Date of Award

8-23-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Advisor(s)

Roger Hallas

Keywords

Documentary;Fantasy;Media;Skateboarding;Subcultures;Textuality

Abstract

Subcultural Textuality: Skateboarding and the Politics of Subcultural Media analyzes skateboarding media from the mid-1970s to the present, tracing how different textual strategies, material media formats, and discourses have formed shifting understandings of skateboarding’s potential meanings as well as what identity positions are presented as “authentic” within the subculture. Skateboard media rely on what I term a subcultural textuality, a set of narratives and aesthetics which, by engaging with material media form, distribution processes, and historically specific understandings of both genre and mode, present engagement with the text as a subcultural act in and of itself. As a result, such textual engagement is not some ancillary aspect of subcultural participation or networking, but instead crucial for understanding skateboarding’s subcultural narrative, its potentially authentic subject positions, and its fantasies of rebellion and domination in relation to a variety of mainstream norms and spaces. This project’s chapters revolve around four main concerns and historical eras: magazine writing and photography in the 1970s, skate videos in the 1980s and 1990s, skateboarding’s presence on reality television in the early-2000s, and finally contemporary documentaries focused on historicizing skateboarding eras and figures. In tracing this history, I reveal how the skateboarding subculture continuously reaffirms dominant conceptions of white masculinity even as it seeks to identify as resisting mainstream processes and identity politics, while also showing the subcultural potentials of each media format in their unique historical moments as skateboarding mediations constantly shift between different narratives, aesthetics, modes, and genres.

Access

Open Access

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