Radgies, gangstas, and mugs: Imaginary criminal identities in the twilight of the pseudo-pacification process

Abstract

In this article, the authors offer data from their ongoing ethnographic study of criminality in a former industrial town in the northeast of England, and attempt an initial analysis of the important relationship between mass media, the imagination, and the cultural practices of criminal masculinities in locales of permanent economic recession. They contend that a market demand for mediated images of instrumental, violent, and criminal individuality has emerged among specific cultural forms that inhabit the twilight of an historical pseudo-pacification process. This process, because it ultimately depends upon the maintenance of the serviceability that pacified social interaction can offer the free-market economy, is now in a dangerously weakened condition.