers of meaning (Massey 1994; O’Donoghue 2007), I show how youth cafés have a stake in gender relations.

Contextualising youth cafés in Ireland

Youth cafés in Ireland grew consistently in number from around 20 in 2010 to an estimated 190 as of 2015 (Forkan et al. 2015), mainly due to capital funding provided by the Irish government in 2010, 2012 and 2013. The immediate rationale for this funding stemmed from the National Recreational Policy for Young People (Office of the Minister for Children [OMC] 2007). Research commissioned for the policy found that young people felt there was insufficient leisure provision for them in their localities and wanted a space or specific facility to ‘hang out’ with their friends that would be ‘legitimate [my emphasis] in the eyes of their parents, their communities and the Gardaí [Irish police]’ (OMC 2007, 61). The Recreational Policy (OMC 2007, 70) thus, recommended that youth cafés be developed ‘particularly in areas where there are high concentrations of young people between the ages of 12 and 18′.

I use the word ‘immediate’ to acknowledge that other less explicit reasons and discourses might have underpinned the development of the youth café model in Ireland. That young people wanted a ‘legitimate’ space is consistent with a theme in the literature on adults desire to control young people’s access to public spaces due to perceived nuisance and young people have been shown to be aware of adults views as to the role of youth clubs in this regard (Robertson 2005). Scholars note that this discourse is mainly about keeping young men off the streets as they are perceived as a threat to the social order (McDowell and Harris 2019; Robertson 2005). Indeed, Bowden and Higgins (2000) found evidence of youth clubs or similar unstructured ‘drop-in’ facilities being used to recruit young people who may be perceived as having the ‘potential’ to be involved in crime into more structured programmes to divert them away from this possible trajectory. Questions have been raised about whether some youth cafés may also come to (or already do) resemble dynamics such as these (Powell et al. 2012).

There is thus, a broader debate and article to be written about the extent to which youth cafés are ‘new’ at all (Powell et al. 2012) and the extent to which they fit into neoliberal and governmental rationalities whereby policy discourses and interventions ‘seek to conduct young people towards desired ways of being’ (Kiely and Meade 2018, 18). To give one example, Irish government reports have linked the lack of recreational facilities such as youth clubs to young people’s problematic drug and alcohol use (Strategic Task Force on Alcohol 2004). More directly relevant to this article, however, is the ‘desired ways of being’ (Kiely and Meade 2018, 18) that are intended to be upheld within youth cafés in terms of respect for others. The youth café Best Practice Guide emphasises that youth cafés should be ‘safe’ spaces which further ‘quality relationships’ that are ‘respectful of individuality’ (Forkan et al. 2010, 36) and should be ‘inclusive of, accessible to and flexible with all cultures, differences and abilities’ (Forkan et al. 2010, 33). This are noble standards, but I show how certain versions of masculinity can work to produce slippage in the stability of youth cafés as spaces of inclusivity.

Theorising masculinities

As mentioned, the self is not ‘a natural sort of being’ (Butler 2006, 43). This article is framed within a sociological understanding of the self as gendered, where young men become men through discursive and embodied interaction rituals that Schwalbe (2014) calls ‘manhood acts’. ‘Manhood acts’ are primarily about demonstrating the ‘capacity to make things happen and to resist being dominated by others’ (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009, 280). Men become ‘men’ by a continual process of becoming through repetitive acts that affirm a particular version of masculinity that simultaneously traduces femininity (Butler 2006; Kehily and Nayak 1997). Masculinity is, in other words, relational, ‘constructed processually around senses of similarity and difference’ (Hopkins and Noble 2009, 815) meaning exclusionary possibilities may arise when young men perform and construct masculinities.

Young men’s constructions of masculinity are not hyper situational, devoid of broader cultural forces and created anew, rather, they are based on shared cultural knowledge about what constitutes normative masculinity (Schwalbe 2014). The masculine self is thus, ideological (Gorman-Murray and Hopkins 2014) open to change and contestation hence, I contend along with others (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009) that the masculine self is ‘micropolitical’. The idea that masculinity is a biological product is a ‘folk belief’ (Schwalbe 2014) as the expectations and practices that signify a masculine self are maintained only because of what people believe about these practices (Schwalbe 2014). This is not to sensationalise, but to point out the way in which spaces themselves, through the social relations acting through them, can be performative of exclusionary practices that sustain inequality (Gregson and Rose 2000).

