beingthat the actions that one performs are of paramount importance
for determining who one becomes (Butler, 1990; Wedeen, 2009). Unlike the
involuntary displays of bodily action that the existing body of work ana-
lyzes, however, youth ritualsand the gestural forms of affirmation and
camaraderie that accompany them represent relatively autonomous
forms of bodily discipline (Foucault, 1975) and performativity (Butler,
1990 ). This calls for a concerted effort to bridge the respective literatures
on self and subjectivity.
Although situated at the forefront of the sociology of self, Callero
(2003)arguesthat most of the cutting edge research on self and identity has
not been influenced by symbolic interactionism, given an unwillingness to
engage with postmodern social change and post-structuralist theoretical
insight.^22 The perspective that I recommend here rectifies that problem
without abandoning the strengths of the interactionist framework. Taking
account of contemporary advances in self and identity research, my analy-
sis has stressed how the self-concepts of punks rested on the concert’s abil-
ity to work on and through the body. Rather than construing the identities
of subjects as mere “effects” of power, however, I have shown how scene
members brought the concert’s modes of performativity and bodily disci-
pline into being through problem-focused cultural work.
The “critical limitation of the Foucauldian tradition,”Callero (2003)
states, involves the way in which it has “eliminated the assumption of an
agentic and knowledgeable actor” (p. 118). My attentiveness to the dialectic
between the cultural work of scene members and the modes of performativ-
ity that resulted carves a middle ground between the dominant approaches
to the study of self in the contemporary literature: the symbolic interactionist
notion of a knowledgeable, problem-solving actor, and the Foucauldian pre-
mise of the social actor as an empty “subject position.” This is consistent
with the conclusions of other recent studies of subculture, which range
from raving and clubbing (Anderson, 2009; Hutson, 2000), to Modern
Primitivism and body modification (Kang & Jones, 2007; Rosenblatt, 1997),
to S&M and deviant sexuality (Rubin, 2011), to practitioners of extreme
sports (Lyng, 1990), to bike messengers (Kidder, 2006), to other studies of
punk (Hancock & Lorr, 2013). Participants within these groups have appro-
priated age-old ritual processesalong with disciplinary practices directed
toward the bodybut refined them in service of the self rather than social
control. Serving alongside other practices, such as ideological commitments,
narrative tropes, and the application of style, the body schemas that these
rituals bring into being come to form a critical part of contemporary subcul-
tural “tool kits” of youth identity formation (Swidler, 1986).
188 PHILIP LEWIN