Classed Intersections

Classed Intersections Spaces, Selves, Knowledges

Edited by Yvette Taylor

Classed Intersections

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Classed Intersections Spaces, Selves, Knowledges

Edited by Yvette Taylor Newcastle University, UK

© Yvette Taylor 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Yvette Taylor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Classed intersections : spaces, selves, knowledges. 1. Social classes. 2. Social comparison. 3. Social mobility. I. Taylor, Yvette, 1978305.5-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Classed intersections : spaces, selves, knowledges / [edited] by Yvette Taylor. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7562-4 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-0324-1 (ebk) 1. Social classes. 2. Social stratification. 3. Group identity. I. Taylor, Yvette, 1978HT609.C6155 2010 305.5--dc22 2009045900 ISBN 9780754675624 (hbk) ISBN 9781409403241 (ebk) I

Contents List of Tables   List of Contributors   Acknowledgements    Introduction  Classed Intersections: Spaces, Selves, Knowledges   Yvette Taylor Part I

vii ix xiii 1

Class, the Self and the Space In-Between

1

Working Capital: Ownership and (Some) Means of Production   Sue Parker

13

2

Is There Such a Thing as a Working-Class Academic?   Paul Wakeling

35

3

Becoming ‘Somebody’: Examining Class and Gender Through Higher Education   Sarah Evans

53

The Significance of Bonding Capital: Class, Ethnicity, Faith and British Muslim Women’s Routes to University   ����� Mellor Jody �����

73

4

Part II Mapping Class: Location, Distinction and Belonging 5 Asdatown: The Intersections of Classed Places and Identities   Ben Gidley and Alison Rooke 6

95

Betwixt and Between: Managing Marginalised Classed Identities   117 Emma Clavering

Classed Intersections

vi

7

Making Working-Class Neighbourhoods Posh? Exploring the Effects of Gentrification Strategies on Working-Class Communities   Kirsteen Paton

8

Privileged Locations? Sexuality, Class and Geography   Yvette Taylor

137 159

Part III Transformations and Intersections 9

Even Poor Gays Travel: Excluding Low Income Gay Men from Understandings of Gay Tourism   Mark Casey

181



‘I Wanted to be Totally True to Myself’: Class and the Making of the Sexual Self   Elizabeth McDermott

199

11

Class and Sexual Intimacy: An Everyday Life Perspective   Dana Wilson-Kovacs

12

Class and Gender at the Intersection: Working-Class Women’s Dispositions Towards Employment and Motherhood   Jo Armstrong

10



Index  

217

235 255

List of Tables 7.1

Positive and Negative Outcomes of Gentrification Defined by Metaphors of Capital  

142

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List of Contributors Jo Armstrong is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Her work focuses primarily on gender and social class inequalities, with interest extending into the broader equalities field. Her current research areas include: comparative work on gender equality policies in Europe, particularly those relating to employment and unpaid domestic labour and care work; equality institutions and legislation, and the changes taking place in this area; and the measurement of equality using survey and administrative data. Previous projects have included research into policies on gender-based violence, a review of equality statistics, evaluation of widening participation initiatives in education, and in-depth work on women’s experiences of combining employment with motherhood. Mark Casey is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University. He has a particular interest in the lives of urban lesbians and gay men, which was the focus of his PhD. Mark also undertook research on gay men, sex and travel in Australia during his ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. He has published a number of papers including De-Dyking Queer Space(s): Heterosexual Female Visibility in Gay and Lesbian Space (Sexualities, Vol. 7(4) 2004), The Queer Unwanted and their Undesirable Otherness (Geographies of Sexualities, Ashgate, 2007) and Addressing Key Theoretical Approaches to Gay Male Sexual Identity: Issues and Insights for Practitioners of Mental Health (Critical Public Health, Vol.19(3) 2009). Emma Clavering’s work engages with a wide range of families who live alternative and often stigmatised lives. She is particularly interested in exploring the contexts of people’s experiences through in-depth ethnographic techniques. Her doctoral research looks at consumer strategies and decision-making in lone parentheaded households. Since completing her PhD, Emma has worked with a team of colleagues from Newcastle and Sheffield Universities looking at experiences of care and support for families with disabled infants. Emma is currently based at the Policy Ethics and Life Sciences (PEALS) Research Centre, Newcastle University, working on an ESRC funded study with Dr Janice McLaughlin (PI), Kinship and Genetic Journeys: A Study of the Experiences of Families who are Referred to Paediatric Genetics. Sarah Evans is a Sociologist and a Content Specialist in Social Sciences (specialising in Sociology and Cultural Studies) at The British Library. Her doctorate was an ethnography of progress in education which examined the aspirations of young working-class women with respect to higher education and employment. She carried



Classed Intersections

this out at the University of Kent where she also taught Sociology and Social Research methods to undergraduate students. Sarah’s research interests include feminist methodologies, gender, class, ethnicity, education and social and cultural theory. Her work at The British Library involves promoting the value of the collections to social scientists through publications, events and collaborative work. In this post she has carried out secondary research on oral history interviews and archival material on topics including prostitution in the 1990s and women in sport. Ben Gidley is a Senior Researcher at the Centre on Migration Policy and Society, Oxford University. His research work has focused on inner and outer city communities, and the intersections of classed and racialised identities there. Elizabeth McDermott is a Lecturer in Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of York. Her published work focuses upon the impact of social class and sexual and gender identity on mental health. She is currently completing an online research project investigating how young people in the UK experience sexuality, gender and emotional distress. Jody Mellor is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK, School of Religious and Theological Studies at Cardiff University. She recently completed a PhD, entitled ‘Parallel Lives? Working-Class Muslim and non-Muslim Women at University’ at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. Jody was a visiting fellow at the Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University, Ohio, and is currently involved in a public engagement project which disseminates research findings to Muslim communities in the North of England. Her current work includes research which examines food practices in the family of two generations of British Pakistani women, funded by the British Academy, and a project which explores the history of Muslims in South Wales. Sue Parker is currently a temporary Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Teesside and also teaches for the Open University. Her research interests lie with the interface between neo-liberalism and identity; specifically the ways in which this relationship (and its inherent concern with meanings around citizenship, potentials and family) demands a continuing analysis of class. She is currently working on publications based on her doctoral study ‘Mothering in the New Moral Economy: Making, Marking and Classing Selves’ (Durham University) based around neo-liberalism, motherhood and inscriptions. Kirsteen Paton has recently completed her ESRC doctoral research at the University of Glasgow, working in collaboration with Westgap (West Glasgow Against Poverty) and Oxfam UK. Her current main research interest is in the relationship between urban restructuring and contemporary working-class identities and community life. Her thesis focuses on the effects of local government’s use of gentrification in a Glasgow neighbourhood. Her publications based on this

