Youth cultures and consumerism: Sport subcultures and possibilities for resistance

This study examined alternative sport subcultures as a potential site for resistance to dominant forms of popular culture. As commercial interests use their control of the means of communication to monopolize cultural space and to dominate it with forms of popular culture that reaffirm capitalist values, including the importance of consumption in achieving success and fulfillment, cultural forms that hold values in opposition to consumerism and commercial success are pushed to the margins. This study asked; to what extent are corporate culture producers able to reconstruct oppositional activities as forms of popular culture that reaffirm consumerism and in what ways are members of these oppositional groups able to negotiate some freedom to construct culture as they wish?;To address this question, the author interviewed professional skateboarders, snowboarders and bicycle motocross riders to examine two primary issues; (1) the perceptions of athletes regarding how their sports have changed with commercialization and (2) whether athletes are involved in attempts to resist corporate control of their sports and how effective they are. Respondents indicated that their sports have become organized more like mainstream athletics, with increasing emphasis on competition, external rewards, specialization and the performance of spectacular stunts. However, despite these changes, subjects reported that they are not engaged in collective attempts to resist or challenge corporate-controlled versions of their sports. Respondents were more likely to attempt to escape the corporate-controlled events by participating in athlete-controlled forms of the sports including participant-owned demonstration companies and video performances. This "parallel world" of participation exists alongside the commodified version without being readily appropriated by corporate sponsors, or engaging in direct opposition.;The author suggests that the existence of parallel worlds indicates that the dichotomy between co-optation and resistance in the theoretical literature may be overstated. In a world in which the power to control cultural space has become so concentrated and overwhelming that it cannot be challenged on its own terms, perhaps agency exists in the ability to carve out these parallel spaces that can preserve the autonomy, creativity and spontaneity of those original oppositional cultural forms.