Skate Life

This book takes an in-depth look at skateboarding culture by a promising young scholar. ""Skate Life"" examines how young male skateboarders use skate culture media in the production of their identities. Emily Chivers Yochim offers a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, skateboarding community, situating it within a larger historical examination of skateboarding's portrayal in mainstream media and a critique of mainstream, niche, and locally produced media texts (for example, ""Jackass"", ""Viva La Bam"", and ""Dogtown"" and ""Z-Boys""). The book scrutinizes these sources to show how adolescent males simultaneously critique dominant norms of masculinity while maintaining the power that white heterosexual masculinity affords. Additionally, Yochim uses these analyses to introduce the notion of 'corresponding cultures', conceptualizing the ways in which media audiences both contest and incorporate mediated images into their own ideas about identity. In a strong combination of anthropological and media studies approaches, ""Skate Life"" asks important questions of the prevailing theories of youth culture and provides new ways of assessing how young people create their identities.