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This essay offers a critique of the subcultural discourse surrounding skateboarding. Skateboarding I argue has been represented in academia, popular culture and skateboard media as a subculture which resists mainstream society. First by identifying three central themes in the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies' theorisation of subcultures: resistance, societal reaction and subcultural identity, and by demonstrating how geographers have interpreted these themes spatially, I deconstruct the nature of the skateboarding as subculture discourse. Then, drawing on a qualitative set of methods, I argue that the everyday lives and experiences of skateboarders complicates the assumed naturalness of the subculture-mainstream culture binary. Indeed I end this paper by concluding that this core ontology in the study of skateboarding is unhelpful. Instead I propose an alternative framework, centred around the concept of Performativity, and a novel ontological starting point to argue that skateboarding, and potentially other subcultures, might be best understood as ordinary rather than marginal or different.
About the author
Joe Penny holds degrees in Geography and Social policy and planning from the University College London and Development Planning Unit.
