Social Structure and Bonhomie

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SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND BONHOMIE: EMOTIONS IN THE YOUTH STREET GANG

Kevin Moran*

Scholars have overlooked the significance of emotion in motivating participation in deviant sub-cultures. Youth subcultures, particularly those of lower or working class provenance, emerge as an ongoing attempt to manage and mitigate structurally produced feelings of shame, by converting this sense of devaluation into pride. Using the youth street gang as a case study, this article gives greater precision to this emotional conversionary process, arguing that gangs transpose ambient parent culture of solidarity into subcultural emphasis on self and group affirming loyalty. Thus, espirit de corps, a central and vivifying value within youth street gangs, is magnified and main-tained via group symbolic praxis and expressive violence. Moreover, youth street gang culture protects this emotional conversionary process from iatrogenic threats, i.e. injury, prison, the death of others, by subsuming potentially negative consequences within this subcultural system.

Keywords: gangs, cultural criminology, subculture, emotions, relative deprivation

Introduction

In the opening chapter of In Search of Respect, anthropologist Philippe Bourgois recounts a faux pas where he inadvertently ‘disrespects’ a prominent but illiterate drug dealer, Ray, by handing him a newspaper before a crowd of onlookers. After several stumbling reading attempts, Ray responds to this indignity first with recomposure, then anger. He ‘regains his deadpan street scowl’, throws the paper down, swears and screams at ‘Felipe’, before making a blustering exit from the scene. As Bourgois adroitly notes, Ray’s shame emerges not only situationally from the public exposure of his illiteracy but also biographically from his ‘long buried…childhood wound of institutional fail-ure’ (2003: 21) against which he invested in an affirming street persona of an implac-able, formidable drug dealer and local impresario.

Criminological theory has more typically articulated deviant adaptations to relative deprivation with the language of economism not emotion (Merton 1938; Cloward and Ohlin 1966). British subcultural theory provided a structuralist semiotics of youth sub-cultures, largely foreign, as critics have noted, from ‘the immediate emotional tone and satisfaction of the actions themselves’ (Cohen 1980: 161; see also Muggleton 2000). American problem-solving variants—although granting a causal role to emotions—regarded deviant subcultures as negativistic inversions of conventional mores (see Cohen 1956), when the relationship between youth culture, the more proximate parent culture and wider social values is perhaps more of intercourse and ambivalence than radical rejection (Matza 1964). More specifically, gangs—a highly conspicuous youth subculture—are only tangentially analysed in emotional terms, with research more frequently approaching the entity in pathological (Krohn et al. 2011), entrepreneurial

*Kevin Moran, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA; [email protected].

doi:10.1093/bjc/azu085 BRIT. J. CRIMINOL. (2015) 55, 556–577Advance Access publication 12 November 2014

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(Sánchez-Jankowski 1991; Padilla 1992) or political (Brotherton and Barrios 2004; Duran 2013) terms.

This article gives evidence for and elaboration to an emotions-based understanding of the costs of marginalization, and similarly, the returns of deviance, arguing opposi-tional street identities generally, and youth street gangs specifically, emerge as an ongo-ing attempt to manage and mitigate an abiding and structurally produced feeling of shame experienced by lower-class youth across various domains. A close reading of a range of prominent ethnographies of the urban poor (Willis 1981; Nightingale 1993; Anderson 1999; Bourgois 2003; Liebow 2003) reveals—couched in varying degrees of scholarly circumlocution and imprecision—an underlying grammar of emotions in which street subcultures variously serve to convert a sense of shame into self-worth, dignity, respeto or expressed affectively pride. Thus, shirking work, drug dealing, flouting school authority or violent terrorization represent pride generating folk adaptations to the phenomenological content of relative deprivation—feelings of devaluation—and less immediately to marginalization itself (Young 2003). This autonomous logic and moti-vational leverage of more experientially proximate affective demands are evidenced when pride generating behaviour is ceded to even when it frustrates longer-term upward mobility (i.e. shame exiting)—when entry costs to legal employment and edu-cation in emotional terms are high and the ‘side bet’ (see Becker 1960) of future pride pay-off seem remote and uncertain (especially in light of past experiences of failure).

A distinctive solution to the problem of shame, thus argued—though not the only subcultural one—is the youth street gang. The gang’s cultural features—the veneration of group loyalty, iteratively communicated and renewed via rich symbolic praxis and expressive violence—function primarily as means of metamorphosing shame into pride, easily understood once an affective vocabulary lacking in current subcultural concep-tual lexica is applied. Drawing upon gang scholarship (Cohen 1956; Conquergood 1991; 1993; 1994; Vigil 1994; Brotherton and Barrios 2004; Duran 2013), this article more specifically outlines the mechanism by which this subcultural process of emo-tional conversion is brought about and sustained:

(1) Youth street gangs, in drawing upon ambient parent culture of solidarity (existing alongside anomic, predatory cultures within poor neighbourhoods), deepen and displace their inherited cultural datum on to youth peer group, whose central value is espirit de corps and more broadly speaking, place attachment, values magnified and maintained through subcultural praxis. Thus, within the youth street gang, ‘loyalty’ to peers and place, symbolically consecrated and ritually cultivated, is recurrently mined for its moral properties, implying virtue, self-sacrifice and interactively call-ing forth mutual affirmations of worth.

(2) Youth street gang subculture not only metamorphoses shame into pride but also use-fully insulates gang members from the potentially shameful repercussions of violent acts punctuating gang life: death, injury or prison. In one sense, this is why this par-ticular subcultural content—emphasizing moral properties of loyalty—is so suitable for youth street gang members because not only does it dissipate negative emotions issuing from experience of relative deprivation but also neutralizes, à la an appeal to loyalty in turn (see Matza 1969), the threats to self, generated by the violent acts it itself calls forth.

In sum, this article begins with sociological conceptions of the ‘self-conscious’ emo-tions of shame and pride, noting individuals tend to avoid or actively displace shame by

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other more pleasing and self-affirming emotions such as anger or pride (see Katz 2001). Moreover, shame states arise more recurrently for subordinate groups in hierarchical social relationships. It then argues, drawing on a range of urban ethnographies, that street subcultures’ primary function is to restore feelings of pride among marginal-ized groups. Youth street gangs, thus understood, represent one subcultural means of generating pride, one which draws upon values of solidarity found in lower or working class communities, transposed as an ennobling commitment to peers and place.

