"The kids were there and I saw two go in the air. They were like dolls flying. It was hard to believe what I was seeing. The car seemed to be somersaulting, with smoke and sparks coming from it" (The Sun, November 1st, 1991)
Delroy Burris's eyewitness account of the killing of Adele Thompson and one of her friends by joy-riders in Toxteth, Liverpool catches something of the shocking unexpectedness of the incident. There's an edgy mixture in the account of danger, threat, thrill and then the sudden, explosive wrecking of people's lives. The ending brings out the personal cost of this rapidly rising area of crime.
But what it doesn't do is focus attention on the fact that out of the 500,000 cars that were stolen in the UK in 1990 (clearly not all these were joy-riders) the overwhelming majority were taken by young men. Indeed, nearly 7% of this figure were driven by men aged between fifteen to twenty.
I want to start from these silences and move beneath the official voices mouthing, "Death riders!", "Young hooligans!", "evil and wicked people" to investigate the root causes. I want to try and make sense of joy-riding in terms of identity politics and a gendered perspective on men and masculinities. This means attending to the role of pleasure, fantasy and desire in producing our emotional attachments to particular identities.
Drawing on the insights of Foucault, identity politics doesn't just see power in terms of coercion or a 'force which says no'. Rather, it sees power as something which works best by working on our own desires, inciting us to construct identities which are, simultaneously, pleasurable and constraining. This involves the active participation of people in the shaping of their own desires, fantasies, pleasures and identities within ruling frameworks of meaning. Within this perspective, joy-riders bind themselves into emotional and social prisons through their struggles to build identities that they can walk tall in.
| After all, it was a red Mazda MX-3 sports car that killed Adele Thompson not a Robin Reliant |
All identities are actively constructed in relation to a range of relevant contexts. In the case of joy-riders, the primary relevant contexts are those of social deprivation and heterosexual masculinity. By focussing on these two contexts and the relationship between them, I hope to show how joy-riding can be understood as a desirable, though ultimately constraining, element in the shaping of a particular form of masculine identity.
The background of social/economic powerlessness is a very real, shaping force in the lives of some joy-riders. Although there are different class forms associated with joy-riding (like the relatively prosperous form that broke out on the Blackbird Leys housing estate in Oxford in September, 1991), in the main, the social context is a bleak one.
The North Eastern/Tyneside, working class experience of powerlessness is based on the de-industrialisation and unemployment of that region, where in certain parts, like the West side of Newcastle, only 20% of the local people are in paid work. Added to this there is an erosion of traditional, masculine skills and an increasing "feminisation" of the labour force (albeit in the low-paid, part-time jobs). Poverty and demoralisation have a very real presence in a culture that has "little hope and little to aim for". This is the area that jumped into the national spotlight in the September riots of 1991 where "ram-raiding" and joy-riding also played a prominent part.
In the last twelve years, the gap between the poverty and powerlessness of the working class, urban poor and the "fast buck/fast lane", enterprise culture of other parts of Britain has widened and deepened. This gap has been reflected in the sleek, fast-performance cars of the executive, "jet set" and the blind cul-de-sacs of some grey, working class council estates like the ones that were burnt out in the riots of September 1991. Social envy is a contributory, motivating force in the lives of some joy-riders. After all, it was a red Mazda MX-3 sports car that killed Adele Thompson not a Robin Reliant.
| The Imagery of heat and strength are used as ways of associating the car's punchy performance with the masculine fantasy of full-blooded heterosexual conquest |
The framework of social deprivation offers very restricted options to many working class, male youths. Some disaffected young men who haven't found a way out of these cul-de-sacs through their heads are trapped into taking up the passive object positions within this context. They long to wriggle free of the victimised, no-hope identities offered them, perhaps through the aggressive use of their bodies (in football or boxing). They want to move far away from a slumped identity that merely confirms that they're on the scrap-heap. But, sometimes, nothing seems possible.
Socially and economically emasculated, many working class young men nevertheless come into contact with other areas of social power where their strength and virility are celebrated, particularly within the framework of the "real man". Here I'm referring specifically to one dominant form of masculinity that claims the privileged label of "real" or "proper" - that is, a "top dog" heterosexual masculinity.
Three main areas of this "real man" context are relevant to the lives of joy-riders. They are:
Car culture in the 1990's is a site where "real man" fantasies and desires for power are played out, especially in the terrain of fast performance cars. It's significant to note here that in a study of 50 joy-riders living in South Wales, carried out by Barnados, nearly half of the cars stolen involved only two makes of cars; the Ford XR3i (including Turbo) and the Astra GTE.
A clear example of this ideology of virile, heterosexual manliness is to be found in the advertising used in some of the glossy car magazines. In the September 1990 edition of "Car" there's an advertisement for the new Ford Fiesta RS Turbo that reads:
"HOW HOT DO YOU LIKE YOUR HATCH?
The XR2i has deservedly made a name for itself as the most potent Fiesta on the road.
Now it's about to be overtaken by a new Fiesta, the RS Turbo. With the combined muscle of a Garrett T02 turbocharger unit and a 133 DIN PS engine, the RS Turbo scorches from zero to 60 mph in 7. 7 seconds. And you can push it (at any rate, on your own private road) to a top speed of 127 mph...