What these understandings suggest is that men never actually ‘become’ men in the sense of attainment of an endpoint or a final state (Butler 2006). The latter may be implied by pluralistic and typological frameworks where configurations of masculinities are transposed into categories such as ‘marginalised’, ‘subordinate’, ‘complicit’ and ‘hegemonic’ modes of masculinity (Connell 1995). These conceptual systems have been criticised for reducing “the complexity and nuance of what men actually do” (Hopkins and Noble 2009, 813). The use of typologies is common in ethnographic studies which explore similar spatial or cultural sites (for a list of examples, see Swain 2006, 334–335). In some studies on the geography of masculinities, researchers use terms to demarcate distinct friendship groups, for example Wards’s (2013) Geeks and Valley Boiz. In other studies, researchers use the terms are that self-elected by the groups they study or are known as such by others in the local community, for example the lads and ear’oles in Willis (1977) and the Real Geordies and Charvers in Nayak (2006). In this article no such terms were used by young people, and I have not similarly deployed typologies, preferring instead to use the concept of ‘manhood acts’ keep the focus on how the category of men and gendered inequality is actually practiced and (re)produced.

Youth cafés as spaces of becoming

While gender may be a feature of social situations, ‘performative geographies’ (Curtin and Linehan 2002) literatures highlight how gender performances are also situated in specific localities, places and spaces (Gregson and Rose 2000). This refers to both how gender is not fixed but about ‘what individuals do at particular times and spaces, rather than a universal “who you are”’ (Curtin and Linehan 2002, 65) and how gender performance extends beyond bodies to (re)produce the spaces in which they are located. The latter point is particularly relevant to this article. Spaces are not endowed with fixed meanings but (re)produced by social relations, which means that spaces and places can be (re)produced as gendered (Massey 1994). Indeed, scholas have shown how spaces can be inscribed with masculinist values and discourses (Curtin and Linehan 2002; McDowell 1997) where young men can claim social spaces as their own, re-making them in their own image (Curtin and Linehan 2002; Massey 1994).

Just as gender identity is a continual process of becoming, I borrow insights from performative geographies to understand spaces as not pre-existing their performance but are brought into being through social interaction (Curtin and Linehan 2002; Gregson and Rose 2000). Youth cafés cannot ‘become’ and then ‘be’ spaces of inclusivity where young people can always ‘be themselves’. They must be (re)produced as such spaces as slippage is always possible. Indeed, geographers have highlighted how ‘“the search to find/be myself” is a search deeply embedded both in a recognition of what is, and is not, socially acceptable in particular places/contexts’ (Teather 1999, 9). Space is thus, ‘a perpetual state of becoming, an action rather than a location, which is made and remade (and sometimes undone)’ (Allen 2013, 61).

The notion that places and spaces can act as ‘performative arenas’ (Curtin and Linehan 2002) of power relations and social identities such as gender (Gregson and Rose 2000) is important here. As Hopkins and Noble (2009, 814) note, a key facet of geographies involves exploring ‘not simply how masculinities are played out in different spaces, but how those spaces shape the very nature of the experience of masculinity’. While there is talk about ‘tackling masculinity through youth work’ (Bowen 2021, no page), research is lacking on how designated youth and youth work sites moderate gender dynamics. Bowden and Lanigan (2011, 7) found some evidence of young people feeling relieved of gendered role performances at two youth work sites in Dublin, Ireland, which contrasted to their experiences of the street where ‘ye have to be the hard man’ (male participant). Robb et al. (2015) report on how youth work sites in West Scotland and inner-city London act as a ‘third space’ for young men, providing among other opportunities, a ‘safe haven’ from the hypermasculine expectations of the streets and a means to ‘keep occupied’.

One of the most researched and powerful sites of ‘emergence’ (Dalley-Trim 2007) where normative masculinities and femininities are (re)produced has been schooling contexts including specific attention to the micro spaces within them (Allen 2013; Dalley-Trim 2007; Kehily and Nayak 1997; O’Donoghue 2006; Willis 1977). Allen’s (2013) and O’Donoghue’s (2006, 2007) research highlight the micro gendered encoding practices of schools and how young people themselves appropriate and mark spaces within schools for their own gendered meaning making. Scholars have also contextualised spaces of youthful masculinities such as schools within the sociocultural and politico-economic contexts they are situated. Willis’s (1977) classic work is key here. Cognizant of how schooling does not speak to their interests, the ‘lads’ in this study rejected the institutional authority of the school and what they perceived to be false discourses of opportunity.

Urban spaces, particularly the street space have also been key sites of scholarly attention. Though subject to regulation, in comparison to more sedimented institutions such as schools, the street is a ‘loosely structured milieu’ (Connell 1987, 134) and geographers have consistently documented how young men use it as a form of theatre to convey masculinity (Connell 1987; McDowell 2003; McDowell and Harris 2019; Nayak 2006). Geographers have shown how these dynamics are particularly salient in former industrial localities where ‘protest’ forms of masculinity accompany young working-class men’s ‘hanging out’ time to compensate for the loss of secure masculine trajectories (McDowell 2003; McDowell and Harris 2019; Nayak 2006).

What these insights highlight is O’Donoghue’s (2007, 62) point that ‘All learning’ then, ‘is emplaced. It happens somewhere…’ This article expand our knowledge of the micro spaces that young men frequent. Youth cafés are far less regulated than schooling and classroom contexts, yet arguably more regulated than street spaces as they are spaces through which subtle forms of non-formal learning about inclusivity and equality may take place. An analysis of the performance of masculinities enables insights into how these spaces are also implicated in and through young men’s process of becoming gendered.