List of Contributors

xi

work so far include a chapter in Neo-Liberal Scotland: Re-thinking Scotland in a Global Context (Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming, edited by Davidson, N., McCafferty, P. and Miller, D.) and an article for the City. Alison Rooke is a Visual Sociologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, whose research interests are focused around class, gender and sexualities in urban contexts. She has written on issues relating to cosmopolitanism, visibility, embodiment and belonging in classed and queer cultures. Alison’s PhD research, ‘Lesbian Landscapes and Portraits: The Sexual Geographies of Everyday Life’, was a visual ethnography exploring the interconnections of spatiality and subjectivity for working-class lesbian and bisexual women. Alison has developed expertise in participative action research and evaluation, with a specific focus on the social, economic and cultural impact of creativity. She has worked on a range of projects including  Sci:dentity, which worked with young transgendered people exploring the science of sex and gender through creative practices, and Signs of the City which is a European participatory youth arts project. Yvette Taylor is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University and held the Lillian Robinson Research Fellowship at Concordia University, Canada, in 2009. Her interests are in the interconnections between class, gender and sexuality, manifest in two recent books: Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and, based on British Academy funded research, Lesbian and Gay Parents: Social and Educational Capitals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Yvette is currently editing a Special Issue of Sexualities (Sexuality and Class) as well as coediting a book on Theorizing Intersectionality and Sexuality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Recently completed ESRC funded research (2007–09) on the intersections of class and gender in women’s lives in the North East of England will be published in a forthcoming monograph Fitting into Place? Transitions and Intersections of Gender, Class and Identity (Ashgate, forthcoming, Taylor, Y.). Paul Wakeling is a Lecturer in the Department of Educational Studies, University of York, where he teaches Research Methods and the History and Sociology of Education. He has research interests in the sociologies of stratification and education (particularly higher education). His research into the ethnic and social class background of postgraduate students has been published in Sociology, Higher Education Quarterly and the British Journal of Sociology of Education. Dana Wilson-Kovacs is a Research Fellow at Egenis, the ESRC Centre for Genomics and Society, University of Exeter, where she also teaches Gender and Qualitative Methods in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests cover sexuality and consumerism, gender and work and the co-production of biomedical technologies. One direction taken by her published work is based on her doctoral research, which examined women’s use of sexually explicit materials, and the creation of intimate spaces. Other research interests, inspired by current and previous

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research appointments, are reflected in her other published work, which addresses professional trajectories in biomedical research, everyday laboratory and clinical practices and the regulation of stem cell research; and the barriers and opportunities encountered by members of marginalized groups in executive positions.

Acknowledgements First and foremost thanks are due to all contributors to this collection for their enthusiasm and engagement throughout. Thanks to all those who participated in the seminar series ‘Our Working-Class Lives: A New Researchers’ Seminar Series’ (2005–2007) and for the funding provided by Newcastle University. Chapter 8, ‘Privileged Locations? Sexuality, Class and Geography’ was initially published in Lesbian and Gay Parents: Securing Social and Educational Capitals (Taylor, Y., 2009, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) and thanks are due for the reproduction here.

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Introduction

Classed Intersections: Spaces, Selves, Knowledges Yvette Taylor

Many of the authors in this collection participated in the funded seminar ‘Our Working-Class Lives: A New Researchers’ Seminar Series’ at Newcastle University (2005–2007), which mapped the ways that class (still) mattered and was actively deployed, mobilised and even denied inside and outside of academia – from (dis)engagements with class as a concept, to (re)engagements with class practices and politics. Within this, academia was variously conceived as enabling and disallowing certain mobilities and opportunities, or certain ‘spaces’, ‘selves’, and ‘knowledges’, where class, with age, gender, sexuality and race, frequently marked the transitions of ‘early career’ seminar participants. To situate oneself (or ourselves as the collective gesture of the seminar title implied) within changing climates of class(less)ness can be rather fraught: difficultly read as a claim to knowledge through experience (or dismissed via an excess of experience, in being the ‘wrong’ person in the ‘right’ space), or uneasily ‘performed’ and perhaps (re)produced through personalised ‘outness’, where confession and admission may nonetheless be unsustainable and unsuccessful as a ‘reflexive’ currency. How should these questions and claims, initiated in the ‘Our Working-Class Lives’ seminar series and continued in this collection, be understood? As an insertion of knowing ‘selves’, a resentful, misguided claim upon space, or even as a deflection of privilege (the terms ‘early career’ and ‘working-class’ being seen to fade with academic privileges and progressions)? Should these be seen as a nostalgic throwback to a classed past, which was not ‘ours’ (where ‘under-age’ participants are seen as out of time and place)? Or as an attempt for a ‘bit of the action’ and a claiming of turf in the resurgence of class analysis? If this claiming is understood through the requirements and demands of a productive professional identity how might such ‘professional’ stakes also be seen as erasing the political-personal elements of identity (such as being working-class, such as being feminist, such as being lesbian)? Identifying as working-class in academia is a fraught, challenging and uneasy process. Slippery negotiations occur in the claims to knowledge, amidst dismissal, in attempts at representation, amidst mis-representation, and in the effort to lay claim to academic agendas. Such agenda setting, and challenging, can never fully be acheived or completed as (only) ‘ours’ if the potential to



