This essay offers a critique of the subcultural discourse surrounding skateboarding. Skateboarding I argue has been represented in academia, popular culture and skateboard media as a subculture which resists mainstream society. First by identifying three central themes in the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies theorisation of subcultures: resistance, societal reaction and subcultural identity, and by demonstrating how geographers have interpreted these themes spatially, I deconstruct the nature of the skateboarding as subculture discourse. Then, drawing on a...