This article discusses continuities between the discourse of caste in ancient India, the racialization constitutive of the Enlightenment, and a similarly exclusionary, overdetermined conception of worthlessness—the lazy, immoral, deviant minorities—evident in contemporary racism as much as in the abandonment of a global underclass. We argue that the negative marking of a social condition or group as inferior and subhuman (on all kinds of grounds, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual) has been constitutive of the paradigms in which these societies subsist. The practices and project of all that is good is shadowed by this negative, its infectious, abominable presence. Analytically bringing together the politics of the homo sacer with the social psychology of abjection, we argue that such exclusion is as vested in politics and economic interests as in their psychic correspondences.

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In his landmark work, Richard Alba predicted that white ethnicity would fade into its twilight in the twenty-first century. Where direct inquiries into American white ethnicity have been scant since the millennium’s turn, the authors use recently collected (2014), nationally representative survey data to systematically assess “postmillennial” white ethnic identification. In particular, the authors explore the prevalence of whites identifying with ethnicity today, how this compares with other groups, and how drivers of white ethnic affiliation may have shifted in recent years. The data show that all ethnic claims have declined in the twenty-first-century United States, but the retreat from ethnicity has been accelerated among whites. By the authors’ estimates, only 8.4 percent of whites still claim ethnicity. The authors also find that white ethnic affiliation is now most substantively driven by racial ideology, experience, and perceived victimhood, though some demographic markers remain important. Further analyses show that remaining American white ethnic claimants now perceive white cultural advantages while simultaneously seeing themselves as victims of racial discrimination at rates that rival reports of nonwhites. In sum, these data suggest that white ethnicity has declined but not disappeared as a socially intelligible boundary claim in the postmillennial era and that it has developed as a racialized expression that holds implications for understandings of contemporary white identities, racisms, and resentments.

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This article uses forty‐four face‐to‐face interviews with individuals who formerly identified with straightedge—a clean‐living, mostly youth‐based (sub)culture—to explore the possible role chosen youth cultural identities play in adult transition, as well as extend recent work on aging and youth scenes by more deeply engaging both “subjective adulthood” and the retrospective accounts of “ex” members. Data show interviewees developing (paths to) subjective adulthoods substantially influenced by former affiliation with straightedge culture they frequently believe mark their (paths to) adulthoods fundamentally distinct from others in their age cohort. Particularly, individuals transitioning from straightedge recounted pronounced subculturally rooted antipathy toward adult conventionality, often envisioned alternative adult trajectories for themselves, discussed transitional impediments and opportunities they took to be unique to transitioning from straightedge, and, in indicating heightened awareness of adulthood's “facework,” visualized a collective of others like them inside adult social spheres by virtue of the formative bases (former) scene affiliation provided them. Ultimately, findings suggest that the study of subjective adult transition may profit from directly considering the formative influence of elective youth identities. Likewise, perhaps the most fertile grounds in the turn toward examining aging and scenes might rest in meanings individuals attach to adulthood and transitioning, even for ex‐members of certain communities.

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This paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of bringing sexuality more to the fore in scholarly work on the transition to adulthood. Sexuality not only brings needed attention to the commonplace sexual minorities that are largely overlooked in existing literature, connection with queer theory’s elemental insights stands to enrich the very frameworks through which transitions to adulthood are articulated. To that end, this paper provides a preliminary sketch of a “queer” vision of “emerging adulthood” and begins to elaborate the potential benefits of its deployment in scholarly treatments of transitions to adulthood. Inasmuch as a queered emerging adulthood lays a base for understanding additional forms of identity instability and perspectives on adulthood, it perhaps also indicates that scholarship on transitions to adulthood can profit by continuing to look to other theoretical perspectives that might shed added light on the shifting and manifold contours of (transitioning to) adulthood in the twenty-first century.

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The 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a great deal of research on white ethnicity. Yet since this time, few systematic empirical studies of white ethnicity have emerged. This paper uses data from a recent nationally representative survey of Americans to (re)assess white ethnicity in the twenty-first century. Three primary areas are explored: (1) the pervasiveness and salience of ethnic claims among white Americans; (2) the social and demographic characteristics of self-identified white ethnics; and (3) the impact of white ethnic identity on political opinions and racial attitudes. We find that a smaller but significant number of white Americans claim ethnicity today and that distinguishing social characteristics of white ethnics still remain. Contrary to current prevailing theoretical formulations, however, these markers of distinction do not appear to be related to political or racial attitudes in any systematic way.

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This paper uses 20 in-depth interviews with individuals who formerly identified as straightedge to explore a largely overlooked but potentially important dimension of youth subcultures: life after subculture. Interviews illustrate the potential importance of life after subculture for gaining a fuller understanding of subculture and indicate that residue from former subcultural affiliation can be a marker of a group’s relative substance. Interviews additionally underscore problems with prevailing theoretical models of subculture and support the claim that approaches to and conceptions of subculture should attend to phenomenological levels of analysis and potentialities.

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