Classed Intersections

situate ‘claims’ beyond the personal (and beyond identity) is taken seriously (Russo and Linkon 2005, Parker this volume, Wakeling this volume). Fears of claims-making and mis-representation may be refocused in listening to covergences and differences, to hear lived experience as a challenge to renditions of classlessness, rather than just as personalised assertion alone. In another place I argued that rather than ‘playing up’ and pointing to my working-class ‘past’, in the context of being asked endlessly to ‘prove it’ and being told how much I had moved, I would prefer instead to problematise middle-classness, to ask why this is currently downplayed, why middle-class people dis-identify from their class position, in remaining neutral and hidden, and what these processes might say about why class still matters (Taylor 2005). Such silences and articulations, tensions and contradictions, claims and denials, are all part of the intersectional slippages which we negotiate in academia, as in the ‘real’ world and so this book queries the ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ of classed lives, where class is also made, known and (re)produced through gender, sexuality and race. An inspiring strength of this collection is the diversity of disciplinary backgrounds and institutional positions from which authors write; chapters serve to demonstrate contemporary classed intersections as imagined by ‘new researchers’ across disciplinary boundaries and utilizing different methodological approaches: it includes autobiographical reflections (and disruptions), policy evaluations, and scrutiny of contemporary classed intersections across a range of social spheres and practices (education, employment and residence; consumption, taste and tourism; intimate life and (sexual) citizenship; parenting and ‘families of choice’). The moves in locating and analysing class across such diverse terrain, beyond and including the realm of employment, reveal complex continuities and transformations, where it can be asked if a new agenda for class can be claimed. Clearly these ‘new’ voices and concerns do not emerge from knowhere and all authors utilize contemporary class theories, often taking these in different directions empirically, theoretically and methodologically. Contributors also variously ask if contemporary classed identities resonate with old class models; what new processes have been active in the continuation of class, regardless of claims to a ‘classless’ society? In these efforts, authors may be seen as part of drive towards establishing ‘new’ working-class studies advanced in collections such as Linkon and Russo’s (2005) New Working-Class Studies and Yates’ (2007) More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States (also Munt 2000, Zandy 2001). Writers in this broad group are frequently interested in lived experience of class and the intersections between gender, age and ethnicity, offering a model for a more creative critical engagement with working-class life: ‘Working-Class Studies…allows us to recognise value within working-class culture without falling into an uncritical nostalgia, nor at the same time engaging in a critique which denies any value in such communities’ (Strangleman 2008: 18). Several authors in this collection align with such a move, others less easily so, caught between competing research agendas where the promise of an ‘intersectional’ focus has not

Introduction



delivered in relation to specific interconnections, such as those between class and sexuality (Taylor 2009). Yet this book’s purpose is to point to the salience, transformation of and tension in class analysis at a time when class investigation is returning to sociological agendas, a ‘return’ marked still by skepticism, weight and potential, where new researchers are engaging with – and against – the ‘past’, perhaps even setting new directions for the future (Skeggs 2004, Byrne and Lawler 2005). Examination of class as produced through combined social, cultural and economic processes, serves to reject a straightforward situation and polarisation between ‘old’ ‘objectivist’ approaches, seeking to precisely name, measure and define class, and ‘new’ class analysis models, which map the lived, subjective experience of class, where ‘the economic’ and ‘the cultural’ combine. In recognition of the shifts in class analysis – as well as the entry of other social divisions into sociological agendas – the aim of the book is not to reify class over and above other paradigms; intersections are foregrounded and all authors give attention to the ways that class links with and is lived through other social categories. Classed intersections are made explicit in thinking about the spaces we can or cannot occupy, the boundaries – geographical, material, emotional – regulating these, the rendering of people in or out of place and the productions of subjectivities and spatialities: what places do we feel (un)comfortable in and how is entry enabled or denied? Certain subjects are positioned as fitting-in, entitled and mobile in relation to occupation, geographical and lifestyle choice, where the abundance of ‘choice’ flows into the realm of how and who to be: to be someone becomes a declaration of worth, investment and reflexive potential, reliant on positioning others as without choice, responsibility and self-worth; as un-reflexive, immoblile, fixed and failing. The resources required in such (mis)positions are frequently disguised, where ‘truth’ is read straightforwardly and unproblematically as evidenced in policies which pinpoint the location of social problems in the uneducated, the ill-informed to the unknowing. So, while pondering the knowledge constructions and assertions in communicating working-class lives another consideration involves the construction, assertions and mis-communications of middle-class lives, spaces, selves and knowledges: when are these made explicit and queried? Must they negotiate writing themselves out, whilst putting or writing themselves in? Across the chapters authors’ variously give attention to such concerns and difficulties and these are briefly outlined below. Part I  Class, the Self and the Space In-Between This section considers the problems arising from staking claims to and seeking to represent, authenticate and validate ‘our’ working-class lives, variously exploring the fixity and movement around class meanings, definitions and experiences, inside and outside of academia (Adair 2005). In ‘becoming someone’ through



