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theses

Youth culture and youth-oriented subcultures have long captured the attention of social scientists, popular media, and concerned parents alike. Yet, even as the majority of punk's 1970's pioneers and the counterculturalists of the 1960's have long left community and defining elements of style behind, we still only know little about how individuals' adult lives might nonetheless be informed by involvements such as these. My dissertation draws upon 44 face-to-face in-depth interviews with individuals who transitioned out of straightedge - a clean-living youth scene that has been associated with punk and hardcore music since the early 1980's based upon a lifetime pledge to abstain from intoxication. Interview data show former straightedge adherents believe their time as straightedge, an affiliation they have all categorically relinquished, has nonetheless laid bases for the ways they currently see themselves within the world and the lives they profess to be leading in their post-straightedge years. Rather than being part of an exploratory period that ends as many scholarly understandings of both youth subculture and adult transition indicate, findings suggest that elective youth identities may instead significantly influence how the transition to adulthood is negotiated and how adulthood is configured in the longer-term, which, arguably marks among the larger changes in the process of aging since the middle 20th Century. Deeper in this vein, where it is generally understood that individuals are exploring greater amounts of identities, consumption phases, and communities in the course of their lives relative to prior generations, there has been surprisingly little inquiry into the potential significance of those that are relinquished. Here, findings indicate that retrospective interpretive inquiry into relinquished identities can shed unique light upon elective cultural affiliation, both as a facet of subjective life history and with regard to what larger identification nodes can potentially mean.

ETD_7636

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jason Torkelson

doi:10.7282/T33J3G9H

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.