Methodology

As I was interested primarily in how masculinity was ‘done’ (Schwalbe 2014) through discursive and embodied performances, I utilized observations through an ethnographic approach. Between February and August 2016, I conducted over one hundred hours of observations within the Fusion and Retro youth cafés and semi-structured interviews with 11 young people (eight young men and three young women) aged between twelve and eighteen and five café workers (four paid youth workers and one volunteer). The data produced was in the form of written fieldnotes and interview transcripts. Ethical approval was sought and granted from the University College Cork’s Social Research Ethics Committee.

The Fusion and Retro youth cafés were selected as sites of a broader ethnographic inquiry into how young men perform masculinities and the cafés were both selected based on convenience. In each café I presented myself to young people as a student researcher who would also be working as a volunteer. This volunteer status meant I helped with the overall day to day operation of each café. I participated in playing pool and board games with young people.

This research was not intended to be representative, and it is important to state that young people highly valued their respective youth cafés and much conversation and fun was had between young people and between young people and café workers. Nevertheless, my time was occasionally taken up with intervening in what I perceived to be problematic behaviour. In Fusion, my interventions to disruptive behaviour were many, in contrast to Retro where the small size meant it was the paid worker who oversaw most of the verbal reprimand. My own negotiation of various performances which I considered to be problematic also sometimes involved having to enact ‘poise’ (Goffman 1967) and to attempt to hide my awkwardness and embarrassment. There were some occasions where some young men attempted to invest their interactions with me with sexualised meanings, such as putting the pool cue between their legs, mimicking a penis. The purpose of this was to provoke my embarrassment. Since this emotion is associated with powerlessness and subordination, my own presence in the café constituted another way in which some young men could construct themselves as dominant and superior.

My embodiment in the field however, enabled me to have numerous ‘conversations with a purpose’ (Gobo 2008), characterised by asking young people about the meanings of some interactions within each café (Davies and and Others 2008). I took handwritten fieldnotes immediately after leaving the research sites to minimise the visibility of the research process (Gobo 2008) and coded the fieldnotes toward building substantive themes (Saldaña 2009). In the findings that follow, I draw upon ‘critical incidents’ (Dalley-Trim 2007) which are representations of the commonplace performances that were enacted throughout my time during the fieldwork.

Setting the scene: the fusion and retro youth cafés

Whereas other cafés also may provide a broader range of more targeted services such as informal educational programmes and information services (Forkan et al. 2015), the Fusion and Retro youth cafés are primarily recreational in purpose, affording young people the opportunity to ‘hang out’ and ‘be themselves’ (Forkan et al. 2015, 34). Fusion is situated within a city suburb that is ‘marginally below average’ on the deprivation index based on the 2011 Census. Fusion is not attached to any youth organisation and is independent. It is a renovated large space within a community centre and opens only once a week for four hours. It is staffed by volunteers only. Ciara is present during each session and acts as coordinator. It contains couches, large bean bags, a large pool table, an Xbox and various arts and crafts which young people can take out of the small storage space inside the café itself. It also has a TV, which is used mainly for the Xbox during each session. It also has basic kitchen facilities including a fridge, microwave, toaster, and kettle. Upon entry to the café, each young person first signs in and pays one euro to use the café. This facilitates the allowance of one hot chocolate or tea per session as well as a toasted sandwich.

The Retro café is part of the Ballygall youth service and is affiliated to an Irish national youth work organisation. It is situated in Ballygall, a town in the suburb of Cork in the south of Ireland with a deprivation score of ‘marginally below average deprivation’. There is another more targeted youth service in the area which manages a community drugs project for young people experiencing substance misuse. There is also an Irish police diversion project which aims to divert young people away from anti-social behaviour and/or criminal behaviour.

The café itself opens five times a week for two hours at a time. At the time of fieldwork, it was staffed by one coordinator, one full time youth worker and one part time worker along with volunteers. The café contains a small pool table, a couch, board games and a TV. The café is always staffed by either one paid youth worker or the coordinator in each session, with at least one other volunteer. The café is free to use and, in each session, the TV always plays music from a music channel, contributing to an upbeat atmosphere which is supplemented by the regular use of simple but fun board games. One evening per week, young people are also afforded the opportunity to make bakes and small cakes in the kitchen within the youth centre itself. The café itself has tea and coffee facilities.

A few more points are relevant. In this article, I refer to both paid youth workers and volunteers (which included myself) as ‘café workers’. In both cafés, café workers attempt to (re)produce and maintain what I call a normative order, encompassing both the ‘official rules’ in the cafés, such as those listed on the rule sheets and the more informal, unofficial rules and fluctuating standards that café workers apply in each session (Kiilakoski and Kivijärvi 2015). At the core of the normative order is the ideal by café workers to (re)produce the café spaces as ones of inclusivity and equality.