Classed Intersections

educational engagements and the general pursuit of ‘good citizenship’, the conflicts between ‘fitting-in’, assimilating to middle-class practices and performances, and failing to ‘escape’ working-classness, materially, subjectively and spatially, is differently demonstrated (Skeggs 2004, Gillies 2006). Class, the self and the space in-between explores the negotiation of worthy, educated, knowing selves where the ‘in-between’ status points to construction of boundaries and the dangers of not ‘getting it right’ in often dangerous terrains, such as in higher education and in parental space. In Working Capital: Ownership and (Some) Means of Production, Sue Parker explores class productions with reference to her empirical study with mothers and children, where class is seen to endure across gender, generation and political visions of selfhood. As has been pointed out by other feminist writers, such as Gillies (2006) and Skeggs (2004), constructions of family and citizenship status, embedded in policy initiatives and legislative change, actively re-create class, where working-class mothers in particular are positioned as familial and social ‘failures’ (Taylor 2009, McRobbie 2004). While her interviewees deemed class ‘outdated’, it became empirically evident that class remained central in framing moral and maternal identity, conveyed in raft of UK education and social policy initiatives (Sure Start, New Deal) generating, producing, inscribing and maintaining class(ing), which mothers negotiate across everyday sites. In Is There Such a Thing as a Working-Class Academic?, Paul Wakeling suggests another version of telling – if not resourcing – the self; the autobiographical tradition of academics reflexively writing about class in academia. Considering the lack of reticence among academics from working-class families to discuss these matters, Wakeling plays with the idea of class as essential, even immortal (rather than dead) where no amount of social mobility can scrape away the traces of birth class. This chapter seeks to locate academics’ ‘objective’ class position and to present an analysis of the testimonies of academics from the working-class, where subjectively ‘feeling’ working-class may not be enough. There is, Wakeling suggests, a danger of self-indulgence, embarrassment and awkwardness in ‘coming-out’ on paper, or even in performing an academic ‘striptease’: but perhaps consider if his chapter title would make sense as a pointer to the (im)possibility of the middle-class academic? There would perhaps be no question mark, no contradictions to map, feel or query. Next, in ‘Becoming Somebody’: Examining Class and Gender through Higher Education, Sarah Evans highlights discourses in educational policy and practice that work to exclude working-class women from equal access to, and engagement with, higher education. Her young women interviewees were loaded with a deep sense of personal responsibility in ‘becoming someone’, as legitimate participants in the economies of morality and capital: higher education was viewed not only as the means through which status and respect could be achieved but also as the means through which their (gendered) responsibility for others would be materialized; as future mothers with caring capacities and career credentials. Evans documents how class is lived through gender and ethnicity, as well in and through family structure,

Introduction



background and relationship to the local area, where young women prioritized family relationships and emotional care-work (while investing in something else – education – where care in itself is not seen as enough to become someone). Such reevaluations are absent from government widening participation programmes which centre student as individuals, specifically dis-located from their classed contexts. Jody Mellor continues the focus on the enabling and constraining aspects of social capital in relation to interviewees’ educational trajectories in The Significance of Bonding Capital: Class, Ethnicity, Faith and British Muslim Women’s Routes to University. Ethnicity as ‘social capital’ has received a great deal of attention but this perhaps risks overstating the advantages of social capital, whilst downplaying the disadvantages. For Mellor’s interviewees bonding, rather than bridging capital, was particularly significant to their movements: tight-knit networks could compensate for material constraints by providing strong levels of support and assistance that enabled them to move ahead, for the sake of themselves and their families and communities. Not unlike Evan’s interviewees’ many women’s families prioritized the moral economy of kin, which emphasized social mobility and wellbeing of the family as a unit, rather than prioritizing individual needs, with family resources divided on the basis of strategic advancement. Overall, this section demonstrates the ways that class operates in and on the self, constructing and denying potentials and problems (as apparent in educational and social reform), where respondents are also situated in relation to gendered, familial, generational and ethnic positionings. Part II  Mapping Class: Location, Distinction and Belonging This section focuses on the (re)making of class through ‘regeneration’, consumption, culture and taste, as spatially situated formations and transformations. The (trans)formation of class is spatially located as areas and inhabitants improve, recover or stagnate, with corresponding assignments of worth-lessness (Hayward and Yar 2006, Skeggs 1997, Taylor 2007). Existing sociological and cultural geography literature highlights the active and intensified role of the spatial imaginary in classing people (Charlesworth 2000, Haylett 2000, Skeggs 2004); this section explores the intersections between classed places, (im)mobilities and identities, dwelling too on middle-class residences and their cosmopolitan, gentrifying ‘choices’. In Asdatown: The Intersections of Classed Places and Identities, Ben Gidley and Alison Rooke explore the intersections between classed places and identities, focusing on the mis-representation of the ‘chav’ in British popular culture, and sustained in official policy discourses. They argue that particular spaces and places (e.g. housing estates specifically described as ‘chav towns’) are used discursively as a way of fixing people in racialized class positions. Gidley and Rooke chart the long legacies of (mis)reading class spatially where, in contemporary times, the spatial signifier of ‘the estate’ has come to stand in for a range of classed



Classed Intersections

understandings, which also infiltrate the media landscape, to be realized in the national imaginary where the working-classes are understood as economically and culturally ‘backward’ and out of place. The Victorian pleasure of gazing upon the chaos and excess of working-classness, encapsulated in early sociological endeavours and classifications, endures today in UK TV drama programmes (such as Shameless) where the tropes of incivility and spatial disorder are endlessly re-mobilized, mis-placing the working-class as responsible for their own lack of mobility. Just as Gidley and Rooke aim to re-invest places stripped of positive meanings and associations, so too does Emma Clavering in Betwixt and Between: Managing Marginalised Classed Identities. This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of a working-class community in North East England, exploring lone mothers’ consumer strategies. Like many post-industrial areas, this place has undergone massive economic and social rupture, which has seen its main work-base greatly altered, leaving residents to face new challenges and dilemmas in unfamiliar social terrain. Clavering relates the significance of material objects, understood as conveying social and cultural status; preferred status markers were (precariously) acquired by participants in presenting as ‘good mothers’ and ‘respectable citizens’. Indeed everyday life was taken up with the difficult task of working to reposition themselves, and their children, as valuable and active members of their community: their ‘situated choices’ can be understood as the management of spoiled identities in a ‘declining’ area but, importantly, they can also be understood as anti-pretentious devices, connected here to ‘poor people’s’ consumption styles, which deflect and respond to the middle-class gaze. In Making Working-Class Neighbourhoods Posh? Exploring the Effects of Gentrification Strategies on Working-Class Communities, Kirsteen Paton continues the theme of area-based (dis)investments interrogating the effects of gentrification processes on working-class communities. Gentrification is frequently positioned as a key strategy in urban restructuring, levelled at former sites of industry and, by extension, former industrial working-class communities: de-industrialized places and populations are depicted within policy and media discourses as degenerated, surplus, and as the abject limit to modernization and regeneration. Conversely gentrification (and middle-class gentrifiers), are often conceived as the antidote and epitome of the post-industrial city. Paton draws on an empirical research project in the working-class but gentrifying neighbourhood of Partick in Glasgow, revealing the ways that residents dis-identify with locale, where place-based identity becomes a proxy for expressing class. Whilst policy discourse depicts working-class as beyond and outside of regeneration, Paton’s interviewees displayed similar practices and values to those associated with their valorised middle-class counterparts (e.g. desire for safety and homeownership). However, while people are encouraged to be better consumer citizens by investing in space, they are frequently denied the material means to participate in the changes heralded by regeneration; working-class residents cannot be gentrifies when their physical and material attachment to place is so precarious.

