Spectacle in the dark: Youth as transgression, display, and repression

Educational Theory

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 1-22

  Roman, Leslie G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002034721     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1996.00001.x     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. I note that this expression carries the geographical spectre of a transgressivepolitics of pleasure. See Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), for an analysis of youth as transgressive spectacle vis a vis the notions of trouble and fun [esp. pp. 17-37)
2. See Paul Anisef and Lesley Andres, "Dropping Out in Canada: The Construction of a Crisis!," in Debating Dropouts, ed. Deirdre Kelly and Jane Gaskell [New York Teachers College Press, forthcoming1 for an excellent sociological and historical account of how, in order to deflect public attention away from massive youth unemployment, Employment and Immigration Canada created the drop-out crisis through A National Stay-in-School Initiative (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1990) and the School Leaven Survey (Ottawa: Ministry of Supply and Services, 1991). A National Stay-in-School Initiative will be referred to as Initiative with page numbers in the text for all subsequent citations.
3. Patrick McGee, Telling the Other: The Question of Value in Modern and Postcolonial Writing (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, and LeRoi B. Daniels, conversation with author, 22 September 1994. 1992, 121
4. This is not to suggest that democratic speech can be guaranteed simply because such ground has been opened. It is, however, a risk that I argue must be taken if youth is to become politically enfranchised. For example, see Leslie G. Roman, "Double Exposure: The Politics of Feminist Materialist Ethnography," Educational Theory 43, no. 3 (1993): 279-308 and Leslie G. Roman, "'On the Ground' with Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Raymond Williams's Unfinished Project to Articulate a Socially Transformative Critical Realism," in Views Beyond the Border Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics, ed. Dennis Dworkin and Leslie G. Roman (New York: Routledge, 1993, 158-214.
5. Anisef and Andres, Dropping Out in Canada Nancy Lesko, "The Dependency of Independence: At Risk Youth, Economic Self-Sufficiency, and Curricular Change," in Debating Dropouts, ed. Deirdre Kelly and Jane Gaskell (New York: Teachers College Press, forthcoming); Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics and the Construction of Deviance (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994)
6. George Lipsitz, "We Know What TimeIt Is: Race, Class, and Youthculturein the Nineties," inMicrophone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross andTricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), 17-28
7. Frank Margonis, "The Cooptation of 'At Risk': Parodoxes of Policy Criticism," Teachers College Record, no. 2 94(1992: 343-64.
8. Michelle Fine, Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban High School (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991 )
9. Michelle Fine, "Making Controversy: Who's 'At Risk!"' in Children At Risk in America: History, Concepts, and Public Policy, ed. Roberta Wollons (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993),91-110
10. Deirdre Kelly, Last Chance High (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1993
11. Donna Deyhle, "Constructing Failure and Maintaining Cultural Identity: Navajo and Ute School Leavers,"{ournal ofAmerican Indian Education (Winter 1992): 24-37
12. DonnaDeyhle, "Cultural Differences in Child Development: Navajo Adolescents in Middle Schools," Theory into Practice 33, no. 3 (1994): 156-66
13. Fine, Framing Dropouts.
14. Margonis, "Cooptation of 'At Risk,"' 360.
15. The commonly used term in cultural studies for manufactured crises is "moral panic." It originates in the work of Stan Cohen [see Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers [Oxford:Martyn Robertson, 1972
16. rev. ed. 1980))w, ho used the term to break awayfrom traditional criminology and the sociology of deviance. For Cohen, moral panics were periodic campaigns to regulate various workingclass youth subcultures by personifying them in the media or through other agencies of social control as the latest "folk devils" of society. Cohen's use of the concept was significantly refined by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, andBrian Roberts in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order [London and Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1978), who expanded it to include the ways in which particular groups are singled out to symbolize not only a general manufactured social crisis, but also to justify conservative calls for regulating their alleged deviancy. They trace how the British press imported the American crisis over "mugging" to Britain. The net effect was an equation of black youth with crime and alleged increases in acts of mugging. They show how this moral panic alters public common sense in that it entails calling for law, order, and discipline as well as seriously lengthening the prison sentences given to convicted "muggers." My own use of the term draws upon the later work of Hall (Stuart Hall, "Thatcherism and the Theorists" [paper presented at the "Marxism and the Reinterpretation of Culture" Conference, Urbana, Ill., July 1984))a nd Hall and Jacques (StuartH all and Martin Jacques, New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990]), who widened the concept to include the articulation of gender, sexuality, and nation [along with race and class) as part of the process of ideological common sense-making in both official and popular culture. This more generalized application provides the basis for my own thinking because it addresses the articulation of a range of conflicting interests within and across such diverse sites as the family, national policies, the welfare state, and lived cultural formations of particular groups. See also Michael W. Apple, "Constructing the 'Other': Rightist Constructions of Common Sense," in Race, Identity and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (New York Routledge, 1993), 24-39
17. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, "A Genealogy of Dependency: A Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State," Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 2 [ 1994): 309-36
18. Leslie G. Roman, "Intimacy, Labor and Class: Ideologies of Feminine Sexuality in the Punk Slam Dance," in Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture, cd. Leslie G. Roman and Linda Christian-Smith with Elizabeth Ellsworth (Sussex: Falmer Press, 1988, 143-84
19. Leslie G. Roman, "White is a Color! White Defensiveness, Postmodernism, and Anti-racist Pedagogy," in Race, Identity and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Chrichlow [New York: Routledge, 1993),71-88
20. Comel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference," in Race, Identityand Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Chrichlow [New York: Routledge, 1993), 11-23
21. Judith Butler, "Discussion," October 61 (Summer 1992): 108-20
22. Davina Cooper, Sexing the City Lesbian and Gay Politics Within the Activist State (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1994)
23. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
24. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, "A Genealogy of Dependency" Linda Gordon, "SocialInsuranceandPub1icAssistance:TheInfluenceofG ender in WelfareThought in theUnitedStates," American Historical Review no. 1 97, (1992): 19-54
25. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)
26. Sandra Harding,Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)
27. Sandra Harding, The "Racial" Economy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
28. Allison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman, 1993)
29. Allison Jaggar, Living with Contradictions: Controversies in Feminist Social Ethics (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1994)
30. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," Feminist Review30 (Autumn 1988): 61-88
31. Chandra Mohanty, "On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 90"'' Cultural Critique 18, no. 14 (1989-90): 197-205
32. Dorothy Smith, The Everyday world as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1988)
33. Gayatri C. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in The Postcolonial Critic: Issues, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasyrn (New York: Routledge, 1990), 271-313.
34. Wini Breines, Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992)
35. Butler, "Discussion" Fraser, "Unruly Practices" Fraser and Gordon, "Genealogy of Dependence" Gordon, "Social Insurance and Public Assistance" Harding, The Science Question; Harding, Feminism and Methodology; Harding, The "Racial" Economy of Science; Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature; Jaggar, Living with Contradictions; Angela McRobbie, "Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity," in Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women's Subordination, ed. Women's Studies Group (London: Hutchinson, 1978)
36. Angela McRobbie, "BetweenText, Talk and Action: The Politics of Feminist Research," Feminist Review 12 (1982): 46-67
37. Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes" Mohanty, "On Race and Voice" Roman, "Intimacy, Labor and Class" Smith, Everyday World; Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak!"
38. Pamela Courtenay-Hall, "Questions of Power and Gender in Wittgenstein's Reflections on Language" (paper presented at the meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, May 1992)
39. Jaggar, Living with Contradictions; and Smith, Everyday World.
40. Leslie G. Roman and Linda Christian-Smith with Elizabeth Ellsworth, Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture (Sussex: Falmer Press, 1988)
41. Smith, Everyday World; Veronica Strong-Boag, "Presidential Address - Contested Space: The Politics of Canadian Memory," Journal of the Canadian Historical AssociationlReview of the Historical Society, N.S., 5 (1994): 3-17.
42. Cooper, Sexing the City; Fraser, "Unruly Practices" Fraser and Gordon, "Genealogy of Dependence" Gordon, "Social Insurance and Public Assistance" Hardmg, The Science Question; Harding, Feminism and Methodology; Harding, The "Racial" Economy of Science; Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature; Jaggar, Living with Contradictions; Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes" Mohanty, "On Race and Voice" Roman, "Double Exposure" Roman, "'On the Ground"'; Roman, "White is a Color!" Smith, Everyday World; Judith Stacey, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (New York: Basic Books, 1990)
43. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak!"
44. Courtenay-Hall, "Questions of Power and Gender."
45. Fraser, "Unruly Practices" Nancy Fraser, "Struggle Over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Theory of Late-Capitalist Political Culture," in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, 199-225
46. Gordon, "Social Insurance and Public Assistance" Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, "Contract Versus Charity: Why is There No Social Citizenship in the United States!," Socialist Review no. 3 22, [ 1992): 45-68
47. Fraser and Gordon, "Genealogy of Dependence."
48. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
49. Fraser and Gordon, "Genealogy of Dependence," 31 1
50. Hazel Carby, "The Multicultural Wars," Radical History Review54 (Fall 1982): 7-20
51. Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes" Mohanty, "On Race and Voice" Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)
52. Caroline Ramazanoglu, Feminism and the Contradictions of Oppression (London: Routledge, 1989.
53. Linda Alcoff, "The Problem of Speaking for Others," Cultural Critique 23 (1991-92):5-32
54. On Thatcherism, see Hall, "Thatcherism and the Theorists" Stuart Hall, "The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Carey Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Ufbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988),34-57
55. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart On Reaganism, see Apple, "Constructing the 'Other, 1983). ."'