In practice, maintaining a consistently equal power relationship with young people is difficult when staff intend on upholding values of inclusivity and must guarantee young peoples’ emotional and physical safety (Kiilakoski and Kivijävi 2015). In both cafés, behavioural transgressions are dealt with by verbal reprimand and temporary banning. With the exception of the opportunity to bake once a week in the Retro café, there are no other explicit non-formal educational activities promoted in the cafés. In Retro however, it is important to point out that rather than always reverting to verbal reprimand, one key dynamic is the way in which paid youth workers subtly attempt to enable young people to develop social competencies by engaging with them in thinking and inquiring into the exclusionary impact of their words and actions. Exploring the performance of masculinities, we will now see how the (re)production and maintenance of the cafés as inclusive contests with some young men’s pursuit of manhood.

Humour in the cafés

Insults, banter, and ‘having a laugh’

In both cafés, some young men attempted to become a particular kind of masculine self through gendered insults which they believed to be humorous. In one instance in the Retro café, Liam (age 14) jokingly exclaimed ‘Come on you faggot!’, referring to his friend Eric (age 13) who was talking to someone else though it was his shot at pool. Eric immediately turned around, sniggered and stated, ‘Shut up!’ Upon reprimand for using this term by Emma (youth worker), Liam explained that he ‘was just calling him stupid’. Echoing the ‘lads’ practices of having ‘a laff’ in Willis’s (1977) classic work, Liam’s insult constitutes a form of (hetero)sexist surveillance which (as his minimising of it shows) here, ‘operates under the guise of playfulness among mates’ (Dalley-Trim 2007, 212). The use of the ‘faggot’ epithet as synonymous with ‘stupid’ has been found in other studies (Pascoe 2007) but at other instances in both cafés, ‘verbal sparring’ (Dalley-Trim 2007) using the terms ‘gay’ or ‘pussy’ was also invoked.

I have labelled these insults as examples of ‘Humour in the cafés’ as the humorousness of them had to do with how they threatened the (gendered) boundaries of others identities. In situations such as these when gendered and homophobic insults are traded between close friends, there are for café staff, momentary decisions to be made about whether to intervene and to what extent they are to be problematised. Emma’s intervening approach in these cases for example is to ask questions such as ‘do you realise what this means?’ She explained in the interview how she tries to balance between ensuring problematic ideas about gender are not (re)produced, but also in not being too confrontational and authoritarian: ‘It’s trying to find the balance without wrecking their heads…’ (Interview extract).

Of course, there are many reasons to intervene. While the cafés may appear as neutral backdrops or containers (Massey 1994; O’Donoghue 2007) within which young men construct masculine selves between friends (Schwalbe 2014), this is not the case. Young men come into the café spaces with gendered identities already built up from ongoing repetition enacted elsewhere (O’Donoghue 2006). If young men’s manhood acts go unquestioned within the spaces, they can have a cumulative effect (Curry 1991), implying that the exclusionary meanings embedded through these performances are acceptable both within these spaces and elsewhere. As Emma articulated herself, insults that may be ‘acceptable’ between friends can still be problematic even if nobody else outside these interactions are effected by them: ‘I think they all deserve a level of respect… I’d say [to them] I don’t think that’s a nice way to speak to each other.’ (Interview extract).

For café workers to continuously refrain from intervening in cases were friends appear to be engaging in non-hostile ‘verbal sparring’, performances such as these between close friends can work to produce the cafés as sites of emergence (Dalley-Trim 2007) where only certain versions of gendered selves are both explicitly and implicitly rendered (un)acceptable within the cafés. These homophobic performances can inscribe and produce the cafés as spaces of heterosexual dominance where ‘other’ sexual and gender identities, for example those who identify as LGBTQ are made to feel unwelcome and ‘out-of-place’ (Curtin and Linehan 2002). This shows how young people’s ability to ‘be themselves’ are contingent on the gendered norms which produce the spaces and the extent to which these norms are challenged and/or (de)legitimised. In some young men’s attempts to ‘become’ certain versions of ‘men’ then, the café spaces have the potential to ‘become’ and ‘be’ spaces of masculine power and gendered exclusion.

The exclusionary mechanisms embedded in manhood acts through humour are also overt. On one occasion at Retro, Michelle (age 13) was sitting at a table next to myself and Jon (age 14) where she began playing the hangman board game with Dillon (age 13). The boardgame involves one player having to guess what word the other has spelled out. For each letter guessed wrong the opposing player twists a clock which shows sequential pictures of a stickman who is about to be hanged. Two of Dillon’s friends were using a laptop at the table next to them when one of them loudly asked: ‘Michelle do you have blue waffle?’ (fieldnotes, Retro). ‘Blue waffle’ is a fictitious blue coloured disease that is supposedly meant to affect women in the genital area. The three young men sniggered, but Michelle ignored the question. A minute later, I saw that Dillon had now spelled out the word ‘whore’ for Michelle to guess. Over the next few minutes, I repeatedly asked him to choose different words over the sexualised and explicitly insulting (such as ‘slut’) terms he was spelling out. This sexist and harassing humour worked as a tool for the young men both ‘to validate and amplify their heterosexual masculinity’ (Dalley-Trim 2007, 209) and to imply that young men cannot suffer from this unclean and misogynistically mythical condition, since ‘active’ heterosexuality is normative for young men (Richardson 2010; Wight 1994).