Shame and Pride: The Self-Conscious Emotions

‘Self-conscious’ emotions such as shame and pride arise from a socially acquired and developmentally sequenced capacity to view and evaluate oneself from the imagined perspective of others (Tangney 1999). Cooley’s concept of the ‘looking glass self’ cap-tures the ongoing and reflexive self-conscious nature of our experience—noting the imputed judgment, whether positive or negative, elicits self-feelings of pride or ‘morti-fication’, respectively (1902). This more catholic conception of shame, and by extension pride, differs from vernacular usage of the term denoting moments of acute shame (Scheff 2003) or Christian connotations of idolatrous pride. Emotions scholar Thomas Scheff advocates viewing the term ‘shame’ as a class name for a family of emotions that arise from ‘seeing self negatively, if even only slightly negatively’ (2003: n/a, emphasis in original) or conversely positively, in terms of pride. This includes a range of feel-ings: embarrassment, guilt, shyness and humiliation on one hand and self-satisfaction, self-confidence, smugness and arrogance on the other. In terms of the feelings’ phe-nomenological content, shame emotions involve a sense of unhappy exposure (Katz 2001)—whether to one’s self, or an imagined or encountered ‘other’—one which places the subject as an inferior outside a relevant community (the literate world in Ray’s case—which would also, shamefully so, include small children). By contrast, phenom-enologically speaking, pride is an outward and inflating emotion—we feel pleasurably ‘puffed up’ or ‘solid’—sensations that can be expressed corporally by an expanded posture, raised head and arms akimbo (Tracy and Robins 2007).

Aside from this inherently social and evaluative aspects of shame, sociologists have noted its existentially insufferable nature, which, dynamically so, lends the emotion to ready substitution for and submergence by other transcendent affective logics, anger and pride being the primary feeling families. Shame, thus, is particularly engender-ing, existentially speaking, of not only its avoidance and escape, but its reconversion, its ‘metamorphosis into to the expressive corporeality of some other emotion’ (Katz 2001: 147). Pride too is dynamic, but to varying degrees depending on the reliability of its source. For example, high-achieving students reporting high self-esteem tend to attribute their success to internal, stable, uncontrollable factors such as ability (Weiner 1984). On the other hand, unstable sources of pride derive from external, less controlla-ble sources—the approval of others, accomplishments, possessions, etc., necessitating a more pressing and iterative maintenance. Self-esteem, thus understood, concerns a bal-ance of shame–pride states in a person’s life, with a quasi-universal want for the pendu-lum to sway towards the latter (whether in self-appraisal or via interactive confirmation or both). This is especially true when social relations of subordinacy exert a downward pressure or at least incline towards negative self-assessments.

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Although shame and pride, perhaps even more so than other emotions, are latent in virtually all social interaction (as noted humans continually self-monitor, Goffman 1990), it emerges in greater regularity under certain social systems as a result of their cultural premises and ways of organizing daily experience (Chancer 1992). Such sham-ing and shameful cultural contexts are often the object of social movements to alter societal conceptions of stigmatized groups, e.g. Civil Rights and LGBTQ movements (Britt and Heise 1997). Stratified societies—among the many other possible rankings of humans shared by more egalitarian communities—are composed of regularized hierarchal social relations—teachers–students, bosses–workers, parents–children and rich–poor—which due to superior–subordinate role interactions habituate the poten-tial for shame–pride self-feelings. Scheff comments on the relationship between shame and social structure in terms of social class in his reading of Sennett and Cobb’s classic The Hidden Injuries of Class. The hidden injury—shame—according to Scheff, felt by Sennett and Cobb’s research subjects, mainly Italian and Jewish working class men, resulted from their subordinate occupational position, in that they felt disrespected (‘looked down on’) by teachers, bosses and even their own children. This was exacer-bated, ideologically speaking, by American idiom of individualism, in the sense that the men regarded their social position as, at least partly, their own fault (2001). Consistent with sociological predilection to discuss emotions euphemistically (for a discussion of this in relation to the unconscious in classical sociological theory, see Chancer 2013), Sennett and Cobb, ironically, themselves hide the ‘hidden injury’, employing the men’s vernacular—which in part stems from shame at admitting shame—in which shame feelings were verbally externalized as a ‘lack of respect’, i.e. a property of others (2001).

Deviance as Emotion Management

One response to social structural exclusion—more typically termed ‘relative depriva-tion’ or ‘strain’ in criminological literature (Young 1999, Figure 1)—is criminal or devi-ant innovation (see Merton 1938). The emotional content of such strained states and their deviant adaptations has been an un-theorized subtext of criminological theory. Phenomenologically speaking, what is strain but feelings of dissatisfaction, resentment or shame leading to action intending to assuage these feelings? Is neutralization theory not a theory of nagging guilt or self-doubt insofar as neutralization techniques func-tion to shield the delinquent from feelings of guilt and shame (Sykes and Matza 1957)?

Fig. 1 Relative deprivation.


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Or, in more orthodox criminology, what is the basis of self-control theory but a hedonic orientation to what feels good?

Recent efforts by cultural criminologists have foregrounded the role of emotions in both crime and crime control arguing the motivation for much deviant behaviour lies in its capacity to generate pleasurable emotional states, a sensual riposte to experiences of boredom and denigration within late-modernity (Ferrell 1997; 2004). Jeff Ferrell’s work (2004), e.g., explores the relationship between boredom and crime, juxtaposing the monotony of modern bureaucratic rationalization with the titillating imperatives of consumer culture, a contradiction finding resolution in illicit excitements of deviance. From this perspective, much delinquency seems like free-form solutions to collective ennui.1 Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘carnivalesque’, Mike Presdee argues the second life of the people—transgressive moments of abandon and destruction—are the first life of youth: raving, fighting, binge drinking, arson, joyriding and so on. Disorder is, in itself, a delight to be sought and savoured (2000). Similarly, Stephen Lyng posits the seductive character of ‘edgework’—voluntary risk-taking—of many criminal enter-prises, whose appeal may ‘derive from the particular sensations and emotions gener-ated by the high-risk character of these activities’ (2004: 360).

The logics of emotional conversion in relation to the shame–pride dyad are perhaps most clearly theoretically articulated in Jock Young’s now famous article, ‘Merton with Energy, Katz with Structure’ (2003). Young argues that criminologists of a Mertonian bent have overlooked the affective dimensions of relative deprivation, misrecogniz-ing deviant responses as driven by primarily economic goals. On the contrary, Young asserts: ‘The predicament of the ghetto poor is not simply a deficit of goods—as Merton would have had it—it is a state of humiliation’ (408). As Young continues, deviance is at base ‘rational’ (utilitarian), but is driven by marginalization’s derivative ‘humiliation’, obviated ‘via a frequent delight in excess, a glee in breaking the rules, a reassertion of dignity and identity’ (2003: 408).

