Title

Model of Marginality-Diagram A

Description

Diagrammatically, it suggests a series of concentric circles: the further out the circle, the more marginal its inhabitants are to the hub of the dominant culture—the world of the middle class male adult.
The diagram is schematised and selected in accord with one theoretical focus—the activity of potentially deviant girls. It is rather like attempting to elaborate a model of the whole society from a study of Skinheads, and its deficiencies become more apparent if we ask where other women should go. Are adult, middle class women nearer the middle, less marginal than adult working class men, for instance? A question of that sort has no single satisfactory answer, but it does undercut the validity of such a model. The model does have some descriptive power which derives from assumptions about both the centrality and the private nature of the family, and the family conceived of as the proper sphere of women. From these assumptions, there is no problem about where to place the “other women”—we know where they are, they are not there, they are tucked away in the privatised and socially-invisible family life. They stand outside the world of power, contest and conflict, and consequently only girls who stand outside the family (and, more recently, “violent” girls and women) enter into that arena of challenge and control.

Designer

Powell, Rachel

Clarke, John

Date

2003

Source

Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain

Bibliographic Citation

Hall, S. 2003. "Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain." Routledge. Page 223.

depict things of type

Structural or Hierarchical