Leery Sue goes to the show: Popular performance, sexuality and the disorderly girl

Book chapter

Bellanta, Melissa. (2016). Leery Sue goes to the show: Popular performance, sexuality and the disorderly girl. In In S. Robinson and S. Sleight (Ed.). Children, childhood and youth in the British World pp. 237 - 251 Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_14
AuthorsBellanta, Melissa
EditorsS. Robinson and S. Sleight
Abstract

On a Saturday night in 1887, 13-year-old Mary Ann M., a resident of the inner-industrial Sydney district of Waterloo, paid a visit to Paddy’s Market. After winding past the sideshows and colourful stalls, the sound of bands and the calls of vendors, she ended up talking with a group of ‘larrikin’ youths in the streets outside. ‘Larrikin’ was a colloquialism used throughout colonial Australasia in this period, most often in Sydney and Melbourne. It described participants in an urban youth subculture based around loose-knit street gangs known as ‘larrikin pushes’ or ‘mobs’. Composed of young people of both sexes aged between their early teens and early 20s, the larrikin subculture was characterized by a hectic enjoyment of popular entertainments, street-smart dress, burlesque humour, a love of pugilism and clashes with police. It was also characterized by sexual activity, including group acts of male sexual violence towards women.1

Page range237 - 251
Year2016
Book titleChildren, childhood and youth in the British World
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Place of publicationUnited Kingdom
ISBN9781137489401
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_14
Research GroupSchool of Arts
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Controlled
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