In keeping with this hot-blooded performance, the styling is appropriately cool.
Note the unique alloy wheels and the low profile tyres, the body-coloured bumpers and rear spoiler, the dark green moulding inserts and the bonnet extractor vents... "
The reader is bombarded by words with a physical attack. Words like "hot", "potent", "muscle", "scorches", "push" assault the reader's attention.
This car culture world is clearly a heavily-gendered one where it seems natural to thrust and compete with vigour.
Looked at more closely, the links between fast performance car possession and the enticing promise of virile manliness are firmly established. The suggestion that car ownership entails a sexual, symbolic and material power is loudly announced throughout the advert. The imagery of heat and strength are used as ways of associating the car's punchy performance with the masculine fantasy of full-blooded, heterosexual conquest. The implication is that your masculine potency (however shaky in reality) can be built and confirmed through the ownership and masterful handling of such a "hot hatch".
To deepen the resonance of this aura of virile sophistication, there are further references to physical strength ("muscle"), competitiveness ("overtaken", "push it") and individuality ("unique", "distinctive"). And there's also an emphasis on the connection between socially assured forms of masculinity and detailed, technical know-how about engines, intricate facts about speed and performance and internal and external fittings.
Another aspect of the "real man" context is the tension between young boys and "mature" masculinities. Young boys are made to feel inadequate and unmanly against the fantasy of the established authority and material/sexual achievement of worldly men. This is especially so in car culture terms where, as we've seen above, manly sophistication is closely tied in with the possession of certain types of fast performance cars.
From this angle, young working class men may be using joy-riding as a way of getting back at their sense of being excluded through the association of fast performance cars and "mature", middle class masculinities. Their rebellion takes on a class-specific form in the way they seize these symbols of middle class authority and power and re-locate them within a new framework of meaning where they feel like Kings (however temporarily). Within this shifted terrain, young, "hard case" working class masculinities can rule, symbolically, through displays of physical toughness and wild, sometimes self-destructive, daring.
In this way "hot"-cars, like guns and technological gadgets, become a symbolic means of entry into the world of the maturely masculine for young boys and disaffected young men. In western, industrialised societies, as John Fiske has reminded us, "technology and science have replaced 'magic' as the social manifestations of male power".
It's not enough to joyride in individual isolation. Joy-riders need the confirmation and approval of the male pack in what they do. "Showing face to the other guys" means elaborating dramatic displays and manly flourishes through handbrake turns, the screeching and burning of tyres, enormous surges of acceleration and 'weaving in and out of cars".
Through these displays of "real man" technical competence (often using scaffing [breaking the steering lock] and hot wiring skills to get the car moving), daring and skill, joy-riders grab prestige and status within the peer group. In this context, the peer group acts as a source of social recognition. Through the risk-taking exploits of joy-riding, young men, who are often insecure in their masculine identities, try to gain the admiration and respect of the rest of the male club. The shaping of their "real man" masculinities is dependent on an imaginary relation to an established source of recognition that will reassure them and make them feel safe within their new selves.
Similarly, the thrill of the police chase also adds to this process of masculine shaping and validation. "The excitement of any chase that results may add to the significance of the events, and a successful evasion may enhance the status of the offender with their peers".
The police presence can act as a powerful source of external authority that joy-riders don't seem to fear so much as urgently need in their search for "real man" confirmation. Perhaps the fact that the police car drivers are almost always men is also relevant here? Isn't there an element of unspoken, manly competition, of antler-clashing, in these chases that might give a buzz to both joy-riders and policemen? Some joy-riders seem to need to prove their manly skills and expertise against their fantasies of the "mature", professional competence of police men. I suppose one of the most important questions here is would young, male joy-riders want to measure themselves, compete with and win so much if they were being chased by two police women?
Traditional "either/or" thinking about either class politics or identity politics has proved very damaging to both sides. And it's also been unhelpful in making sense of crimes like joy-riding. Class politics has tended to ignore gender (and the other new, social movements). Identity politics, in struggling away from narrowly defined, economistic politics has tended to underestimate the power of capital and class. More positively, there is an alternative approach that fully recognises the need for a more dynamic interweaving between these two polarised politics and the two contexts that have been identified above.
| The thrill of the police chase adds to the process of masculine shaping and validation |
It's the detailed interaction between both contexts that actually helps us to understand the emotional investments that young men make in the activity of joy-riding. The powerlessness and helplessness of being defined as a passive object within the context of a social deprivation framework puts considerable pressure on young men to actively convert their sense of being put down into a struggle to overcome it. This pressure is created by the contradictions in their lives between fearing their social/economic powerlessness (and for some young men their lack of hardness and physical strength) but at the same time recognising that the ideological climate of manly virility they exist within expects them to demonstrate superiority and power.
This fear of their own powerlessness also exists for many young men at a psychological level as well as a social one. Their present need to protect their vulnerable selves comes ultimately from their early childhood relationships with their mothers. In order to become masculine, boys have to wrench themselves away from the merging closeness of the early mother/son contact so that they can build a gender identity as a boy/man. They attempt to do this through associating themselves with the independent power and desire represented by the father.