Obviously, these overt forms of bullying do not align with the principles of equality and inclusion that are meant to be sustained within youth cafés. In enacting subtle non-formal learning, café workers attempt to (re)produce the spaces as inclusive by sanctioning these performances and engaging with young men in the more important work of questioning and querying the ‘idea’ (Schwalbe 2014) of what a ‘man’ might mean. Through these critical questions, the cafés are produced as sites of contestation over normative ways of what is sayable and doable along gendered lines (Dalley-Trim 2007; Kiilakoski and Kivijärvi 2015). Youth cafés may be socially produced as gendered spaces based on exclusionary values associated with masculine power, but this is not inevitable. Through the pedagogies of youth work, the cafés are also possible sites of emergence for alternative constructions of masculinity which ideally align with inclusiveness.

‘Game-plays’ and the materiality of humour

In both cafés, humour was also encoded through body-reflexive practices (Nayak 2006) in the form of ‘game-plays’ (Kehily and Nayak 1997), defined as competitive physically tactile interactions which end with a winner, loser or a draw. Game-plays involved ‘rough-’n’-tumble’ (Kehily and Nayak 1997), encompassing a broad range of physical horseplay (Nayak 2006) such as ‘push plays’, ‘pull pranks’ and ‘pull fights’ and were performed by appropriating some of the material props of each café. ‘Push plays’ involved using either the pool cue or just hands to physically push an opponent back, constituting a form of ‘macho posturing’ (Dalley-Trim 2007), based on constructing an image of physical strength. ‘Pull pranks’ involved swiping the pool cue away just as the opponent is about to grab it. These manhood acts are a means to signify masculine prowess (Nayak 2006), working to construct an agile and physically superior and dominant image of self by simultaneously making the opponent look clumsy. Lastly, ‘pull fights’ involved attempting to pull the cue from another person like tug of war and again worked to construct an image of strength and agile superiority as pull fights also encompassed suddenly letting the cue go, producing a scramble for balance by the outwitted opponent.

Through these performances, young men attempt to prove that they can physically ‘handle themselves’ (Nayak 2006) and construct a masculine self based on the exertion of control (Schwalbe 2014). In doing so, they can constitute how others can and do experience the spaces. These ‘game plays’ monopolized the spaces in gendered ways, disrupting others corporeal manoeuvrability. In the interview, without any prompting of my own, Michelle (age 13) brought up that ‘there’s barely no girls here’. While this was true in the numerical sense, the café spaces were gendered in the sense that young men and women performed gender differently, whereby young men’s performances such as ‘game-plays’ constituted a form of entitlement over the physical and linguistic space of the cafés (Dalley-Trim 2007). Consistent with observations on other micro spaces such as classrooms (Dalley-Trim 2007), other school spaces (O’Donoghue 2006, 2007) and youth clubs (Forkby and Kiilakoski 2014; Robertson 2005), the effect was that young women in particular were marginalised to the periphery of the cafés, since their movements were restricted by young men’s boisterousness, As Jordan (age 17) argued: ‘I’m not being sexist now but it’s eh, the lads kind of take over … its very kind of hard then for the girls then…’

As Michelle’s point about the lack of young women in the cafés highlights, young people’s experiences of the cafés are constituted by these various masculinist technologies of jostling and play-fighting. Jon (age 14) argued that the Retro youth café gets ‘a bit mixed up sometimes, they tend to go a little wild…they just mess around and cause chaos…’ (interview extract). As Barry (age 16) argued, the ‘messing’ is ‘kind of hard to pinpoint, just shouting at each other, the odd throwing themselves at each other’ (interview extract). These extracts indicate the private oppositions that some young people had about some young men’s ‘take over’ of the spaces through their more boisterous and embodied performances. They are ‘private’ in the sense that they were views that they kept mainly to themselves and did not openly voice opposition to young men’s performances.