56. Nancy Lesko, "Mind Over Matter: Towards a Post-Colonial Theory of Adolescent 'Developmcnt"' (paper presented at the Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice Conference, Dayton, Ohio, October 1992)
57. George Lipsitz, "We Know What Time It Is" and Marianne Whatley, "Raging Hormones and Powerful Cars: The Construction of Men's Sexuality in School Sex Education and Popular Adolescent Films," fournal of Education 170 (1988): 100-121.
58. Robert Enright, Victor Levy, Jr., David Harris, and Daniel Lapsey, "Do Economic Conditions Influence How Theorists View Adolescents?" [ournal of Youth and Adolescence no. 6 , 16(1987): 541-59.
59. Donna Gaines, "Border Crossing in the U.S.A.," inMicrophone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994)
60. Joan Lipsitz, "Public Policy and Young Adolescents: A 1990's Context for Researchers," [ournu! of Early Adolescence 11, no. 1 11 1199 : 20-37
61. George Lipsitz, "We Know What Time It Is."
62. Hall, "Thatcherism and the Theorists," 15.
63. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977).
64. Hall, "Thatcherism and the Theorists," 15.
65. Stuart Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees," Journal of Communication Studies 10, no. 2 (1986): 28-44.
66. Alcoff, "The Problem of Speakingfor Others" Butler, "Discussion" oTeresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)
67. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies ofGender:Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1987)
68. Fraser and Gordon, "Genealogy of Dependence" Roman, "Intimacy, Labor and Class" and Leslie G. Roman andTimothy Stanley, "Empires, Emigres, and 'Aliens': Young People's Negotiations of Official and Popular Racism in Canada" (paper presented at conference of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, Lousiana, April 1994).
69. Butler, "Discussion."
70. At the most general level, semiotics studies culture as systems of signification and meaning production. Semiotic analysis has been applied to cultural products such as romance novels, films, and poetry as well as to symbolic rituals of different youth subcultures. For an example of the former in the field of education, scc Linda Christian-Smith, Becoming a Woman Through Romance (New York: Routledge, 1990). For examples of the latter in cultural studies and education respectively, see Dick Hebdige's The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen 1 Y79) and Roman, "Intimacy, Labor and Class." Unlike conventional approaches to analyzing texts through content or thematic analyses, semiotics aims to show how meaning is produced not as a reflection of a presumed reality or naturally given categories (such as "women" or "youth") but rathcr through a process of sign production and signification which can cithcr construct or interrupt existing codes of meaning. Semioticians and semiological traditions vary in their approaches to the analysis of linguistic codes and sign-producing systems, especially with respect to the extent to which languagc or linguistic systems are accorded autonomy from larger social relations and context or viewed as stable and determinant of social relations in structuring how particular texts are read. The sharpest disagrccmcnt occurs ovcr the issue of whether readers, including the semiotician, are seen to affect and change how a process of semiosis is read by virtue of their own semiotic rcadings of a particular text. For an overview of different traditions, see Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982). Some schools of method and epistemology are highly structuralist (for example, as pioneered by Roland Barthes in his early work Elements of Semiology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967)). Others are poststructural and deconstructive in their orientation to the indeterminacy of signification and reading practices (for example, Umherto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 197Y)). Still others dcvclopcd poststructural insights but historically preceded cnnteinporar poststructural theory (see, for example, the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: and Charles Sanders Peirce: Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard university Press 1931, )
71. Charles Sanders l'eirce: Complete Published Works, Including Selected Secontlary Materials (microform), cd. Kenneth Laine Ketner (Greenwich, Conn.: Johnson Associates, 1Y 77; supplcmcntary fiche issued 19861). My own approach favors that of Eco and Peirce, who clearly outline the relatively autonomous role of readers and thus accord weight to the dynamism of intcrtcxtuality or the interactions hetween specifically located readers in different contexts.
72. Frank Burton and Pat Carlen, "'Official' Discourse," Economy and Socwty 6, no. 4 (1977): 377-407;
73. quoted in James Donald, "Green Paper: Noise of Crisis," in Schooling and the National Interest, ed. Roger Dale, Geoffrey Esland, Roger Fergusson, and Madeleine MacDonald (now, Arnot], of Education and the State (Basingstoke: Falmer Press with Open University Press I am indebted to Donald's semiotic approach to analyzing official policy documents which crystallized the British Right's call to restructure education through identifying an "educational crisis" in the late 1970s, 1981, 1 105.
