January 22, 2006
Donna Gaines: Teenage Wasteland
Gaines, Donna. 1998. Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Overview:
Gaines starts out as a reporter for the Village Voice sent to investigate Bergenfield, New Jersey where four kids in 1987 committed suicide together followed by another pair the following night. Copycats spiraled around the nation and a class moral panic broke out. Upon entering the town, she realized that it would be a challenge to get the kids to talk - media had been hounding them continuously. In building their trust, she became more curious about what was actually going on. She left the Voice and started her sociology PhD. This book is her dissertation, a brilliant ethnography of working class kids in this town.
The style and writing are unbelievable. She juxtaposes her own experiences growing up 15 years earlier in a similar working class suburb on top of the stories of the Bergenfield kids, brilliantly placing herself in the narrative and showing the ways in which she is interpreting what is actually happening.
The ethnographic account reveals a critical shift in America. Traditionally, working class kids had a potential notion of success - working class jobs that were valued - unions, high end factory work, opportunities for advancement. Sure, it was never as well-paid as white collar work but that was OK. In the late 80s, those jobs were disappearing. Most of these kids' parents were out of work. Where on earth were they going to get work when they grew up?
"Working-class kids have learned patterns of coping with an educational system originally designed by middle-class reformers to elevate the masses. It is generally agreed that the values and 'cultural capital' needed to survive and thrive in this environment has given middle-class kids a bigger advantages... But if the (working-class) parent culture itself is dying out, the strategies learned from it have no value. They won't lead to reproducing one's parents' lives in industrial labor. They'll lead to nowhere" (156).
These burnouts were being pushed out of mainstream education in order to raise the perceived value of the schools as college feeders. These kids were being shipped to alternative institutions, vo-tech programs. Yet, the vo-tech programs were educating the kids for jobs that no longer existed. Furthermore, many of these kids resented the system because they felt as though they were being discriminated against based on their musical tastes, smoking and other burnout behavior. In short, the kids felt completely marginalized and out of the system. The system resented them and they resented the system.
The burnout kids had a different language and value system than the educators and they spoke past each other. "The 'burnouts,' as a clique, as carriers of a highly visible 'peer-regulated' subculture, posed threat to the hegemony of parents, teachers and other mandated 'agents of socialization" (37). The schools created programs to make it look like they were dealing with the problem, but they never understood the burnouts or what they were going through.
Music became the religion of these youth as their experiences were told through Metallica and other hard rock bands. "It's a sad irony - because the only place where taboo subjects like sex, death, suicide, loneliness, and terror are discussed is in their music" (208).
Hanging out is the primary pastime, with kids meeting in the parking lots of 7/11 and finding hide outs to get away from the surveillance of the police. "This constant threat of the police always intruding upon anything that was going on was a source of chronic anxiety" (82). Sex and drinking are a given. Cutting is common.
Boredom ran deeply in this culture and the suicides made it clear that "the kids' complaint of 'no place to go' had to be taken seriously" (86). It was no longer just a complaint, but a death wish. "There was perpetually no place to go and nothing to do" (80). "It was taken for granted that if you refused to be colonized, if you ventured beyond the boundaries circumscribed by adults, you were 'looking for trouble.' But in reality, it was adult organization of young people's social reality over the last few hundred years that had created this miserable situation: one's youth as wasted years" (86).
"Kids understand their right to party as their right to create, express, and commune. It is a crucial political question for young people. The right to produce and to express yourself through culture is essentially a First Amendment issue" (206).
There's also extensive conversations about the increase in generational divide and how organized sports are one of the few places where people hang out across the generations - to watch, play and talk about sports (92). With that gone, everything became about peers. "If you were falling, your friends, peers, scene brothers, your generation, would be there to catch you, pick you up, and push you forward" (214).
"Families are falling apart, and the papers are full of atrocities perpetrated by adults on kids. You can't trust anyone. The school bus driver, your pastor, the babysitter, even your dad could rape you or beat you or lock you up and no one would even care!" (187).
"Adults worried about protecting kids' 'morals' but were completely unconcerned that the minimum wage hadn't gone up once during the whole decade. Since the 1960s kids have lost power in leaps and bounds; but when they turned to 'Satan' or to other youth culture traditions for help, for comfort, for support, adults complained that the kids were being seduced by evil. Everything kids did to empower or protect themselves in recent years, any refuge they created from adult indifference and brutality was turned around and used against them" (192).
Military used to be a road out but any kid who goes through detox is exempt from the military (172). "Waste-disposal problems in Bergenfield were getting worse. For as long as anyone can remember, the armed forces were the last shot. But for some kids, even that was moving out of reach... Garage #74 had served as the last available dump site in Bergenfield - the final solution to the town's teenage waste-disposal problem. A place for expendable youth" (173).
"Responsibility for containing young people, for prolonging their entry into the work force, is now shared among families, school, the military and juvenile jails" (157). [This is deeply connected to "Learning to Labor"] "Kids don't see the point of going to school when it didn't lead to anything" (155).
The only way out was through fame - sports, music, etc. Thus, those who won that lottery became the idols of that generation. "In the scheme of things average American kids who don't have rich or well-connected parents have had these choices: Play the game and try to get ahead. Do what your parents did - work yourself to death at a menial job and find solace in beer, God or family. Or take risks, cut deals, or break the law. The Reagan years made it hard for kids to 'put their noses to the grindstone' as their parents had. Like everyone, these people hoped for better lives. But they lived in an age of inflated expectations and diminishing returns" (151). It's no wonder that the 80s were filled with cocaine and dreams of being spectacular.
"Their way of fighting back is to have enough fun to kill themselves before everything else does" (103). "Sometimes the only control over life kids feel they have is starting it (pregnancy) or ending it (homicide, suicide)" (242).
"The importance youth once held in the social order declined and their civil rights have eroded with it" (237). "We consistently doubt kids' ability to make important decisions, but we will punish them for what they decide just the same" (238). "Young people are the only minority without formal self-representation" (239). "As the 'minority of minorities', young people get the lowest pay, have fewer rights, and suffer more absolute structural regulation than anyone. Under control, they are encouraged and coerced to defer to adult authority. Kids are taught to mistrust their own instincts as 'immature' and 'inexperienced'" (239).
Questions that this sparked:
How does contemporary curfew affect things now? Are there latch-key kids these days?
Who has the right to "hang out"? What are the limitations? It used to be the police.. now what? Burnouts dominate the classic hang out locations - malls, skating rinks, railroads, parking lots, woods... were they once mainstream hang out locations? Where do jocks hang out?
Is surveillance about making sure your kid doesn't become a burnout because there's no way out? Is this the reason for activities? Does MySpace reveal the burnout side of everyone? Is that why we fear it?
Did the late 90s boom temporarily hold back the decline of opportunities? Are we facing a whole new level of doubt?
What are the opportunities for working class suburban and rural youth?
Category: sociology
Posted by zephoria at January 22, 2006 8:58 PM
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