Class: Disidentification, Singular Selves and Person-Value (Published in Portuguese as Classe; Disidenificacao, Selves Singulars E Valor Da Pessoa)

In all the research I have conducted in the UK I have found one consistently repeated issue in relation to identity: the women who would be defined by almost any sociological measurement as working class resolutely refuse to make an identification with the term working class. For them class is a category loaded with negative connotations, a category by which they believe they are mis-recognised and from which they dis-identify. The ethnography Formations of Class and Gender documents this process in detail. The point of this paper is to show how identity is a slippery term always associated with visibility and value, and it is to the evaluation of identity categories that attention should be focused

Class culture and morality: legacies and logics in the space for identification

Chapter for the sage handbook of identities (author has copyrite

The Labour of Transformation and Circuits of Value ‘around’ Reality Television

Drawing on recent research from a project which included both textual and audience research, this paper will explore the involvement of women viewers with 'reality' TV as 'circuits of value'. These relationships cannot be adequately described as deconstructions of representations as in a text-reader framework of media theory. Rather, we examine these relationships as an extended social realm, whereby the immanent structure of reality television generates emotional connections to the labouring undertaken by participants on the programmes. 'Reality' television develops different traditions of women’s genres from melodrama, magazines to lifestyle television, it drawing attention to those who need transformation. By promoting different forms of women’s emotional, appearance and domestic labour, it parallels broader political shifts to an 'affective economy'. Rather than these texts producing wholly divisive moral reactions in viewers, we noticed how our audience participants assessed the forms of labour performed through their different classed resources, made judgements through pursuing connections with their own lives, and ultimately tended to value care over condemnation

'Oh goodness, I am watching reality TV': How methods make class in audience research

One of the most striking challenges encountered during the empirical stages of our audience research project, `Making Class and the Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios' (funded as part of the ESRC's Identities and Social Action programme), stemmed from how the different discursive resources held by our research participants impacted upon the kind of data collected. We argue that social class is reconfigured in each research encounter, not only through the adoption of moral positions in relation to `reality' television as we might expect, but also through the forms of authority available for participants. Different methods enabled the display of dissimilar relationships to television: reflexive telling, immanent positioning and affective responses all gave distinct variations of moral authority. Therefore, understanding the form as well as the content of our participants' responses is crucial to interpreting our data. These methodological observations underpin our earlier theoretical critique of the `turn' to subjectivity in social theory (Wood and Skeggs, 2004), where we suggest that the performance of the self is an activity that reproduces the social distinctions that theorists claim are in demise

The Politics of Imagination: Keeping Open, Curious and Critical

A simple phrase takes its meaning from a given context, and already makes its appeal to another one in which it will be understood; but, of course, to be understood it has to transform the context in which it is inscribed. As a result, this appeal, this promise of the future, will necessarily open up the production of a new context, wherever it may happen. The future is not present, but there is an opening onto it; and because there is a future, a context is always open. What we call opening of the context is another name for what is still to come. (Derrida and Ferraris, 2001: 19–20) In adopting ‘keeping open’ as our motif for this set of papers, the phrase takes its meaning from the context of the theme of this special issue: ‘The politics of imagination’. This theme already makes its appeal to another theme from The Sociological Review’s 100th Anniversary Conference with which it was placed back to back: ‘Imagining the political’. Our aim is to provide an ‘opening’ to the first context that also transforms this additional context. This is because we think a re-imagining of the political has to go beyond the concerns of class, ethnicity and activism as well as do more than take in a much wider array of topics such as the body, gender, business and religion. We want to show that any re-imagining of the political has to go hand in hand with an exploration of imagination as one of the key sites in which all political and cultural agendas, large and small, are played out

Structure of Class Feeling / Feeling of Class Structure:Laura Wade’s Posh and Katherine Soper’s Wish List

Theatre’s counter-hegemonic resistance to the “demonization of the working class” (Owen Jones) is the subject of this article. This resistance is analysed through case studies of two “class acts”: the elite Oxford boys in Laura Wade’s Posh (2010) and poverty-stricken youth in Katherine Soper’s Wish List (2016). My close reading of these two plays involves a reprise of Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling”: the conjugation of “structure” and “feeling” allows me to engage with and advocate a dual concern with systems of classification, and the affective, experiential (lived) dimension of being “classified.” Moving between the class-fuelled feelings of entitlement in Posh and those of alienation in Wish List, I elucidate how, under the UK’s regime of neoliberal austerity, the label “working class” has become “sticky” (Sara Ahmed) with disgust-making properties (Pierre Bourdieu). Overall, what emerges is a critical feeling for the UK as a class-divided nation and the urgent need to resist the entrenched classifying gaze of the neoliberalist imagination

On the economy of Moralism and Working-class Properness: An interview with Beverley Skeggs about Feminism, Respectability and Use-Value

Sofie Tornhill & Katharina Tollin: This issue of Fronesis deals with feminism and the Left. How do you position your work in relation to those "entities"? Beverley Skeggs: Definitely feminist, definitely left! But what is difficult is that we have lost the political parties that were left in Britain and also there is no kind of formal Left in public culture. Although practically everyone I know would define themselves as on the left, it is quite a homeless position. And it worries me because if you only do criticism, it doesn't always produce very much. The shift has been so great within the Left. After 30 years of neoliberal policy that was taken up and taken further by Tony Blair, or Tony Blatcher as he is called, the left space is something difficult to inhabit

Exchange Value and Affect: Bourdieu and the Self

A meeting ground for mainstream social theory and contemporary feminist theory. Brings feminist theory face to face with Pierre Bourdieu s social theory. Demonstrates how much Bourdieu s theory has to offer to contemporary feminism. Comprises a series of contributions from key contemporary feminist thinkers. Defines new territories for feminist theorizing. Transforms and advances Bourdieu s social and cultural theory