Introduction



I continue a focus on place-based attachments, movements and ‘choices’ in Privileged Locations? Sexuality, Class and Geography (Yvette Taylor), offering an insight into the spatialities of parenting, sexuality and class, hoping to illustrate their linkages and mediation. The relevance of class and sexuality as pertaining to parental (im)mobilities and ‘geographies of choice’ is provided where perceptions, experiences and materialities of and in place vary by class and sexuality; this interconnection has been somewhat neglected in class analysis generally and in competing versions of ‘social capital’ formations and actualisations so relevant to the centring of ‘families of choice’. In researching lesbian and gay parents from different class positions, a specifically classed concept of social capital is preferred over relatively benign, overly optimistic or normative versions; the potential for extending this to take account of sexualized reproductions and (dis)advantages in the uptake of social space is demonstrated. Overall, this section seeks to put class back on the map, charting its presence and persistence through locale, and in processes of distinction and belonging in space, complicated by the intersection with gender and sexuality, as a continued focus of the final section of this book. Part III  Transformations and Intersections In focusing upon intersections between class, gender, generation and sexuality, this section foregrounds that which is present throughout the previous sections, serving to speak to ‘transformations’ and ‘intersections’. While ‘intersection’ is now a common trope in discussions of social dynamics and identities, these connections are often gestured towards without being fully, empirically fleshed out (see Taylor et al. 2010). This is particularly so in the case of class and sexuality and this section addresses this absence, exploring the classing and worth of differing (non)normative femininities and masculinities in everyday locations. In Even Poor Gays Travel: Excluding Low Income Gay Men from Understandings of Gay Tourism, Mark Casey explores gay men who are able, and unable, to make claims as ‘tourists’, increasingly relevant in city (re)positionings and ‘Gay as Now’ urban regeneration. The inclusion of gay men within the tourism industry is granted or restricted through economics, intersecting with social and cultural capital: having knowledge of and networks to the right places to ‘be’ (gay), and actualising such connections and confidences through finances. ‘Cosmopolitan’ queerness frequently rests upon an agentic, white middle-class subject who can be flexible and mobile with regards to identifications and desires, fixing classed and racialized ‘others’ in space. Based upon research in Melbourne and Sydney, Casey demonstrates such claims, experiences and desires, querying the entitlement to and exclusion from practices of tourism. Elizabeth McDermott’s chapter ‘I Wanted to be Totally True to Myself’: Class and the Making of the Sexual Self continues the interrogation of research and theory which generates a privileged (middle-class) and universal account of LGBT subjectivity, experience and identity, based on reflexive and self-fashioned ‘choice’.



Classed Intersections

She does so by considering how ‘coming out’ requires subjective and material resources, thus differentiating the lives, opportunities and accounts of lesbians from working-class and middle-class backgrounds: while initial identification as ‘lesbian’ is emotionally demanding for all the women, class advantages protected middle-class interviewees from the emotional strain of coming out. Where the home, local neighbourhood and place of origin have been positioned as stressful sites in constructing a lesbian identity, the classed negotiation of these shapes understandings of the kinds of lesbians it is possible to be: this is not just a querying of alignment between commercialized city ‘scene’ space and gay possibility, but rather a re-focus on the spaces – and selves – within and without entitlement. Where Casey suggests that ‘Even Poor Gay Males Travel’, McDermott re-positions lesbian bodies within space, highlighting how unequal access to resources makes a difference to how the (gendered and classed) self can be made and articulated. Dana Wilson-Kovacs also queries the privileging of the sexual as preference alone, in Class and Sexual Intimacy: An Everyday Life Perspective, exploring how erotic encounters are navigated in everyday life and made sense of amongst heterosexual women. Where sexual intimacy and preference is seen as cultivated choice, expressed through lifestyle preferences, the interconnections between class, sexuality and gender become apparent, highlighting the (re)creation of inequality in relation to the practices of consumption that accompany the maintenance of intimate events. The classing and worth of differing femininities is captured in the reflexive performance and choreography of sexual displays (‘doing tart’), where this is done with the knowledge that such performances do not fix, but rather resource the self in a repertoire of sexual possibilities. Developing the ‘right kind of self’ for sexual encounters becomes a marker of middle-class subjectivity, where the erotic ‘Do-it-yourself’ biography is still nonetheless told through expressions of moral worth, taste and knowledge. As Wilson-Kovacs suggests, it is not only intimacy that is rendered in this transformation; such processes are circumscribed by visions of imagined class positions, where respondents seek to highlight cultivated selves, while self-distancing from a less affluent, attentive and educated female other. Such everyday strategies may be seen to differ from the ‘pragmatic’ and ‘relational’ ones adopted by working-class women in managing employment and care, as demonstrated by Jo Armstrong in Class and Gender at the Intersection: Working-Class Women’s Dispositions Towards Employment and Motherhood. Armstrong joins the growing body of researchers that have addressed workingclass women’s experiences across employment and motherhood, advancing this in a simultaneous focus on paid work and mothering which attends to the interconnectedness of these spheres in the lives of working-class women. In doing so, Armstrong suggest that these women’s dispositions can be described as pragmatic and relational, where life was approached in a matter-of-fact manner and paid work was seen as interconnected with mothering work. Again, this approach challenges theories of reflexive individualisation, in conceptualising gender in terms of dependencies, where the ‘self’ is necessarily connected to others and dependent