Jack Katz teases out what is perhaps implicit in these cultural criminological accounts of emotions and crime: namely the sensual attraction to actions that generate transcend-ent emotional states. If we abstract from specific emotions—excitement from boredom, abandon from restraint and rage from humiliation—we can theoretically conceive this movement as one through which actors are drawn to actions that transport them from negative to positive emotional states, i.e. a grammar of emotional conversion.

The pursuit or fulfilment of these emotional needs often, contra Maslow, come at the expense of safety and economic security, under conditions where the means of escap-ing marginalization, education and legal employment, work to, at least in an imme-diate sense, compound rather than countervail nagging feelings of devaluation (i.e. shame). Such conditions prevail in exclusive societies of late modernity (Young 1999), where unlike previous Fordist economies, entry-level jobs for those without high school or college are menial, underpaid, with scant promotional opportunity. Adopting an affective analytic helps resolve an ongoing paradox whereby marginalized groups, in part, auto-reproduce their social position, self-demote or even self-destruct—educa-tion is resisted (Willis 1981), employment is refused (Liebow 2003), prosecution risked (Bourgois 2003) and violence pursued (Anderson 1999)—seemingly irrationally, but

1 Note that in an television interview with one of the ‘mods’ involved in the 1972 Clapton riots, when asked ‘why did you do it?’ the young man replies, emphatically, ‘boredom’.

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not so once the underlying affective grammar—the shorter term generation of pride, i.e. a sense of self-worth (in contexts where there is justifiable scepticism that longer-term strategies would not pay off) is theoretically grasped, elucidated and generalized across its local empirical manifestations.

Urban Ethnography and the Shame–Pride Dyad

This section examines a series of key urban ethnographies of various ‘deviant’, oppo-sitional responses to relative deprivation across a variety of domains: education, work and familial relations. On the one hand, feelings of shame (i.e. a sense of inferiority) derive, in part, from marginalized individuals’ shared and/or imputed understand-ing of their relative statuses, a self-assessment emerging in contact with each of these ‘conventional’ arenas. Concomitantly, ‘deviant’ responses, whether group based; coun-ter-school codes, street corner cultures or individual; drug dealing and violent terrori-zation—restated in terms of their emotional logics are, in part, folk means of converting shame into pride. Such emotional sequences are present in rarefied form in the urban ethnographies examined below but expressed obliquely amidst the movement between abstract (i.e. respect) and affective (i.e. pride) conceptual registers. Giving greater pre-cision to this underlying emotional grammar helps understand why subcultures are adhered to even when they frustrate longer-term shame exiting strategies (i.e. upward mobility). But more importantly, that such responses hinder longer-term self-interest exemplifies how central more proximate affectual demands are to subcultural life.

Paul Willis’ classic Learning To Labour (1981) details the interaction between subjective notions of dignity (i.e. pride), social marginalization and an important institution of conventional society: the school. Willis’ argument is that working-class youths (‘the lads’) develop a group ‘counter-school’ culture in almost continual subversion of teachers and school management and in distinction with conforming peers, pejoratively termed the ‘ear oles’.2 The oppositional subculture is expressed in countless small ways as an almost ritualistic part of the fabric of daily life in the school (12), and emerges from the sham-ing context of school relations, as suggested in the books’ opening dialogue:

Bill: The teachers think they’re everybody. They are more, they’re higher than us, but they think they are a lot higher than and they’re not.Spanksy: [they]…think they’re God (11).

The lads’ primary of means of reasserting their status is their affiliation with adulthood in the form of smoking, drinking and flaunting their precocious (by the school’s stand-ards) sexual prowess (20).

Yet, paradoxically the lads’—and this is Willis’ path-breaking insight—resistance to their insubordination within the school is a form of self-induction, in that pyrrhicly it serves to reproduce their insubordinate class position. Willis’ explanation for this seeming self-damnation is to retrieve a class rationale for the lads’ behaviour, implicit in their subculture is a reaching in (‘penetration’ in Willis’ terms) of more objective class position and prospects. There is an air of implausibility to Willis’ argument that counter-school culture is a proxy assertion of class conditions, demonstrated by Willis’

2 The term ‘earole’ as Willis notes, connotes passivity, the ear being one of the least expressive organs of the human body, not animated by internal life but formless in rigid reception.


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frequent and laboured assertions that such dynamics of mediated resistance occur with-out specific or even euphemistic articulation by the lads. Class relations are present in the school, but they are felt and resisted at the level of emotions manifested in constant status jostling between teachers and students. The lads resist their social demotion and resulting negative self-feeling, emerging more so from the mismatch between working-class habitus and the middle-class habitus valorized in the school, a point raised in Willis’ brief reference to Bourdieu and Passeron, but whose theoretical implications are obscured, inter alia, by Willis’ commitment to a Marxist analytic.

A similar group response to shame—now in the context of work—is documented in Elliot Liebow’s seminal ethnography Tally’s Corner. Tally’s companions remain tenu-ously attached to, indeed frequently refuse, employment on the legal labour market, preferring the ‘security and self-esteem’ found in street corner relationships (2003: 114) over the degradation of low-paid, low-status employment. As Liebow writes, the men are acutely aware of the low-status of their work (wryly noting of the street-corner man that: ‘He cannot draw from a job those social values which other people do not put into it’ 37), such that to even talk about their jobs can ‘trigger a flush of shame and a deep, almost physical ache to change places’, which is almost too painful to express, but poignantly captured in the following dialogue:

He’s no better off than you, Tally. You make more than he does.

It’s not the money. [Pause] It’s position, I guess. He’s got position. When he finish school he gonna be a supervisor. People respect him…Thinking about people with position and education gives me feeling right here [pressing his fingers into the pit of his stomach]. (38)

Tally further recalls, when he and Liebow meet a lawyer at the courthouse, he stood in embarrassed silence, as ‘I didn’t even know what you was talking about’, concluding this comment with an additional admission: this happens to him a lot.