It was café staff who policed these performances in their attempts to produce a safe, inclusive space. On one occasion for example, Liam (age 14) refused to give the pool cue to Anne (youth worker) despite her repeated requests for it, since his engagement in a push play effectively monopolized the space of the café and undermined safety. Anne eventually grabbed the cue and recommended that he do three laps around the block ‘to drain some of that energy’ (fieldnotes, Retro). Her suggestion exemplifies that this monopolization was obviously not deliberate, rather it stemmed from some young men’s comfortable entitlement over the spaces (Schwalbe 2014). As Schwalbe (2014, 64) points out ‘males [can] often feel authentic as they engage in manhood acts’. Here, maintaining the space as inclusive and enabling young people the freedom to ‘be’, can be a delicate balancing act as interrupting these performances is not always straight forward for café workers, as Emma (youth worker) articulated:

… just because they’re shouting and roaring and messing with each other with the pool table doesn’t actually mean that there’s anything, your tolerance levels I think as well for like noise and that type of thing would change and you realise, teenagers are noisy you know its ok they’re not actually… [doing anything bad]

What Emma is articulating here is how café workers enact a ‘pedagogy of loose space’ (Kiilakoski and Kivijärvi 2015), between maintaining some sense of psychic and physical safety within the cafés spaces, but also allowing young people to be ‘who they are’ (Sarah, Retro coordinator, interview extract), even if ‘who they are’ is based on socially constructed ideas (in the case of this paper) about the masculine self (Schwalbe 2014). In other words, the constant reprimand of some young men can ironically constitute an exclusionary practice in itself, as boisterousness may for them represent ‘being who they are’.

Humour through the cafés

Humorous improprieties

Café staff attempt to produce a respectful and inclusive café space by reprimanding the use of crude, inappropriate and disrespectful language within them. Young men are cognisant of these limitations on their behaviour and the control which staff deploy in policing the space. Rather than acting as a constraint however, these norms ironically enabled the cafés to act as performative arenas for young men to construct masculinities. This is because young men could prove that they are ‘becoming’ men by constructing themselves in relation to these norms. They challenged the norms through various humorous technologies, one of which is what I have conceived as ‘humorous improprieties’:

…Liam (age 14) at one point seemed to randomly out loud and in a matter-of-fact delivery state ‘Dick. Sex. Pussy.’ This incited sniggering from his friend Aaron (age 14). Liam was standing up straight, soldier like with his eyes averting attention to Anne (youth worker), who did not hear him, perhaps because she was texting… Liam smiled at Aaron and got back to playing pool… when Anne and Rebecca (volunteer) had briefly left the café space to go down the corridor, Liam began stating these words again even louder… Aaron laughed, but Liam suddenly stopped when Anne came back in… (Fieldnotes, Retro)

This extract exemplifies the key characteristics of humorous improprieties. First the performances are for the amusement of friends. Second, while young men momentarily discredit the identities imputed to café workers as competent and observant ‘sanctioners’ (Goffman 1959) of the normative order, the relational objects the humour is deployed against was not so much a particular individual’s identity, but the norms of (in)appropriate use of vulgar language within the spaces themselves.

In striving to become men then, some young men constructed themselves in relation to and in opposition to the normative order of the cafés. The existence of the normative order provided young men with the opportunity to impress upon peers that they are ‘becoming’ men by creating ‘humorous events’ (Nayak 2006), constructing themselves as ‘funny boys’ or ‘troublemakers’ (Dalley-Trim 2007) and to demonstrate their capacities to resist being controlled by the normative order (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009), similar to what has been found in classroom and school contexts (Dalley-Trim 2007; Willis 1977).

Humour bombing

Performances which I have coined ‘humour bombing’ were also designed to challenge the normative order of the cafés. A difference, however, is that they were noticed and perceived by almost everyone in both cafés, rather than friends only as in the case of humorous improprieties. The term - ‘humour bombing’ - describes the (as I have written in the fieldnotes) ‘out of nowhere’ character of these performances, similar to the phenomenon of ‘videobombing’ and ‘photobombing’, which refer to how a person or even an animal may unexpectedly appear in a video or photo. These appearances are sometimes deliberate on the part of the unexpected person, intended as a practical joke. In this way, the appearance is staged to disrupt the carefully scripted and/or idealised video, dialogue or image. Due to space I cite one example of ‘humour bombing’ only. While Liam (age 14) was setting up the PlayStation, his friend Conor (age 13) ‘shouted out of nowhere’ profanity that implied aggressive heterosex and references the female genitalia. As I wrote in the fieldnotes, a ‘“light laughter ensued from many within the café. Anne cautioned that ‘that’s disrespectful’. Conor asked: ‘to who?’, where Liam replied with his voiced raised ‘to women!’” (Fieldnotes, Retro).

The particular profanity shouted by Conor was a ‘meme’, which refers to an ‘idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behaviour that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)’ (Urbandictionary 2003). The profanity ‘gained notoriety online after it was widely thought to have been said by a video bombing prankster during the live broadcast of a local news report in Cincinnati, Ohio’ (United States) in 2014 (Know Your Meme 2018).

‘Humour bombing’ is a relational construct. It is both only humorous and an acceptable means of constructing masculinity where there is an attempt (in this case by café workers) to produce a space as respectful. Indeed, such humour bombing occurred during moments of relative quiet and this quietness may have amplified a feeling that café workers where succeeding in their visions of what a café space should ‘be’: a respectful space. As forms of manhood acts, young men’s ‘humour bombing’ reaffirmed themselves as daringly insubordinate (Schwalbe 2014).