Introduction



upon the labour of others (frequently women). In this chapter, interviewees approached paid work and caring labour with a straightforward attitude, where the meaningless of ‘choice’ in the trajectory from school to employment, and the nonsense of work/life balance, is also made apparent. To foreground choice, reflexivity and flexibility in relation to public and private life is to assess working-class women as lacking, in contrast to middle-class women who are identified as ambitious, mobile, and future-orientated. This fails to recognise classed and gendered relations of power and the intersections between ‘our’ lives and ‘theirs’ where, for example, the care-giving provided by these women constrains their own mobility and enables the movement of others. As Armstrong concludes, her chapter, like all others raises the question of ‘what is to be done?’, where inequalities require explanation and action. Classed Intersections: Spaces, Selves and Knowledges continues to raise this question drawing upon a wealth of empirical material, refusing the dismissal of class and the erasure of such questioning. Bibliography Adair, V. 2005. US Working-Class/Poverty-Class Divides. Sociology, 39 (5), 817–834. Charlesworth, S. 2000. A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillies, V. 2006. Marginalised Mothers: Exploring Working-Class Experiences of Parenting. London: Routledge. Haylett, C. 2003. Culture, Class and Urban Policy: Reconsidering Inequality. Antipode, 29 (1), 1–31. Hayward, K. and Yar, M. 2006. The “Chav” Phenomenon: Consumption, Media and the Construction of a New Underclass. Crime, Media, Culture, 2 (1), 9–28. Lawler, S. 2005. Editorial Foreword: Special Issue on Class. Sociology, 39 (3), 405–406. McRobbie, A. 2004. Notes on “What not to Wear” and Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence, in Feminism After Bourdieu, edited by Adkins, L. and Skeggs, B. Oxford: Blackwell. Munt, S.R. (ed.) 2000. Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change. London: Cassell. Reay, D. 1998. Class Work. London: UCL Press. Russo, J. and Linkon, S. 2005. New Working-Class Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge. Strangleman, T. 2008. Sociology, Social Class and New Working Class Studies. Antipode, 40 (1), 15–19.

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Taylor, Y. 2005. By the Skin of My Teeth: Working-Class Academics and the Career Ladder. Network, summer 2005, 21. Taylor, Y. 2007. Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Y. 2009. Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capital. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Y., Hines, S. and Casey, M. (eds) 2010. Theorizing Intersectionality and Sexuality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Yates, M. (ed.) 2007. More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States. New York: Monthly Review Press. Zandy, J. 2001. What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working Class Studies. New York: Feminist Press.

Part I Class, the Self and the Space In-Between

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Chapter 1

Working Capital: Ownership and (Some) Means of Production Sue Parker

Producing knowledge is a fragile endeavour; uncovering ‘truth’ involves precisely ‘setting it down’ as we see it (and moreover how we live it). This chapter constitutes an account of ‘gazing’ (Finch 1993) as it were, that claims invention or rather reinvention, is at the heart of class and political visions of social order. This is not to claim that class is not experienced materially, but here I wish to point out, in a discussion of working-class lives both ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, not only the subtle shifts in marking and producing class that this timely collective publication explores, but also the continuities across gender and generation that have survived those postwar cultural and economic visions of class as lived experience. This chapter considers the problems arising in staking claims to and seeking to represent, authenticate and validate ‘our’ working-class lives (Adair 2005, Russo and Linkon 2005). Meanings around class and identity are dynamic; responsive not only to paradigmatic shifts in vocabularies of research and cultural environments, but also subject to (and prescriptive of) the ways in which capital markets reassemble in the wake of deindustrialization. How is class being (re)articulated in contemporary visions of ‘classlessness’ and good citizenship? Do contemporary classed identities resonate with old class sensibilities? What new processes have been instrumental in the maintenance of class regardless of claims to a ‘classless’ society? Drawing upon my study of mothers and pre-school children I demonstrate how class (and classing) remains intact and furthermore troubles both participants and researchers in the research process when working to represent, authenticate and validate working-class lives (Reay 2004, Gillies 2006). In this sense ‘new’ voices (participant and researcher) are relational to these (re)productions and demand exploration.

 This chapter is drawn from a paper presented at the funded seminar series: ‘Our Working-Class Lives: A New Researchers’ Seminar Series’, Newcastle University.   Goldthorpe’s influential studies of working-class work/lives evidenced shifts in traditional class identities and working-class collectivism, interpreting a specifically gendered working-class existence framed by work/instrumentalism (Savage 2005). As I will discuss later, the narrative of instrumentalism resonates still, but becomes more complex in terms of current political entreaties to individualism and citizenship.

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Class categories, Beck theorises, have become a flawed tool for a sociological analysis of de-traditionalised society. This ‘zombie category’, Beck claims, redundantly rests on ‘objective income basis, or on structures of work and employment’ (Beck 2000: 43). Nonetheless, class(ing) remains an emotionally, psychically and culturally charged production evident across a realm of sites and spaces. Particularly so when the figure of the future citizen/child is deemed crucial to the success of Euro American political drives to generate social capital and good society. This is a project for which, ‘naturally’, mothers are ultimately held responsible. Using empirical evidence gathered from my study with mothers of pre-school children, this chapter maps out the ways in which the continuing focus of UK policymakers towards worthy citizenship/classlessness acts as cover (not concealer) for a classing of ‘sorts’ inscribed in educational potentials and failures (Reay 1998, Ball 2003), facile (predominantly female) bodies (Lawler 2005, Skeggs 2004, McRobbie 2004), and a racialization of class (Haylett 2001). I trace then the ways in which class resonates still. Examining knowledge production specific to class entails attending to the ‘doing’ of sociological work itself. All these points of discussion are fuelled by the turn to the reflexive self. Skeggs notes: The value (and the destabilising quality) of feminist interpretative frameworks is that they engender reassessment of previous frameworks. They pull prior experiences back into the interpretative viewfinder for reassessment and in doing so they make us question who or what we are (1997: 29).

