Male and female rockers, Male and female turkeys, Skaters, Lesbians and Gays. The role of cultural consumerism in the social construction of the representations of youth identities. (The case of youth groups frequenting the local malls in Maracaibo, Venezuela)

Abstract

This paper has as its goal to analyze how cultural
consumerism turns out to be a fundamental element in the process of construction of identites and differences in some youth groups in an urban context and in those spaces where globalized material and symbolic goods are interchanged, as it is the case of the malls of Maracaibo. To reach this goal, the concepts of culutral consumerism and identities representations were taken as central analytic categories. The methodology used in this study was qualitative, foregrounding ethnographic techiques for the collection of information, like observation and in-depth interviews. The conclusion is that in the proceses of identities representation construction in those youths under scrutiny, objects become valuable and acquire centrality in their identitary adscriptions in as much as they become the most important means to construct that image they wish to communicate in order to identfiy with, and differentiate themselves from other youths. It is also concluded that there are different ways of being young, and that those identites are constructed in the crossing of spaces and symbols that are both local and global.

Keywords: Youths, cultural consumerism, youth identities, Maracaibo, Venezuela.