Keeping Out The "Weeds"

On Nov. 24, 1992, the City of Tacoma made the act of skateboarding in downtown Tacoma illegal after complaints of damage done to marble ledges in the business district by a handful of skaters.

City Council wanted to protect the community members by eliminating all skateboarding from the downtown Tacoma. The belief was that the skateboarders would scare away business and cause injury to innocent bystanders. I will be using Foucoult’s writing on bio-power to examine reasons for city ordinance eliminating skateboarding as form of transportation and skateboarders in the early 1990’s because Foucults theory on bio-power shows how the expression of control or segregation towards specific groups can be done under the guise of community safety.

According to the City of Tacoma Council circa 1993, “The City Council has found that the use of skateboards has resulted in damage to both public and private property…..use of skateboards in an area of high vehicular and pedestrian traffic creates an increased risk of injury to persons and property. Final notes on the ordinance state, the proposed ordinance will enhance the public safety and welfare and reduce the risk of harm to persons or property by prohibiting the use of such devices in the Downtown Business District, as well as restricting such use on the public roadways and sidewalks of the City of Tacoma. The Ordinance passed September, 7, 1993.[1]Central to the ordinance is the rhetoric of protection of individual and private and public property by eliminating an undesired section of the community.

Eliminating the lesser desired culture allows other cultures to flourish, similar to plucking out weeds from a garden. This allows those the desired/profitable groups to maintain safety, control and room to grow.   Foucoult states that bio-power is a major means of control through statistics and probabilities. Foucoult argues nation states analyzed both the likely responses to actions by the government, and the ways in which people could most probably be controlled and directed in all aspects of life. [2]       

Foucoult sates that bio power is a key element in the development of capitalism and also acts as factors of segregation and social hierarchization movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. [3] According to Negri, bio-power is a concept which invests the dimensions of the economic, political, and understanding of oneself within a community.  “Bio-power is a concept that invests life, an instrumental rationality of economic action that brings about an increasing spread of capitalist domination.”[4] Foucoult later states that within bio-power, people are not thought of as ends in themselves, but as resources which had to be used and taken care of in their everyday activities to ensure the development and viability of the state. [5] As resources the can be eliminated or managed in order to maintain power and to encourage economic growth. In this way the city council was investing into a more seemingly profitable culture rather than the community as a whole, an investment that has seemingly failed given the still empty store fronts in down town Tacoma.

The attempt to eliminate or conform the skate culture to fit the practices or standards of Industrial culture within the city boundaries results in the states pursuit of hegemony .Beal states that the skate subculture challenges this hegemony daily in civil society, in everyday experiences with people.[6] The desire to manipulate the environment to meet the needs of society is an obvious cause for conflict between cultures. I would like to suggest that the use of bio-power is in turn used by skateboarders as well when pushed out of community or public spaces to cement patches under bridges or abandoned parts of the city. According to Beal and Yochim the skate culture, has been known to be sexist, homophobic and intolerant towards those resembling the industrial culture who may attempt to enter the skate park/skate spot.[7] The attempt to eliminate others from the skate spot is another example of how bio power works. The skateboarders subconsciously eliminate anyone that may be a threat to their way of life or may damage an idea or an image of what skateboarding as a sub-culture.

The use of bio-power shows fear of change, loss of culture and loss of resources. Both Industrial culture and skate sub-culture use bio-power; bio-power shows how the territorial rebellious local’s only mentality can exists in unhealthy skate sub-culture communities. Yochim  states that television shows that are marketed towards skateboarders such as jackass, wild boys, viva la bam and Rob and Big display young men reveling in adolescent humor, taking pleasure in pain, and mocking dominant norms of masculinity, all the while maintaining their power at the expense of women, homosexuality, and working-class whites.[8] I do not agree with Yochims attempt to understand the norms of skate culture through MTV, however  mocking the mainstream culture and separating from is common among several skate parks I have attended. This shows a need to push main stream society out of skateboard boundaries. It is important to note that this evidence shows both Industrial culture and skateboard sub-culture use forms of bio-power, the difference being that most skate park kids are between ages of 11-19, wear as the Industrial culture is represented by a more “adult” demographic. This would suggest that a child will react negatively to rejection and deny others to enter their space in an immature fashion and the Industrial cultures are prone to act like children when thinking of what community development is. The skate culture is noted to be immature by industrial culture and by scholars such as Beal and Yochim however the skateboard sub-culture use of bio-power can be seen as learned from the Industrial culture.

[1] City of Tacoma, Ordinance No.25237

[2] Foucalt, Michel The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 English Translation (1978) 140

[3] Foucalt, Michel The Foucault Reader   (1984) 263

[4] Negri, Antonio Empire and Beyond (2008) 173

[5] Ibid, 140-143.

[6] Beal,Becky Disqualifying the Official: An Exploration of Social Resistance Through the Subculture of Skateboarding (1995)253

[7]Ibid 252,

 Yochim, Emily Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity(2010)

[8] Yochim, Emily Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity(2010) 112