Phillipe Bourgois’ In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, as is well known, exam-ines the world of illicit drug dealing in Hispanic East Harlem during the 1990s. This adaptation relies less on group affirmation of worth, but in the advantages of partici-pation in the sub rosa economy whether pursued alone or in loose concert with others. Bourgois’s description of the dealers’ and other crack house habitués’ relationship to the legal economy is interesting, as he details the complex role pride maintenance plays in the process of rejecting legal employment and becoming a dealer. In a sec-tion ‘Getting “Dissed” in the office’, Bourgois recounts how ‘Both Primo and Caesar experienced deep humiliation and insecurity’ in their attempts to penetrate the world of legal employment in New York’s F.I.R.E. economy (2003: 143). As a case in point, Primo who acquires a job as a mail room clerk, but is fired after eight months due to an admixture of racially charged miscommunication and the conflict between his sense of stature and the submission—particularly costly in terms of his mainly female super-visors—required for his entry-level position. Primo’s need for a sense of pride trumps and thus threatens his employment, despite the fact that his job, as Bourgois admits, affords some opportunity for promotion (153). By contrast, in spite of the ‘inconsist-ent and meager crack income’ (92) and potential for violence, the underground econ-omy affords a sense of pride. Whatever the risks involved, drug dealing never serves to threaten Primo’s sense of personal worth (144). As observed in terms of shame-about-shame, Primo’s feelings are buried deeply: ‘Only after repeated badgering on my part

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did he finally express the deep sense of shame and vulnerability he felt whenever he attempted to venture into the legal labor market’ (160).

Elijah Anderson’s now canonical Code of the Street (1999) too recounts an individu-ally pursued adaptation to marginalization. According to the study, a ‘subculture of violence’ centred on the gaining and maintaining of respect or pride (Anderson shut-tles back and forth between subcultural and emotional lexica in his analysis of ghetto violence)—primarily among the poorest of ghetto youth—dominates public spaces of the community. Violent terrorization, reflecting the more anomic tendencies within Philadelphia’s black ghetto, is a continually available means of achieving pride. Such violent status contests—which extend to ‘possessions’: clothing, footwear, jewellery and even sexual partners—bear a zero-sum quality: ‘In this violent give-and-take, raising oneself up largely depends on putting someone else down’ (1999: 75). Resulting shows of deference by others can be ‘highly soothing, contributing to a sense of security, comfort, self-confidence, and self-respect’ (75). Correlatively, ‘transgressions diminish these feelings’, for ghetto youth losing face would likely ‘leave one’s self-esteem in tat-ters’ (76), to the extent that some would rather forfeit their lives than countenance social, read psychological, demotion.

Interestingly, Anderson’s discussion on ‘Campaigning for Respect’ via violent means is followed by section entitled ‘I Got Yo’ Back’ recounting the story of two young men where violence serves to warmly consummate, rather than, anomically sever social bonds between the two ghetto youth. Although deriving from a valuation of violent prowess and ‘nerve’, the young men’s fist-fight, recounted in the book, which occasions several instances of gentlemanly deference, actually results in their reconciliation, and having established their mutual esteem (i.e. fighting prowess as a proxy of worth), occa-sions their agreement to ‘watch each other’s backs’. As Anderson notes, ‘When this very strong…expectation is met, powerful bonds of trust are formed, and with repeated supportive exchanges, ever more firmly established’ (91). Whereas one means of earn-ing deference among peers consists of individual campaigns for respect, another group solution persists (alongside other alternatives), one that regularizes the ‘repeated sup-portive exchanges’, which indicate the solidification of friendship and mutual respect.

Carl Husemoller Nightingale’s work, On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and their American Dreams (1993), is most explicit in highlighting a shame–pride dyad at the heart of relative deprivation–subculture dialectic, and like Anderson, documents individual, but also hints at forms of small group pride generation. Nightingale’s bril-liant ethnographic account asserts that the rise in crime in American black ghettos resulted from the increasing integration of black communities into American cultural circuits, primarily those valorizing conspicuous consumption and violence alongside their growing exclusion from economic and political life. Poor black youth drink Coca-Cola, eat McDonalds, obsess over the latest sneakers, watch television 11 hours a day, love action-adventure movies and revere the army while enthusiastically embracing Cold War enmities (2).

As Nightingale demonstrates, poor black youth, especially young men, feel their exclusion acutely, manifesting in feelings of shame, humiliation and frustration, involv-ing a series of painful emotional experiences of macro, meso and personal provenance: the humiliation of poverty (roach infested homes, welfare dependency, inconsistent mealtimes) is exacerbated by consumer socialization, educational failure and a host of racial ‘micro-aggressions’ (see Pierce 1970) involving negative interactions with police,


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roving and suspicious eyes of store owners and gruff attitudes of security guards. To this is added the aggressive status competition of peer street culture where, as in Anderson, (self)respect resides in the ability to wield violence and to trade insults (made more potent by racial pejoratives and the stigma of poverty). On the other hand, for ghetto youth, home life is a combination of didactic violence, resentment and filial alienation punctuated by periods of neglect and abandonment.

To repress this pain, adolescents invest in compensatory identities of masculine self-affirmation,3 conspicuous consumption and violence; these too a hyper-realization of the materialism, self-absorption, hedonism and violence immanent to American popu-lar culture. Reacting to sorely felt indignities of economic and racial exclusion they aspire to be ‘bad motherfuckers’—to flaunt aggressive values, boastful posturing and ownership of status-redeeming commodities. Similar affective returns can be found in social milieus, peer groups providing interpersonal affirmation of the adopted ‘bad ass’ role so key to a sense of adequacy: ‘he [Chauntey] also could expect much from his ‘boyz’ in the ways of moral approval for his ways of repressing and protecting his deep-seated pain’ (44). In short—like other lower-class subjects discussed above—they develop alchemical formulas to convert the shame, frustration, resentment and loneli-ness they feel into a sense of personal adequacy and emotional well-being.

The need for shame–pride conversion is ongoing; resolutions via forms of compensa-tory activities are temporary and superficial, only tenuously providing for positive pride-ful states. Intelligibly, given the fragile nature of their individual subcultural remedies, young men such as Primo, Caesar and Nightingale’s Chauntey create or are attracted to spaces of culturally regularized interactions affirming a sense of well-being. Enter the gang.

Youth Street Gangs: Emotion Management

Argued thus far is that ‘deviant’ behaviour—whether shirking work, drug dealing, flouting school authority, violent terrorization or becoming ‘a bad nigga’—seems to bear out at least in the short term, emotional over pecuniary logics. In particular, the need to reassert one’s pride (dignity, worth, self-respect) in the immediate term can take precedence over opportunities for social advancement, thus in a pyrrhic sense, individuals and groups often reproduce, indeed deepen, their marginalization in the various forms in which they ‘search for respect’, the abstract equivalent of pride. Such affective conversionary dynamics are exampled in the youth street gang, this article now provides an analysis of subcultural content and sequencing which provides for this emotion work (Hochschild 1979).

