Adolescents Youth and Teenagers Youth teenagers and adolescentsdo

Adolescents, Youth and Teen-agers

Youth, teenagers and adolescents…do these words all mean the same?

These words all refer to young people who are not children, but not yet adults. They are IMBETWEENERS. But each of these words suggest different forms of identity.

YOUTH • Refers to young people operating in the public sphere, as part of a social group. • Tipically associated to boys rather than girls. • Examples : youth clubs, youth unemployment.

ADOLESCENCE • Used in connection with an individual’s identity, referring to a private, psychic sphere of experience. • Examples : adolescent crisis, adolescent diary.

TEENAGER • Emerged in the 1950 s when young people were newly identified as a distinct group of consumers. • Since then it has been associated with certain kind of products or markets. • Examples : teenage fashion, teenage magazines.

With respect to gender, we should note that expression like teenage pregnancy and gang of youths suggest that : Teenage : feminine Youth : masculine

Other words conied recently: • Tweenager : eleven and twelve-years-old who aspire to the lifestyle of their older siblings and have money to do so. • Kidult : adults who dress in the style of children. Both terms predominantly applied to females.

There is concern expressed about the way even younger people adopt adult habits too early. Fashion is no longer restricted by age limits, with pre-teens shopping by themselves at Gap, Topshop, Miss Selfridge, their tastes commanded by pop bands like One Direction and magazines such as Sugar.

Birth, procreation and death offer the most coincise summary of the human life cycle. Even if these events are universal, there are massive differences in the ways they are experienced by people from different backgrounds. To learn about British people’s identities market research are the most plentiful sources of information.

In order to value how age shapes patterns of behaviour, it’s important to analyze how people spend their money and their time at different stage of their life. The term lifestyle became linked to the notion of choices over spending, and modern Britan seems to be characterised as consumer culture. The British teenager is seen as the consumer par excellence and a fashion victim driven by larger forces than personal expression.

The teenager is considered to have been an invention or symptom of shifting consumer markets in the 1950 s. Many studies of British youth since then focused on the way young people characterise themselves through the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, the films they watch and the places they go to.

Richard Hoggart in The uses of Literacy summoned up the image of the British teenager being almost consumed by a mass culture linked to the Americanisation. Recently, social commentators argued that through their role as consumers British young people express themselves most powerfully and creatively.

GRAFFITI • Art form borrowed from the inner-city subcultures of black Americans. • From the mid-1980 s onwards became a common sight on spare bits of wall in cities. • Complex, brightly colored designs made with spray paint based around a single word, name or phrase.

GRAFFITI • Important element of appeal : you have to know how to read its messages and recognise the signature of the artist. • Union between British graffiti and urban America give to graffiti the power to glamorise mundane environments and make this spaces more exotic. • Banksy

The Punk Revolution

The music • In the 1970 s, amidst economic uncertainity and political discord, a rebellious movement against the establishment arose: Punk Rock. • The music and the social background and the idiosyncrasies of the British punk rock movement provide us a unique insight into the social-political scenario of the UK of that time

• The roots of punk rock lie in the musci of late 60 s and early 1970 s US bands such as the Velvet Underground. • Punk Rock opposed the stereotypical rock star attitude and musical magniloquence of bands like YES or Pink Floyd. • Punk songs were raw, loud, short, fast, and direct, with basic vocal melodies and no guitar solos. • Those songs became famous thanks to fanzines like Sideburns.

• The most famous British Punk band was the Sex Pistols. • Punk acted as a ppwerful means of rebellion against the recession in the United Kingdom. Unemplyoment figures were at their worst since World War II. The social background of the punks was the working class, therefore they felt the urge to show anger and frustration for their condition of living. • They angrily rejected issues such as the Poll Tax and the nuclear weapons, seeing anarchy as a possible answer.

The LOOK • Leather jackets, spiky, dyed hair, torn clothes, T-shirts with offensive slogans, safety pins, zips, body piercing, all are the elements which contributed to create the punk image.

Sex culture • Until the 1960 s there was a suppression of all sexual things. From the Victorian age the UK suffered from terrible inhibitions. • Sex education for schoolchildren became a necessity in more recent times as desires, pleasures and practices have gone through significant change. • New fears concern, for instance, cybersex.

• The British have, historically, taken a pragmatic view of sexual relations, recognising that appearence is all and that a strict preservation of a public façade of continent behaviour is as just important as actually achieving it. • The regulation of morality and the demarcation of privacy.

• • Bills for the legalisation of abortion 1967 The decriminalisation of homosexuality 1967 Divorce laws 1971 New Labour Party made significant inroads to some of the glaring inequalities facing the samesex couples for instance: the Civil Parternship Bill or adopion legislation which gave gay-couples the right to adopt in 2002.