74. John Fiske, Television Culture [London: Methuen, 19871, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), and Understanding Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
75. For cxample, the recent moral panic over invasion by immigrants is challenged by countervailing discourses of liberal humanism. Of course the balance of ideological power is tilted to the Right in the context of neoconservative gains and economic retrenchment. For more on these points, see Roman and Stanley, "Empires, Emigres, and Aliens." Also see Fazal Rizvi, "Children and the Grammar of Popular Racism," in Race, Identity and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Chrichlow (New York: Routledge, 19931, 126-40, for an excellent discursive analysis of the kinds of popular common-sense discursive contradictions that operate in Australian children's expressions and representations of their racism, including the rhetorical device of asserting "I'm not prejudiced but ..." and "Some of my best friendsare Asians, but ...." The contradiction makesanobligatorynodtowardsliberalhumanrights at the same time that it dismisses them.
76. Secular evangelism denotes the powerful effect of testifying in a secular context (such as television talk shows) in the same way that one would in a church or before a religious congregation.
77. Transcript of Clarence Thomas, cited in Ofra Bike1 (producer, director, writer, and narrator), "Public Hearing, Private Pain," on the weekly national U.S. news television program, Frontline [Boston: Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1992). Continuing to address the Senate panel and viewers in a secular evangelical mode of address, Thomas distanced himself from the backgrounds of his white male examiners, taking care to identify with working-class African-Americans: "My earliest memories.. .are those of Pinpoint, Georgia-a life far removed in time and space from this room, this day, and this moment. My grandparents grew up and lived their lives in an era of blatant segregation and overt discrimination. Their sense of fairness was moulded in a crucible of unfairness. But I've always carried in my heart, the words, the life, the people, the values of my youth"( italics added).
78. Here, Linda Grindstaff's critical rereading of Bikel's PBS documentary points out that it suppresses the fact that it was Hill who was most vulnerable to the symbolic lynching Thomas described, for it was Hill who was subjected to the degradation experienced by sexual assault victims who dare to speak out from a position of relative powerlessness. See Linda A. Grindstaff, "Double Exposure, Double Erasure," Cultural Critique 27 (Spring 1994): 46. On this point and other related issues, see also Geneva Smitherman, ed. African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 199q.42. Rikel, "Public Hearing, Private Pain" and Smitherman, African American Women Speak Out.
79. Grindstaff, "Double Exposure, Double Erasure."
80. Stuart Hall, "Gramsci's Relevance to the Analysisof RacismandEthnicity,"JournalofCommunication Studies 10, [ 1986): 5-27 no. 2 and Rizvi, "Children and the Grammar of Popular Racism."
81. Phil Cohen, Racism and Popular Cu1ture:A Cultural Studies Approach [London: University of London, Centre for Multicultural Education, 1988, 14.
82. See Enright, Levy, Harris, and Lapsey, "Do Economic Conditions Influence How Theorists View Adolescents!" andDan Offer andKim A. Schonert-Reichl, "Debunking the Myths of Adolescence: Findings from Recent Research," [ournal of American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry 31, no. 6 [ 1992): 1,003-14. Enright, Levy, Harris, and Lapsey show that during times of economic depression, theories of adolescence portray teenagers as immature, psychologically unstable, and in need of prolonged participation in the education system, whereas during times of war, the psychological competence of youth is emphasized and their need for education is downplayed.
83. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory.
84. The Initiative's cmphasis on a "caring nation" displays a rhetoric of national identity that is notably absent in similar proposals emanating from the United States (for example, National Commission o Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983)).C lose attention to the Intiriarive may help Americans to understand how Canadian official discourse articulates its sense of "otherness" vis-a-vis the U.S.
85. Roland Rarthes, S/Z, trans. R. Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 97-98
86. SO. The significance of the Initiative as an instance of attempting to speak for/as a unified federal voice should be noted, for, in Canada, the provinces have historically with very few exceptions had control over educational policymaking and implementation.
87. Donald, "Green Paper," 104
88. Statistics Canada, Schvol Laavers Survey. 19.
89. Aiiisef and Andres, "Dropping Out in Canada."
90. Ilonald, "Grccn Paper," 105.
91. According to Anisef and Andres in "Dropping Out in Canada," statistics on the drop-out rate are notably exaggerated in the results of the School LeuverJ Survey
92. Roman, "'On the Ground' with Anti-Racist Pedagogy," 214
93. That such displays of public talk function as important emotional catharses for audiences speaks to the absence of a politics of everyday desire in both Politics with a capital "P" and in academic discourse -an absence that discourses such as Thatchcrism and Reaganism were able to exploit.
94. John Willinsky, conversation with author, 24 September 1994
95. Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, 18.