This reflexive turn has seen sociological work bring class back with a vengeance, unsettling the boundaries of identity politics by mapping class onto gender, generation, ethnicity, sexuality and disability; thereby enriching class analysis through a focus on intersectionality (Lawler 2005, Taylor 2005, 2007, Johnson 2008, Byrne 2006). Yet writing/identifying class poses some painful methodological and personal negotiations in the researcher/researched relationship/environment (Reay 1996, Walkerdine and Lucey 1989). Indeed, the uneasy relationship between working classed academics and the academe is acknowledged in Medhurst’s claim that, ‘Class is felt, class wounds, class hurts, and those of us on the cusp between classes bruise particularly easily’ (2000: 21). Living, to use Medhurst’s (2002) phrase, ‘on the cusp’ poses some prescient challenges in staking ownership claims on agendas around class; not least that of identifying oneself as working -class and indeed working (to write) class subjectivities (back) into sociological research. Notwithstanding, the resurgence of class studies here and in the US is   My attention was first drawn to the ‘plight’ of working-class subjects (and my own subjectivity no less) during my first degree studies in psychology in the early 1990s. ‘Essential’ psychology texts such as Argylle (1994) revealed working-class subjects etched with lack in comparison to their balanced ‘other’, the middle classes.

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a response to the lived experience of working classed academics and evidences their commitment to problematize the ways in which class has been historically produced and knowledged into being (Lawler 2000) by and through middle classed subjectivities (see Charlesworth 2000, Skeggs 1997, 2004, Adair 2005, Ball 2003). These are welcome analyses that evidence the widespread symbolic violence sustained through class distinctions and these academic interventions do necessary work to counter ‘Third Way’ claims to classlessness. Yet it is not my intention to re-inscribe (working) class in any way that reconstructs or returns us to the fantasy of the left; that is to say, to some particular version of ‘heroic’ working-class culture. Whilst the decline of industrialisation and the attendant fragmentation of global, social and economic structures has lead some commentators (Giddens 1994) to declare class redundant in terms of mapping/producing social identities, others demonstrate complex shifts in the way class remains evidential. Similar to the hierarchies of the industrial/classed self, though more complexly drawn, class has become absorbed by forms of cultural capitalism that maintain parameters for the enterprising self. Class, defined as it was straightforwardly through industrialised capitalist society was never the whole story of class distinction (Savage 2000). Parenting in particular becomes a site where worthiness is constructed through the ‘project of the child’, closely mirroring the cult of the individual (Rose 1999). So classing involves a complex network of relations and connections to knowledge far in excess of that which is confined to the exclusive mother /child relationship, rather implicating whole populations. There is certainly something here to be said about the ways in which post-war accounts of class were denied complexity, instead made ‘heroic’, predominantly male and homogenous to serve as object to leftist fantasies and middle-class recognitions. Those imagined communities and ‘others’ that populated early community studies (see Roberts 1999) persist still in current policy initiatives (Gamarnikow and Green 1999). Our task here is to evidence how current renditions of classlessness do not translate easily and painlessly into lived experience. These are the points of convergence between our working classed lives and theirs that demand exploration. How class is produced historically, culturally and theoretically then, must concern us here and I examine those productions with some reference to my empirical study with mothers and children, media representations and political initiatives. Finally, I will ask how the research process itself plays a part in this production and conclude that ‘our’ working-class lives resonate with ‘theirs’. Put simply, class endures across gender, generation and political visions of selfhood.

  Beck 2000, Giddens 1991, Pakluski and Waters 1996, render class redundant and Giddens’ work has been loosely drawn upon in ‘Third Way’ politicised renditions of inclusive society. Though these works remain as academic commentaries on the breakdown of class, New Labour’s rhetoric of classlessness becomes unsustainable if we interpret class as spread horizontally across populations rather than hierarchically (Savage 2000).

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The Meaning of Production and (Re)production of Meaning Ezzy notes ‘Meaning is not a thing or a substance but an activity’ (2002: 3) and an appropriate starting point here may be to examine how (classed) distinctions/ meanings are/were produced. In what way do remnants of a post war notion of class frame current personhood (if at all)? Indeed, what does the term ‘working -class’ reveal and confer upon the self? Roberts’ (1999) work draws our attention to the ambivalent position held by the working-class in the historical imaginings of the intellectual left. It is here, laden with the heroic and emblematic fantasies around the ‘golden age’ of post war Britain, that the term is equated (when it suits) with a nobility or conversely with moral lack. Read this alongside current Atlanticist approaches to weave potential and classlessness into the rhetoric of progressive individualism and we see how culturally legitimated potential is given a moral slant; as rendered always possible, already there, achievable and the responsibility of the self. Though here class is theorised as central to the way in which identities are negotiated across social relations, the initial response of the mothers in this study appeared to dispute this premise. In order to qualify the interview material and these mothers’ responses around class, identity and values, it is perhaps necessary to place the very locatedness of those classed associations I investigated in perspective to contemporary frameworks of deindustrialization and individualism. Much of the historical relevance of class revolves around a predominantly male industrialised workplace. Coal and steel, particularly in North Eastern England, conjure up the idea of working classed communities and it is through this predominantly male space that class is imbued with heroic virtue, stability and community. Historically speaking, this elision of class with models of male employment has obscured the lived experience of class and its intersections with intimacy, community and culture (Gillies 2007, Roberts 1995). Under this academic (and ‘common sense’) class model, men at least were provided with a heroic working-class position. Albeit one that Roberts (1999) claims, disappointed the left with a refusal to rise up and usher in revolution; this position nevertheless fulfilled a particular fantasy for the left. These heroic class distinctions, once signified publicly through heavy manufacturing employment, have transposed into concerns about family and inevitably it is the mother who becomes the focus of any condemnation; she becomes, in Walkerdine’s terms (1989: 15), the ‘guarantor’ of liberal social order, and moreover, culpable for social disorder. Such classed positions are far from heroic; rather they become a matter of taste and disgust (Lawler 2005). So the ways in which these distinctions persist has shifted socio-culturally from associations with the predominantly male world of heavy manufacturing work, to the private and domestic world. A world targeted by issues of child development, education and potential yet circumscribed (as it ever was) by notions of taste, lifestyle and ways of being. We need only point   Finch (1993) and Roberts (1995) work exemplifies ‘reading’ class other than through occupational structures.