This understanding of youth street gangs, however forgotten or submerged in con-temporary gang research, is longstanding. Early researchers like Riis portrayed gangs as ‘the slum’s counterfeit of self-esteem’ (Riis 2005: 237). In his book Barrio Gangs, Diego Vigil comes to a similar conclusion in discussing the psychodynamics of gang members (1994). For some Chicano youth acquisition of self-identity is beset with dif-ficulties and the gang becomes a type of coping strategy; strivings for self-identity are integrated with, and find fulfilment through, gang channels especially in adolescence

3 A similar analysis is made in Major and Macini Billson’s excellent Cool Pose where the adoption of a ‘cool pose’ of masculine self-command by young black men serves to ‘ease the worry and pain of second class status’ (1992: 5).

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(150). Before the problem-solving paradigm gave way to structural semiotics, Albert Cohen’s Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (1956) analogously depicted delinquent subcultures as an ongoing series of efforts to solve intractable emotional problems: ten-sions, frustrations, resentments, guilt, bitterness, anxiety or hopelessness. Although not explicitly adopting an affective analytic, Brotherton and Barrios (2004) importantly define gangs as protective, empowering and immanently (and in the case of ALKQN, explicitly) political: formed by marginalized youth and adults, the gang ‘…aims to pro-vide its members with a resistant identity, an opportunity to be individually and collec-tively empowered, a voice to speak back to and challenge the dominant culture…and a spiritual enclave within which its own sacred rituals can be generated and practiced’ (23). Another US researcher, Robert Duran, evokes a kindred understanding contend-ing youth street gangs emerge in prideful opposition to inveterate social and economic exclusion and increasing criminalization of Barrio youth.

Beyond such accounts, there are good empirical reasons to suggest that this under-standing is superior, i.e. integrates various empirical features of the youth street gang that conflict with existing paradigms when taken wholly. Existing approaches hold youth street gangs arise, pathologically speaking, from urban disorganization or alter-natively from economistic adaptations to social exclusion. Pathology-focused approaches, however, tend to be agnostic as to the motivations for youth gang membership, com-porting a trite ‘bad people come from bad places’ logic (Matza 1964). Rational actor models (see Sullivan 1989; Sánchez-Jankowski 1991; Padilla 1992; Venkatesh 1997) on the other hand posit an economic basis for gang membership difficult to sustain in the face of evidence for the persistence of gangs despite meagre economic returns (see Levitt and Venkatesh 2000) nor typically resemble entrepreneurial criminal organi-zations (Fagan 1989; Hagedorn 1994; Curtis 2003; Decker et al. 2008). Neither per-spective can account for a constitutive, but yet decidedly non-instrumental, feature of youth street gangs: their expressive, culturally ‘spectacular’ character. But although economic activity is peripheral to most youth street gang life, in Bourgois’ In Search of Respect (2003), the acquisition of self-respect, autonomy and pleasure found in his sub-jects’ drug dealing behaviour—the commerce of choice for youth street gangs—is con-sistent with, but not the mainstay of, the entities’ pride generating subcultural praxis. Modal gang economic activity, low-level drug dealing, is thus perhaps experienced as an admixture of mild utility augmentation and emotional gratification, accounting for the degree of economism captured in studies cited above. Youth street gangs can evolve into complex entrepreneurial organizations or political movements, they are, after all, open-ended dynamic entities—but in doing so depart from ‘gangness’ and move towards other criminal/deviant social phenomenon.

A distinctive solution to the problem of shame, thus argued—though not the only subcultural one—is the youth street gang. This section seeks to explain how this collec-tive conversionary process culturally originates and subculturally occurs. In the previ-ous discussion, relative deprivation is experienced when generalized (as in partially accepted by most individuals deviant or no) cultural values of success or status contra-dict available means, whether involving an objectively low supply of opportunity and/or subjective unavailability. As argued, the phenomenological content of this experi-ence is shame (i.e. a sense of devaluation), produced across various domains (legal employment, education and interaction with those of a higher social status). In Part 1: Shame–Pride Conversion (Figure 2), youth street gangs, reflecting their socialization,


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draw upon the ambient values of solidarity and place attachment of their parent cul-ture but transpose these values in their subcultural emphasis on group loyalty. This communitarian ethic is expressed and iteratively renewed via the gang’s symbolic life and group-affirming conflict. Such mechanisms allow youth to mine allegiance to both peers and place for its honorific qualities, implying virtue and self-sacrifice, hence pro-ducing pride. However, in Part 2: Neutralization, most immediate negative consequences of gang involvement—death, injury or prison—which may serve to reintroduce shame and thus undermine the sequence, are additionally neutralized and transmuted by their interpretation in the solemn, ennobling terms of self-sacrifice, personal fortitude and group commitment. Thus, the affective schedule of shame–pride conversion is maintained (at least temporarily) against iatrogenic tendencies.

To understand how the youth street gang’s subcultural content provides for such pride generation, we need to begin with the parent culture from which it draws.

Parent culture

To understand youth street gangs, as the subcultural tradition suggests, one has to grasp how they shape and transform the material of their inherited parent culture. Argued here is that gang culture tailors the communitas (a feeling of social belonging and togetherness) existing in poor neighbourhoods and extends it to peer interactions to create distinct and tightly bonded street fraternities that better, and more imme-diately, serve as sources of affirmation—and, hence, pride feeling. The role of parent culture in this respect is less to transmit historical contradiction to youth subculture à la Willis, and more to as a traditional agent of cultural socialization—disposition for-mation (leading to a stress on communitarian rather individualistic ethics, i.e. those expressed in middle class culture of self-realization).

The disintegration of social collectives in poor urban communities may be less wide-spread than sociological accounts indicate (Wilson 1987; Wacquant 1999). Other urban research is evocative of an ambient solidarity persisting in low-income neighbourhoods,

Fig. 2 Shame–pride subcultural conversion: youth street gangs.

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enduring beside more anomic and predatory cultures emergent in the wake of social disorganization. In his The Projects: Gang and Non-gang Families in East Los Angeles, Vigil describes the sentiment or ethos—a sense of neighbourly ‘we-ness’—that suffuses rela-tionships within Los Angeles projects (2007). Conquergood portrays life in a poor Chicago neighbourhood, his ethnographic site, in similar terms: ‘the culture of Big Red was characterized by an intimacy of interactions across apartments expressing…the various networks that laced together these households’ (2013: 196). Bourgois briefly comments on the contrast between the warm social relations in El Barrio and the stuffy upper-class community in which he grew up: ‘I always appreciated the shared sense of public space that echoes through Spanish Harlem…In the safe building where I grew up downtown, neighbours do not have nicknames…they usually do not even say hello or nod an acknowledgement of existence’ (2003: 35). Similar habits of resilience and soli-darity are discussed in Carol Stack’s All Our Kin (1974) and Martin Sánchez-Jankowski’s excellent Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods (2008).

