The practice of ‘Othering’ in reaffirming white working-class boys’ conceptions of normative identities

ABSTRACT

This paper considers how the practice of ‘Othering’ is used by white working-class boys in Boremund, South London to mark identity boundaries and reaffirm their habitus. Through unearthing themes of difference within the young men’s accounts, the work identifies various ways of ‘doing masculinity’ in two social groups, ‘Boremund Boys’ and ‘emos’, who contrasted greatly in style but who were of the same race, class, and ethnicity. Focusing on the identity negotiations of a small cohort, aged 14–16, the data indicate how a normative white male identity specific to this locale is policed and how ‘Othering’ is employed as a strategy. Using Bourdieu’s tools alongside the hermeneutic of heteronormativity, the research explores how emos, through inverting a traditional working-class masculinity, brought the habitus of Boremund Boys into disjuncture. Within the field of masculinity, the habitus of Boremund Boys, through a process of reorientation, reconciles competing and contrasting conceptions of what it is to be a white working-class male in South London.

KEYWORDS:

• Habitus
• white working-class boys
• emos
• othering
• identity work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Ironically, the genderlessness of the broader emo subculture emphasizes the goth values of equality and self-expression against what its members perceive as the constrictive mainstream. Within the goth/emo social space, the ‘style practice of male androgyny’ of goth men can draw on the transgressive charge of gender-bending as a major source of subcultural capital (Brill 2007, 117); however, within the wider field of Boremund, androgyny is not a subcultural capital (Thornton 1995).

2 ‘Donut’ was a pejorative slang term used in South London during the time of the study.

3 There is tremendous variation within the emo subculture as seen in studies conducted in the Welsh valleys (Ward 2015), Newcastle (Hodkinson 2004), and Montreal (Peters 2010).