Many young men never achieve this transition and go on through their lives feeling incomplete in themselves. They often try to hide their hunger for closeness and warmth through manly acts of virility and daring.
This is why the "real man" context becomes so enticing and attractive to some young men who feel themselves to be both socially and psychologically helpless and vulnerable, and who also sense that other escape routes have been cut off from them. Buying into an alternative context as an active subject, rather than the disempowered object of the social deprivation one, confers a compensatory power and authority on them. This accounts for the intense, emotional commitment many joy-riders experience in fitting themselves into identities within the "real man" context that make them feel bigger and stronger than they actually are. The inciting promises of full-blooded, heroic performance and manly sophistication lures them into the fantasy pursuit of "real man" identities.
One of the reasons why joy-riding has such an emotional grip over the lives and fantasies of some young men is that intense buzz of excitement and thrill that makes Mike, an ex-joy-rider from Cardiff, feel "all bubbling". That's why if we are to understand what joy-riding means to the young men who do it, we have to recognise that, in the joy-riders' own terms, the initial act of joy-riding is always joyful. Death, disaster, accidents, severe mutilation might all result from it but, at the point of driving cars away, joy-riders are making a bid to be included in a world of masculine mastery that promises to counter their helplessness.
In struggling to conquer their disempowering personal and social conditions, joy-riders make considerable emotional investments in the masculine identities offered by the "real man" context. They chase after the fantasies of omnipotence and sexual and material success that seem to be a part of these illusory identities. But they also trap themselves through the chase.
The "all bubbling" desire to claim a manly virility and power through joy-riding seems, at first sight, to offer young men a way of breaking free from their constraints. The new charge of energy (and a heightened sense of being alive) involved in the danger and daring of racing, being chased in or displaying stolen cars is intoxicating to them. Like in the September riots on the Blackbird Leys housing estate in Oxford, dramatic display in stolen cars earned the respect of at least one onlooker:
"You wouldn't believe your eyes. They can do handbrake turns at 40-60 mph. The smoke from the burning tyres and exhausts is everywhere..." (The Guardian, September 4th, 1991)
There's a kind of awed respect in this account that gives the joy-riders a new status and pride in themselves. But in striving to achieve a fresh sense of themselves, their desires and pleasures lock them in to an aggressive manliness that often ends up in them destroying themselves and others. Within the boundaries and definitions of the "real man" framework, these desires for a commanding potency are shaped in such a luring form that they quickly gain the willing compliance of alienated, working class young men.
| Go-Kart racing schemes or police invitations to young men to handle fast performance cars in controlled situations are like inviting alcoholics to a brewery |
These bubbling desires capture joy-riders' active participation in their own imprisonment because they work through their pleasures and not their prohibitions. It feels so right and "natural", in their bleak surroundings, to enjoy the immediate, thrilling buzz in stealing, mastering, displaying, accelerating, (maiming and killing). It's only later that they begin to realise what they have done.
Joy-riders become criminals through actively pursuing "real man" identities and desires. They are hungry for fantasies of heroic performance to counter their fears of dependency, powerlessness and dead-endness. But these desires and fantasies beckon them into the grim cells of prison and death.
Before we can do anything about this, we need to investigate the pleasures joy-riders get out of doing it. From a prevention angle, the social shaping of their desires might offer a more promising starting point than focusing on their "hooliganism" or irresponsibility. We have to face up to the fact that joy-riders' emotional commitments to their desires and fantasies totally "outweighs the prospect of conviction". So it's about time we started to wake up to the importance of identity politics and men and masculinities' viewpoints in making sense of these issues.
One of the most useful things we could do in approaching joy-riding is to break open our gender blindness about such activities. Go-Kart racing schemes or police invitations to young men to handle fast performance cars in controlled situations are like inviting alcoholics to a brewery. First, we have to work on young men's damaging and narrow models of being masculine, and the different ways they have of buying into the "real man" framework. Later, a recognition might begin to emerge about the links between the compensatory assertion of manly virility and the compulsion to joyride. We also need to acknowledge the related insight that gender ideologies, like the "real man" one, don't just work at a rational level. They have real power over our lives, especially at moments of insecurity and inadequacy, because they move through unconscious processes and because, temporarily, they make us feel better about ourselves.
On November 27th, 1991, the then Tory Government brought in new legislation about joy-riding as a criminal offence, with prison sentences of up to five years. It established a new offence of Aggravated Vehicle Taking to cover cases where the crime of driving away a vehicle results in an accident, damage or injury. But joy-riders won't change through the coercion of harshly punitive measures or through rational arguments, like John Patten's, the Minister of State at the Home Office, that, 'There is no joy in joy-riding".
Instead what we desperately need is a politics that heals the split between official rationality and the "all bubbling" desires that pull at us at awkward moments. In order to be able to address the contradictions of joy-riding we need a politics of the 1990's that sees power operating through the shaping of our pleasures and desires. It's only through understanding how young, male joy-riders come to want what they want that helps us to loosen the emotional/social ties that bind them so tightly at the present moment.
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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