Performances of ‘humour bombing’ were transgressive in three ways. First, they monopolized the linguistic space of the café (Dalley-Trim 2007) as they were audibly loud and infringed upon the general comfort of others. Second, as mentioned, the vulgar and harassing meanings embedded within them were transgressive of the normative order. Third, they implicitly challenged café workers competency and identities in terms of their role of maintaining general decorum in the café spaces. In all it is the transgression of the norms of the space which made some young people believe they are humorous, and the point is that this is a deliberate disruption rather than unconscious entitlement of the space as in the case of ‘gameplays’.

The transgressive disruption of these forms of humour echo that of scholars who have similarly highlighted how disruptive performances relate to a rejection of the value of education (Willis 1977). Youth cafés are not spaces of formal education however, so the question is: what is rejected? I suggest that what is rejected is the idea – made particularly salient in quiet moments and periods – that the café workers have complete control over the space and what the space should ‘become’, namely, a space of safety, and where discursive and embodied meanings are aligned with inclusivity, hence, why ‘humour bombing’ consisted of crude and sexist language.

Similar to humorous improprieties, the performances work to give off a daring and ‘funny boy’ (Dalley-Trim 2007) images of a masculine self as well as convey resistance to being controlled by socially produced rules (Schwalbe 2014). Yet the meanings that are produced by these performances are more than that of simply monopolizing the linguistic space and producing discomfort. Rather, they (re)produce meanings about gender. Although Conor was not referring to any particular young woman in Retro the performance can nevertheless be interpreted as producing meanings about hierarchical gender relations. Embedded within the profanity is the aggressive and objectifying inference ‘that sexual intercourse is not a joint activity but something males do to females’ (Wight 1994, 722) [my emphasis]. Its utterance is one of the many ways in which young women may learn about notions of female passivity and acquiescence and male activity and control (Wight 1994). What it highlights is that the norms which café workers attempt to produce and which young men attempt to test and transgress is an issue far more than one of ensuring that the youth cafés are supposed to be spaces where young people should be able to ‘relax’ and be afforded some measure of psychic safety and bodily security. It is also an issue about how these performances may constitute the café as yet another learning space for the (re)production of normative gender relations more broadly (O’Donoghue 2007).

Creating a scene

Some humorous performances were about ‘creating a scene’ (Goffman 1959). These too, challenged the normative order as well as the imputed identities of café workers as competent ‘sanctioners’. On one occasion for example, Eric (age 13), who was temporarily banned for deliberately spilling water in the Retro café, repeatedly attempted to try and enter the café. At one stage, after managing to hide under the table near the entrance initially and briefly unbeknownst to café workers, almost all young people present in the café began laughing. Anne (youth worker) exclaimed ‘that’s not funny it’s not fair to have someone clean up the mess that he made’ (fieldnotes, Retro).

In another incident, Eric was told not to come back for the remainder of the café session, but humorously attempted to connect his mobile phone to the café’s WIFI by waving his hand through the ajar door entrance. Barry (age 16), who never caused upset or broke any of the rules and norms within the Retro café, could not help but laugh and became suddenly quiet when Emma (youth worker) cautioned to him that ‘if you joke like that it only spurs him on and then you could get into trouble yourself’ (fieldnotes, Retro).

Performances which were intended to ‘create a scene’ interrupted every activity and individual and captured the attention of all young people in the cafés, not merely friends. In contrast to ‘humour bombing’, the attention of young people was captured by more than just a ‘brief few moments’ and were significantly disruptive. This is because ‘creating a scene’ involved a combination of horseplay, swearing including sexualised swearing, exaggerated and drawn-out performances that prove that one can handle oneself in the face of café worker’s reprimands. Interestingly, it resembles a version of ‘protest’ (McDowell and Harris 2019) or ‘spectacular’ masculinity (Nayak 2006) which was visible and audible. Young men who created a scene by enacting these performances were aided by supportive laughter and clear deference from both close friends and other young people’s laughing, thus, most of the young people present in the cafés during these moments constituted an integral ‘cooperative audience’ (Schwalbe 2014) for these performances.

Besides the ‘funny boy’, daring and insubordinate images of self these performances construct, they also signify masculine prowess (Nayak 2006) and control as young men show how they can gain momentary control of the spaces from café workers, who must manage not merely the behaviour of the culprit, but the entire situation. The creation of ‘a scene’ was usually very stressful. With humorous improprieties and bombing, on the part of the young man there was respect for the fact that the café worker is a person who has a responsibility to maintain certain ‘involvement obligations’ (Goffman 1967) toward young people and who must contribute to the production of a relatively cordial space where values of equality and inclusivity are upheld. With performances that were about ‘creating a scene’, café workers came to be not someone to laugh with, to involve them playfully in the performance that is given, but to laugh at. My own feelings during these situations were of awkwardness, grappling with the sheer disintegration of a sense of respect and order within the space which myself and café workers were now faced with. What these performances produce in my interpretation is a sense that café workers control and (re)production of the space as safe and inclusive is exposed as a charade, a performative illusion that requires continual (re)making (Gregson and Rose 2000). In these moments, workers are put out of ‘face’ (Goffman 1967) where some individual young men can demonstrably remind that at times at least it is they who have control and the upper hand. It is in other words, a masculine space. It is ‘theirs’ (Curtin and Linehan 2002).