The sense of ‘we-ness’, long noted as a feature of working-class communities (Hoggart 2009), develops in poor urban neighbourhoods for several reasons. The primary is pov-erty management whereby communities rely on local social capital from which small portions of economic or in kind support can be gleamed. Such exchanges of tangible care-giving in turn rely on less tangible but extremely important mutual offerings of respect and esteem: handshakes, inquires, forms of phatic communion in Malinowski’s sense. Secondly, the sheer density of poor urban living gives a quasi-public character to private life, resulting in enduring place attachment. Class differences in parenting styles and leisure play a significant role: with little resources, poor families favour the ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ (Lareau 2011), whereby poor children spend more time than their middle class counterparts in the public spaces of the neighbourhood, seeking the amusements afforded by the features of the physical landscape and the local characters and peers co-inhabiting the area. Such affective bonds to physical and social setting explain why so many gangs are named after neighbourhood blocks, but never schools. Finally, ‘we-ness’ is generated in contrast with the more affluent world beyond the margins of the neighbourhood and heightened by awareness of relegated social-placement and a shared experience of scarcity, hardship and dilapidation. This finds expression in the ‘caged resentment’ observed by Paul Willis, occasionally produced in working class contact with middle class institutions (1981). A distinction between ‘us and them’ is all the starker given the daily acknowledgements and courtesies of ‘the hood’ and the gruff, frequently fearful, treatment in world outside.

Gang subcultural values

Just as a cultures of solidarity form in poor neighbourhoods, the constitutive principle of youth street gang culture is the cultivation of a sense of ‘we-ness’ as a group ethic expressed and strengthened through symbolic life and integrative conflict—an intensi-fied form of parent culture applied to peer relationships. While the need to belong is a ‘powerful, fundamental and extremely pervasive motivation’ (Baumeister and Leary 1995) for all individuals, deviant or no, it is more intensely created and mined for emo-tional succour and self-conception by those for whom other sources of positive affect, educational and occupational success and affluence are both limited, as noted above, nor provide for proximal gains in self-worth. In other youth subcultures such as goth


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(Hodkinson 2002), similar conversionary logics are born out in opposition to parent culture via rejection of its values and aesthetics, namely stolid suburban conformity (see Gaines 1998). For lower-class youth, group loyalty is pridefully asserted in contra-distinction to middle class values of individualism, an assertion of moral superiority against recognized status inferiority, as expressed in this dialogue among working-class youth in MacLeod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It (1995: 34):

SLICK: What it is, it’s a brotherhood down here. We’re all fucking brothers…we’re always here for each other…we’re not like them up there – rich little boys from the suburbs or whatever. There’s a line there. On this side of the line we don’t fuck with each other; we’re tight.

As Conquergood asserts in a different context, youth street gangs are ‘bonded commu-nitarians’ where ‘espirit de corps is an overarching goal and a much celebrated achieve-ment of all communication praxis’ (1993: 24). To enter the gang is to adopt a modus vivendi of in-group solidarity; much gang behaviour expresses and sustains this com-munitarian ethic. Similarly, Duran asserts the core ideal of gang life to display loyalty, an ‘I got your back’ ethic requisite of membership and whose regular, communicative iteration creates ‘entrenched solidarity’ between members (2013: 154). As Brotherton and Barrios’ research on the Latin Kings documents, respondents’ speech is littered with references to ‘love’: ‘Love is everything without love you have nothing. You are alone, you have no sense of being’ (2004: 170). A universal salutation among Latin Kings, ‘Amor de Rey—King Love’ denotes the love between members in interaction but also their co-commitment to the broader gang and its ethic.

It is not surprising, then, that most gangs consider themselves a kind of family (Morales 1992). While some literature treats gangs as surrogate kin, they are not neces-sarily in conflict with the family; rather, gangs are embedded in familial and commu-nity networks that they extend (Conquergood 1993). The preponderance of gang terms rooted in nurturance and domestic tenderness express these familial-like bonds bind-ing members: ‘they name themselves homeboys, homeys, homz, bloods’ (1993). For every menacing nickname (Hit Man, Pit Bull), another expresses affection: Spanky, Teddy Bear, Baby Face, Little Man, Pee Wee and other such diminutives. The preferred term of address is bro a term of endearment, communitas—and an expression of ‘we-feeling’ (Conquergood 1993: 40). As an outsider, it took Conquergood six months of fieldwork to earn the relation marker of bro, from which it was then used liberally to lend emo-tional warmth as well as stylistic rhythm to verbal exchanges.

Youth street gangs are a nurturing, familial space, but one which is rooted in the locality and familiarity of a ‘hood’. Loyalty or love is also expressed in terms of gang members’ relationship to their neighbourhood. Gang members often see themselves as symbolically representing their neighbourhood (Papachristos 2013), frequently tat-tooing its name on their skin. As one youth gang respondent characterized her tattoo: ‘When you’re in your hood, you love your hood. So you love it enough to put it on you.’ (Harris 1994: 299). In Los Angeles Chicano gangs, the word ‘mi barrio’ refers equally to ‘my gang’ and ‘my neighbourhood’ (Moore et al. 1978). In New York City, the ritual interrogation, ‘Where you from?’ may serve as a precursor for violent encounter where it is taken that each side is representing the honour of their neighbourhood (Garot 2007).

Such urban gemeinschaft forms a counterpoint for youth humiliated by their relegated social position by providing them with a sense of community, identity and prestige—the

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components of psychic well-being (Furman 1998). But why is this so? First, understand-ing why loyalty generates positive affect requires grasping the moral dimensions of commitment, the ‘I got you’ ethic. Moral philosophers have speculated that intimate relationships carry a positive moral valence, ‘The deeper and stronger concern for the friend…the greater degree of moral worth’ (Blum 2009: 48). Exhibitions of appropriate loyalty reflect virtuous character and moral integrity that are sources of self-pride and esteem. Social parallels of the strong moral quality of solidarity can be found in other deviant subcultures such as the ‘convict code’ or the ‘stop snitching’ movement (Smiley 2014: 1), which aside from instrumental purposes (i.e. keeping information from the police), steadfast faithfulness simultaneously confers an honorific quality to the bearer (especially if this involves sacrificing their own interests, etc.). Conventional exam-ples abound in this ‘loyalty as virtue’ family: sporting allegiances and religious faith, neither which, at least for grass-roots adherents, afford any instrumental dividends, but whose social inveteracy can perhaps be explained by their variegated emotional returns. Conquergood argues, e.g., youth street gang culture devotion mirrors broader notions of patriotism (1994). Indeed, as noted by Bourdieu, actors in gift-economies generate symbolic capital via demonstration of ‘disinterest’ (1977) also implied in loy-alty, whereby cycles of self-less giving confer and reproduce social prestige. Second, in terms of receiving loyalty, as noted above, belonging, regard and support aid and their arousal positive feeling are a ‘powerful, fundamental and extremely pervasive motiva-tion’ (Baumeister and Leary 1995). Through these means, youth street gang members, to borrow from Garfinkel, engage in successful elevation ceremonies and street apothe-osis. How this communitarian ethic is communicated and compounded is the topic of the next, and last, subsection.

