Abstract
In this thesis I take the skateboarding activity that has become popular among local adolescents since the late 1990s as point of departure, to explore how specific adolescents formed identities through constructing the skateboarder subject, by analyzing related documents, notes and interviews collected in field researches. First, by looking at skateboarding as an imported sport, I delineated the characteristics it has formed in its development in the US--such as the transformation of styles and its close connection with commercial mechanisms. Then I explore how these characteristics were appropriated or rejected when skateboarding was admitted into Taiwan. While being labeled as one of the ‘extreme sports’, skateboarding combined with teenage fashion and has become one of the few sports that facilitated the exhibition of personal style of teenagers. Its prevalence has been made possible through the local skateboard shops, and it has become one of the visible identical positions for local adolescents (Chapter two). Next I moved on to the practical experiences of local young skateboarders in becoming ‘someone who has been skateboarding,’ and find that the concrete practices to construct and label the skateboarder identity was completed through disciplining and displaying one’s own body while they were practicing the tricks, confronting the injuries and skateboarding in the public space, that is, a tough body that was identical to those of foreign skateboarders displayed in the mostly American imported skateboarding videos. The skateboarder identity that combines with such tough body also coincides with the strong male body that is highly valued in the ‘cocky’ value system in their daily practices, as the clue of the appealing of this identity to them (Chapter three). In the fourth part, I expended the process in constructing the skateboarder identity to the important living space for these young people--the skateboard shop--wherein the identity is further maintained and negotiated through the experiences that skateboarders have in cooperating with and resisting against the shopkeepers as well as other skateboarders in the space of skateboard shop. In such a space, penetrated by the logic of production, the skateboarder identity is re-presented under this mechanism, while at the same time, the skateboarders adopted the logic of personal loyalty to develop alternative ways to form identities that resist the mechanism operated by the logic of production (Chapter four). Lastly, I review the formation of skateboarder identity by situating the young skaters back to the society as a whole, as well as the thesis as a process of personal writing in Chapter Five.