From Margins to Privilege: Revisiting the Sociology of Youth Subcultures Through Omnivorousness

Advantaged young people may engage in transgressive or non-conformist subcultural practices usually associated with disadvantaged youth. When undertaken from privileged positions, however, these practices can carry markedly different meanings, costs and rewards. Sociological research on youth subcultures has illuminated the marginalised side of this dynamic, analysing deviant and oppositional practices as collective responses to blocked opportunities and exclusion from mainstream recognition. However, why young people with more secure and legitimate routes to recognition and success may nonetheless be drawn to risk-bearing subcultural practices remains under-theorised. This article addresses this asymmetry by reframing advantaged youths' subcultural participation as a specific, transgressive form of boundary-crossing cultural omnivorousness, and by analysing advantaged and disadvantaged youth within a field-oriented framework. Extending Bourdieu's logic of condescension into the domain of risk-bearing participation, it proposes the concept of transgressive condescension, to capture how privileged actors can convert visible transgression into recognition and advantage. This reveals a double misrecognition: the visibility of privileged transgression obscures the capital buffers that make such risk-taking manageable, while the absence of such buffers, which renders similar practices acutely costly for disadvantaged youth, is also obscured. The article thus develops the Bourdieusian turn in subcultural studies towards a more symmetrical analysis of participation across social positions, and extends cultural omnivore research beyond taste and consumption by treating transgressive boundary-crossing as a risk-bearing practice, whose authenticity effects, costs and convertibility are unequally structured by class position and capital configuration.