Part 1: Conversion

Symbol

Criminal enterprises, such as the Mafia or Camorrah, are known for secrecy and oaths of silence, communicating through a private language of codes and symbols (Gambetta 2011). Gang members, by contrast, publicly declare their gang identities proudly dis-playing graffiti, symbolic mixes of clothing, verbal cues, hand gestures, bodily comport-ment and markings and ever-expanding systems of argot. This signification is generally referred to as ‘reppin’ or representing which works to subculturally inscribe Part 1 processes of shame–pride conversion in regularized cultural patterns. ‘Reppin’ is the performance of two acts: one, to publicly communicate and project ‘the gang’ to others and, two, as rituals of integration and boundary maintenance, a studied camaraderie that functions as presentation of self as one with the group. Indeed street gangs often adopt a distinguishing colour in the same way that sports teams and nations deploy totemic colours in their flags and insignias (Conquergood 1994). Gangs refer to their colours in ennobling referents: for instance, Latin Kings say black stands for the strong dominant colour of the earth and gold for the shining, glowing radiance of the sun.

Although publically communicated, gang ‘reppin’ is often deliberately opaque, densely layered evolving semiotics dividing the literate insider from the uninitiated, a ‘web of symbols and meanings pulled together all the more tightly against an outside world that was emphatically other’ (201). Conquergood describes ‘reppin’ as a form of


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secular prayer, the coaching of an attitude by the use of mimetic and verbal language: here, the attitude conveyed through the representational practices of the hood is that of loving, commitment and bonding. Gangs frequently use elaborate and stylized rites of greeting, salutation and leave-taking. Most have their own specific and elaborately choreographed rites of handshaking which performatively enact communal bonding and are conducted in large crowds despite their time-consuming nature. For exam-ple, Latin Kings ‘shake on the crown’, a graceful series of co-performed hand gestures that digitally represent the Latin King crown, a centrepiece of King iconography. ‘This rite culminates with both partners throwing their fist across their ‘heart’ kissing their fingertips, and tapping their hearts with the tips of fingers extended in the shape of a crown’ (1993: 41). According to Conquergood, these rituals of phatic communication texture street life into a tightly knit fabric of familiarity, denoting the special sacred sta-tus of their enactors, ritually affirm belonging and worth in counterpoint to the legion exclusions and relegations visited on poor youth by the outside world.

Gangs also extensively use graffiti to ‘inscribe the urban landscape with elaborate, complex, deeply meaningful symbolism’ (Conquergood 1993) that discursively trans-forms a neighbourhood into a distinctly familiar lifeworld (De Certeau 2011). A transla-tion of ambient place attachment, gang graffiti marks an ennobled constituency and ‘identification with a particular space or section of the city’ (parks, streets, neighbour-hoods, public housing projects) (Adams and Winter 1997). Graffiti typically contains sup-portive inner-directed messages at the core but increasingly hostile and outer-directed ones towards the boundaries (Ley and Cybriwsky 1974; Romotsky and Romotsky 1974). While gang names are most often represented, they are often accompanied by a ‘register of friends’ (a list of gang affiliates). Perhaps most sacred of all are graffiti that eulogize dead members (Conquergood 1994). Although gang graffiti expresses alliances, it also ritually denigrates other gangs, often through forays into rival territory to challenge the resident gang’s respect by penetrating and marking their walls. One commonly deployed insult is crossing out a rival gang’s utterance by drawing a line through or writing over it with one’s own gang’s name or initials (Adams and Winter 1997). Other insults come in varied forms from simple slurs through elaborate play of words on rival gang names to desecrating their symbols. Such slurring is interactive—cross outs, inverting rival gangs’ symbols—a form of linguistic, ritually traded one-up manship.

Violence

A connection between gangs and violence is difficult to dispute: superficially, this might seem to contradict the claim that gangs are objects of intense, ritualized communitas. However, a link between violence and the communitas of gang life can be plausibly made. As noted by Thrasher, gangs are conflictually constituted and violence is a vital resource for group construction. Adversity is minded for its integrative and uplifting properties (see Durkheim 1938; Coser 1956), forming the second element of Part 1 conversionary process.

In his research on the Little Village project in Chicago, Spergel specifies various forms of gang violence: ‘Drivebys, factional disputes, inter-gang fights, plans and preparations for fights, graffiti forays, torching of opposing gang members’ property (especially vehicles), sporadic non-gang related batteries, robberies and other criminal occurrences were known to the youth workers’ (2003: 5.10). Gang conflict is typically directed at two targets: rival gangs and the police. Elements of parent culture, the

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construction of identity through the production of ‘us’ versus a myriad ‘them’s, mani-fest in both contexts. Violence serves as a means of upholding neighbourhood honour vis-à-vis rival gangs. Then too, as representatives of a hostile and indifferent world out-side the ‘hood’, the police serve as a means for proxy defiance of the alien codes of the broader society, which occasionally penetrate the social space of the neighbourhood. In both instances, violence is a key for the production and maintenance of in-group solidarity.

But how precisely does this work also generate pride? The majority of cases of gang violence result from fights over expressive not economic stakes (Hughes and Short 2005). More gen-erally, public violence is a means for individual status enhancement (hence positive affect), the grist for masculine symbolic capital consistent with lower and working class valuation of toughness (Miller 1958). Likewise, observations have shown that gang violence is frequently initiated in response to status threats, especially about the respect or honour one deserves ‘as a leader, as a male, as a member of a particular gang, or as an aspiring adult’ (Short, 1965: 162). For example, most serious violence conducted by gang members is gun related (Bjereegaard and Lizotte 1995). Beside instrumental purposes (i.e. self-protection, increased potency), guns have expressive value (Fagan and Wilkinson 1998), furnishing the means by which otherwise mundane phenomena are transformed into the stuff of mortal challenge. In one research study, a gang member said of gun possession: ‘When I have a gun, I feel like I’m on top of it, like I’m Superman or some-thing’ (Stretesky and Pogrebin 2007: 106). Katz argues that serious violence is essential so that membership in a gang will have a seductively glorious, rather than a mundane, significance (1988). Violence has ‘the instrumental value of stimulating metaphors that make the group a real presence as a force of sovereign rulers’ (132).

