Cultures of the ‘Ordinary’ Boys: Masculinities, Transitions and Aspirations in Austere Times

This thesis draws on ethnographic data detailing the cultural lives and transitions to conventional adulthood across the spheres of education, employment and housing of 12 young ‘middling’, white heterosexual men during austerity in England during the 2010s. This thesis aims to understand how the young men cope, put up with, imagine conventional adulthood whilst engaging in leisure-based practices in a moment where markers of conventional adulthood are harder to attain for the relatively advantaged men of this study. To understand this experience, the concept of ‘austere conviviality’ will be proposed. This will be used to make sense of how the men cope with the suffering of once ‘marginal’ experiences, how the cultural and material of politics of austerity are embedded in their practices and outlooks, and how the intersections of whiteness, ‘middling’ class status and heterosexual masculinity work to ensure forms of advantage in contrast to more marginalised social groups in England. As a particularly white, middling, masculinised structure of feeling, austere conviviality will critically give an insight into ‘ordinary’ youth, blend transitional and cultural approaches to young people, show how austerity is reproduced in ongoing ways as expressed through the relationship between time, culture and economy at the level of lifestyle. Doing so presents an insight into inequalities across class, gender and race in highly historicised ways, whilst still articulating longstanding injustices despite austerity proliferating out ‘marginal’ experiences to the ‘mass’.