Everybody wants to stand out in life: new forms of self-expression among urban lower-class youth in neoliberalizing Turkey

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1558708 (Table of Contents)

This thesis draws on an ethnographic study in which I followed the peculiar ways lower class male youth carve out spaces for themselves in the Turkish society and negotiate their subjectivities by differentiating themselves from others mainly through style. I analyze the contemporary forms of self-expression that they adopt in relation primarily to the history of discursive exclusion of urban lower classes in Turkey and to the Turkish variant of neoliberalism experienced in the recent decades. I argue that through their creative and insistent interventions young people unsettle the symbolic order of the society and transcend the cultural and spatial boundaries imposed upon them. Contrary to the representation of lower class youth in dominant discourses as wannabes, I see these new practices and forms of self-expression as their attempts to become themselves and to stand out from the crowds.