Scholars have overlooked the significance of emotion in motivating participation in deviant subcultures. Youth subcultures, particularly those of lower or working class provenance, emerge as an ongoing attempt to manage and mitigate structurally produced feelings of shame, by converting this sense of devaluation into pride. Using the youth street gang as a case study, this article gives greater precision to this emotional conversionary process, arguing that gangs transpose ambient parent culture of solidarity into subcultural emphasis on self and group affirming loyalty. Thus, espirit de corps, a central and vivifying value within youth street gangs, is magnified and maintained via group symbolic praxis and expressive violence. Moreover, youth street gang culture protects this emotional conversionary process from iatrogenic threats, i.e. injury, prison, the death of others, by subsuming potentially negative consequences within this subcultural system.