‘Chavs, chavettes and pramface girls’: teenage mothers, marginalised young men and the management of stigma

Abstract

This paper examines how marginalised youth including unemployed young men and teenage mothers come to be represented through labels such as ‘chav’ and ‘pramface’. It explores the deeply affective nature of these representations, how they leak out into everyday life and come adhere to particular bodies and spaces. A contribution of the paper is to move beyond the familiar terrain of textual deconstruction to further consider how lower working-class young men and teenage mothers manage social class stigma and might themselves speak back to these markers of abjection. In doing so they are seen as creative actors who may come to inhabit these seemingly negative articulations, dissimulate from them or resist them altogether. We conclude that while the stubborn markers of class disparagement cannot easily be displaced, paying attention to how they might be understood and re-evaluated within local youth circuits offers nuanced readings that may resonate more closely with working-class experience.

Keywords:

• chavs
• class
• motherhood
• subculture
• unemployment
• youth

Acknowledgements

The project team comprised Rachel Thomson, Mary Jane Kehily, Lucy Hadfield and Sue Sharpe. The research on young masculinities and NEETs was conducted by Anoop Nayak independently. Both authors would like to thank their participants for their time, passion and general good humour.

Funding

The Making Modern Mothers study was funded by the ESRC Social Identities programme [RES148-25-0057].

Additional information

Funding

Funding: The Making Modern Mothers study was funded by the ESRC Social Identities programme [RES148-25-0057].