‘Flexible Opposition’: Skateboarding Subcultures under the Rubric of Late Capitalism

In this article, I develop a critical dialogue with historians and sociologists who suggest that subcultural or ‘alternative’ sports such as skateboarding are best understood as fluid and fragmented sites of ‘postmodern’ identity formation. Depending largely on an archive of video footage from the 1960s to the present, I argue that while these scholars accurately depict the quotidian operation of skateboarders’ identity formation, they have lost sight of the historical relationship between the development of skateboarding subcultures and the emergence of neoliberal regimes of accumulation. Drawing from the theoretical insights of scholars such as David Harvey, I call for a radical critique of ‘alternative’ sports that acknowledges, but does not necessarily celebrate, the ephemeral subjectivities of the athletes in question.