Becoming a clubber: transitions, identities and lifestyles

Abstract

This thesis examines how young people identify and affliate with particular club scenes and how these practices and processes relate to their transitions, identities and lifestyles. It aims to give a sense of the processes and the resources that are required to 'become' a clubber over time. The thesis engages with the recent attempts to reconcile the conceptual and empirical divisions between the two main approaches in the sociology of youth. It suggests that the work ofSchutz serves as a heuristic framework to conceptualise data, and when synthesised with other sympathetic conceptual frameworks, links disparate literature to allow for a better understanding of the role of knowledge in the transitions, identities and lifestyles of young people. This focus influenced my choice of method: the ethnographic techniques of participant observation and in-depth interviewing were employed to access participants' experiences and knowledge of becoming a c1ubber. The findings suggest that the process of becoming a clubber is a gendered, dialectical and transformational process: informed by the social heritage and locally situated experiences of clubbing participants. It is a process that manifests itself through embodied practices involving cultural knowledge and taste. Participants place one another on the basis of their participation in and identification with a clubbing lifestyle. These placements appear embedded in the social order: they call not only on old social markers but also on the increasing hierarchies of difference within and across social groups. Social competence, cultural knowledge and consumer activities are all implicated in the placement of others, and the construction of boundaries that clubbing collectives engage in. These are young people who can afford materially and socially to extend both their structural and cultural transitions. The social confidence and adept skills of exchange that 'proper' clubbers develop are resources that help them develop and create social and cultural capital of their own. Becoming a clubber requires competency, skills and dispositions: it is a process that transmits privilege and disadvantage.