The gang thus encompasses individual status campaigning but endows them with addi-tional expressive significance, hence affective potency. Again, in violent contests, gang members frequently view themselves as symbolically representing their neighbourhoods (see Papachristos 2013)—whereby their violence, in subcultural transubstantiation, acquires an altruistic, honorific quality. For Conquergood, gang conflict serves to imbue the lifeworld of the gang with metaphoric (and affective) valence: street-fighting both contests and clarifies boundaries and becomes the rhetorical grist for self-defining and culture-celebrating narratives (1994). In more precise terms, specific instances of gang conflict, whether as victims or perpetrators, instantiate what Durkheim named ‘public temper’. A milder form of collective effervescence, public temper, emerges from synchro-nized attention to commonly interpreted events (whether victories or violations), a har-monization and, hence, intensification of affect. Such events mobilize and strengthen the ‘one for all, all for one’ ethic invoking collective honour and sentiment. Conflict is thus the master narrative that mobilizes and uplifts local incidents and particular actors on to a sacred plane of meaning, memory and motivation (Conquergood 1994: 200).

Part 2: Neutralization

As so wonderfully forwarded in Matza’s purposeful, but yet open-ended conception of human behaviour, subcultural solutions do not necessarily permanently or definitively resolve the problems—shame as analysed here—they are directed to. As has been argued above in terms of social mobility, they may, in fact, create additional problems for their bearers. For a further example, take male gaming subcultures (‘Trekkies’, World of Warcraft or Dungeons and Dragons players), currently understudied by criminologists.


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Although they afford an escape into imaginary and virtual worlds of adventure and achieved stature (as well as a sense of community and acceptance) against the low-status ascription in terms of more worldly standards of looksism (Chancer 1998) and sporting prowess, they may inhibit adult romantic relationships, conflicting as the obscu-rata of fantasy worlds do with the manly sociability expected in the sexual market. So too in the youth street gang. Although grossly inflated by both mediatic depiction and academic engrossment, violence forms a constituent feature of pride generation in youth street gangs and is found in diverse demographic and geographic manifestations of the social phenomenon.

Proposed here is that an additional subcultural mechanism, adjuncting shame–pride sequences, exists within the youth street gang, that of neutralization serving to mitigate feelings of shame/guilt arising from the costs of gang violence: imprisonment, injury or the death of others. This mechanism sustains a calculus whereby the affective profits of violence outweigh (at least in the short term) its affective costs. Gang members’ abil-ity to countenance negative life consequences of membership—one being a dramati-cally higher risk of violent victimization—is evidenced in that gang members feel less anxious about future victimization compared with non-gang peers (Decker et al. 2008; Taylor et al. 2008). But why is violence so unproblematic for youth street gang members?

Whereas mechanisms of shame–pride conversion exemplified above in terms of male gaming subcultures create problem as they resolve them, youth street gang subculture, centred on moral properties of loyalty and espirit de corps, in which loyalty’s honorific properties are evoked and expressed through violence, generates potentially conver-sionary destabilizing behaviours: shame, guilt, physical injury, loss—violence’s side effects which in turn neutralized via the same subcultural content. Thus, youth gang subculture not only sublimates negative shame feelings into positive pride feelings as described in Part 1—Conversion but also, in an analytically separate way, insulates gang members’ self from affective repercussions of deviant acts as described in Part 2—Neutralization: expressions/acts/ethos of loyalty are emotionally and ontologically uplifting, but they neutralize negative feelings when a criminal act is undertaken, à la Matza, in their appeal to higher loyalty (1964). Imprisonment, on the other hand, can simply connect youths with other perhaps more hardened gang members, readymade allies in the compacted world of the prison (Moore et al. 1983), or as one Detroit gang member asserted: ‘A lot of dudes like prison because it’s where all their boys is’ (Taylor 1990: 52). Another study by Moore and colleagues found a continuity in group values between neighbourhood and prison, which among other aspects, referred to the alloca-tion of respect (1978). Even when resulting in death violence symbolically transmutes and affords group renewal. Willingness to face death is an immeasurably potent sig-nifier of group commitment and collective attachment to peer and place. As earlier, fallen gang members are commemorated in stylized eulogies, embellished with honor-ific insignia akin to war memorials. At wakes, funerals and gravesites of gang members, this violence is rhetorically transmuted through the solemnizing, and ennobling, spirit of sacrifice and communion in collective loss (Conquergood 1994: 202).

Thus, the conversionary effect of youth street gang subculture is protected from threats that it itself creates, perhaps accounting in part for the longevity and pandemic quality of gangs despite their frequently ruinous effects. In this sense, this is why this particular subcultural content is so useful for gang members because not only does it sublimate negative emotions issuing from experience of relative deprivation but also

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neutralizes the threats to self generated by the deviant acts this sublimation itself calls forth.

Conclusion

This article has argued that youth street gangs—amid deviant subcultures more gener-ally—are adaptations (from a range of possibilities) to marginalization, but one that responds more directly to marginalization’s by-product: shame. More specifically, this article argued that youth street gangs, in transposing ambient parent culture of solidar-ity existing in lower or working class neighbourhoods, mine the honorific properties of loyalty to peers and place, sustained by iterative symbolic and violently expression, to generate feelings of pride. While other subcultural adaptations can produce negative side effects that undermine their affective dividends, the harmful legal and physical repercussions of gang subculture—the death of others or the imprisonment or injury of self—are counterbalanced by their interpretation (at least for a limited time in gang members’ biography)—read neutralization—in solemn, ennobling terms of self-sacri-fice and personal fortitude, the entities’ enduring endemic character is more under-standable. Thus, as was argued, street subcultures not only resist but also frequently reproduce, if not deepen, the marginalization that is their provenance. It is to these more experientially proximate emotional dynamics that future theoretical exegesis and empirical investigation should be directed by criminologists of subcultural life.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank two people, without whom this article would not have been written. David C. Brotherton for creating an intellectual space beyond pathological conceptions of gangs and Lynn S. Chancer, whose unstinting attention and intellectual acumen help guide this article from draft to draft to its final form.

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