Discussion and conclusion

Blending insights from the sociology of masculinity and performative geographies, this article has problematised the idea that open access youth provision are pre-existing spaces of inclusivity and individuality where young people can ‘be themselves’. Rather, by examining the performance of masculinities, this article has shown that ‘the ability to enact some identities or realities rather than others is highly contingent on the power-laden spaces’ (Valentine 2007, 19).

The first empirical section – Humour in the cafés – highlighted manhood acts that were based on strength, agility, competitiveness, superiority, heterosexuality and control. These where humorous because the acts were based on young men constructing themselves in relation to others, hence, as in the contexts of schools (e.g. Dalley-Trim 2007; O’Donoghue 2007; Willis 1977), open access forms of youth provision can be (re)produced as sites of emergence (Dalley-Trim 2007) where ideas about normative gender relations are played out. In the second section – Humour through the cafés – young men construct themselves as men in relation to the spaces themselves. Some young men are cognisant of how workers try to (re)produce the cafés as spaces of safety, individuality and respect for others. The normative order was appropriated by young men as a performative resource to construct themselves as ‘funny boys’, superior, daring and crucially, convey that they cannot be totally controlled (Schwalbe 2014). Through this analysis, I have advanced new concepts – ‘humorous improprieties’ and ‘humour bombing’ – to the performative geographies literature. These highlight two nuanced ways in which young men construct themselves as men in relation to space using humorous masculinist technologies.

Here I suggest, is where youth cafés can be conceptualised as micropolitical spaces of becoming. The meanings embedded in young men’s striving to ‘become’ men are based on exclusions and gendered inequality. Embedded in their performances is an ‘idea’ about the masculine self which, left unchallenged, can inscribe and monopolize the linguistic and material space of the cafés, potentially (re)producing them, as in the case of some youth clubs, ‘a microcosm of the real world where people are discriminated against and abused’ (Robertson 2005, 82). Café workers must continually work to (re)produce the café spaces as safe, inclusive and where quality relationships are upheld, since masculinist technologies of humour continually disrupt the fixity of the café spaces as ‘being’ pre-existing spaces of safety, inclusivity, equality and respect.

At moments, young men appear successful in deploying social power to claim space as masculine and ‘theirs’ (Curtin and Linehan 2002). Ultimately, the permanence of this is short-lived. Young men are unsuccessful in claiming the space as a completely masculine one and are even at times, confronted with critical questioning as to the ideological basis of their performances. The cafés constituted performative spaces where young men could signify masculinity beyond school and street spaces among others (Nayak 2006).

Part of the project of projecting a coherent masculine self is to keep consistency of self across places and places (Goffman 1959), yet research also shows how young men may recalibrate their masculinities across different spaces in their localities (Ward 2015). Further research can explore both the extent to which young men ‘chameleonise’ or ‘code-switch’ (Ward 2015) their masculine fronts between the places and spaces they use and frequent in their localities and how their use of youth work sites are bound up with these dynamics, particularly in areas of deprivation. Given that youth work emphasises equal power relations and ideals of equality, inclusivity and participation, this research will add to our understandings of how youth work spaces contest normative gender relations. In terms of this article, I have shown that as possibly the most unstructured form of designated youth provision, youth cafés have a stake in gender relations. What is at stake is a further sedimenting of versions of masculinity that young men have built up from elsewhere (O’Donoghue 2006) which are productive of gender inequality, and which threatens any notion that youth cafés can be inclusive.

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Barry, a kind, sociable, and well-liked young man who sadly passed away four years after the fieldwork. He loved the Retro youth café very much. This paper is partly derived from a PhD thesis which explored how masculinities were performed in both youth cafés more generally, including but beyond performances of humour. Sincere thanks to my PhD supervisors Dr. Elizabeth Kiely and Dr. Caitríona Ní Laoire. Thank you to my dear friend Mastoureh Fathi whose encouragement led me to continue working on the paper. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and immense patience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Robert Bolton

Robert Bolton is a post-doctoral researcher on a three-year, EU-funded project (PositivMasc) which explores the discourses that young people use in their understanding of masculinities and how these discourses influence young people’s attitudes, behaviours and responses to violence against women. The project is based on innovative, participatory research using a multi-country, mixed-methods approach. Robert graduated with a PhD in Applied Social Studies in 2018 from University College Cork. His research was an ethnographic study which focused on the performance of young masculinities in youth cafes.