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to UK media television representations: Wife Swap, Holidays from Hell, How Clean is Your House, Dinner Party Inspector, all point up the interest in the easily read surface of the self, the intimacy and intricacy of the family, its relationships and the ways in which family life is produced. The white, hetero-normative, classless family is the touchstone against which these media devices incline, even as they display ‘others’. We are invited to look and learn, to simultaneously recognise and misrecognise (our) selves and in doing so, to do the work of class(ing). The ‘classing gaze’ (Finch 1993) then persists, and my study was driven to explore mother/child identities as a vehicle for producing distinctive selves (and reproducing good citizens). Blair’s middle-class revolution, making the family central to New Labour discussions around inclusion, citizenship and social order, marked a distinct shift from the exclusionary tone and conservative rhetoric around underclass (Murray 1994). Further, the ‘death of class’ debates (Pakulski and Waters 1996) that emerged out of the changing neo-liberal economic and political landscape of late seventies de-industrialised Europe, focussed on the fragmentation and erasure of class. These discussions have ultimately transposed into current claims of classlessness that suggest forms of equity (Giddens 1994, Beck et al. 1994) but these claims of progressive individualism are fraught, as these conversations found, with the persistence of class distinctions. Classlessness is, as Reay claims, a ‘myth’ (2000) for a whole range of institutional power relations, between the state, the individual and capitalist driven markets, depend upon the reproduction and reiteration of class. I evaluate then, how ‘psy’ knowledges around the child, produce knowing selves; selves that (re)produce class and distinction under the cover of nature and potentials. My interviews took place at two sites, a family centre in the North East of England and a rural playgroup in Northumberland. Initial questionnaires completed by the women, self identified class around occupation/professional training. It may appear, as Bourdieu (1999) suggests, that asking what class   ‘A middle-class that will include millions of people who traditionally may see themselves as working-class, but whose ambitions are far broader than those of their parents and grandparents,’ Tony Blair (in White, M., Blair Hails Middle Class Revolution. The Guardian. 15th January 1999).   ‘…contemporary discourses of both widespread social mobility and classlessness are myths which operate to ensure dominant class hegemony and perpetuate class inequalities’ (Reay 2000: 162).   The area in which the family centre is located has a rank of 26 out of 354 local authorities and ranks 49 on the income measure. The area in which the rural playgroup is located has a rank of 207 out of 354 local authorities and ranks 317 on the income measure. A low score represents a deprived area. Compiled from 2004 English Indices of Most Deprivation, www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk. Datasets referenced: Index of Multiple Deprivation (source ODPM).   Aged between 21 and 42 years and identifying as White British; of the 13 mothers in the study, 11 were married and co-resident with the father of their child; three were single mothers living alone; four mothers were recipients of welfare benefits.

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meant to these women is too simplistic an approach and even naïve. Given that research subjects do not have equal access to the knowledge making processes derived within and for the purposes of academic work, Bourdieu (1999) is strictly averse to reifying ‘class’ or attempts to raise and objectify class in the empirical process. Such a scenario, in which the deployment of knowledge specific terms are privileged raises, for Bourdieu, the charge of symbolic violence and unequal power relations in the research process. Yet, ‘speaking’ class in the interview situation and moreover hearing it denied, was crucial to demonstrate the ways in which class was understood by those interviewed as not in the subject, not part of identity, but as an abstraction. Though they deemed class ‘outdated’, it became empirically evident in our discussions that class remained central in framing moral and maternal identity. At the family centre, Laura feels that to speak of class somehow negates the value of others in society: I suppose if someone asked, if I had to tick a box, I suppose I’d say middleclass. But nowadays it has rather negative connotations, class terms, I think. For me anyway, I dunno, it can be a right sort of snobbish way of looking at yourself...a way of almost raising yourself above other people which I don’t think is a really helpful way of classifying yourself really (laughs). It’s a bit of an outdated thing (34).

For Karen (27) who attends the family centre, working-class means, ‘They want to make things better for themselves, and they want to get themselves from one place to what they can see is a better place, to advance.’ Moreover, defining class posed difficult for Diane (24) at the family centre; ‘Hard to distinguish these days, ...y’know, cause it’s not like when we did it at school, you had certain classes, but now everyone’s made more to feel the same, so you don’t feel any different’ (my emphasis). Class involves, for Karen, recognising that there is a space of future occupation, an ‘other’ place (privileged and out of reach?). Yet Diane claims no-one feels any different; we are all made to feel the same. So what process is occurring if we are made to feel the same? Embedded within an array of psychological disciplines and without the need for constant reiteration in public life, Karen and Laura’s responses reflect the process through which class is made invisible: Making class invisible represents a historical stage in which the identity of the middle classes is assured. There was a time when the concept was considered necessary by the middle classes to maintain and consolidate differences in power; its recent invisibility suggests that these differences are now institutionalised, legitimated and well established (Skeggs 1997: 7).

Suzanne (27), also from the family centre, a single, university educated mother, defines working-class as ‘Traditionally, it’s people who leave school early and sort of follow the footsteps of their parents, sort of shipbuilding, work down the pits. That

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kind of thing doesn’t exist any more, I don’t think.’ Drawing upon her university education as capital through which she may secure her own classed identity, Suzanne goes on to define middle-class as ‘people who are a bit more educated’. Education resonates too with Pam (42). A teacher on career break, she attends the playgroup and constructs class here: Pam: It could mean perhaps people who are working in more manual labour. SP: You mean heavy manufacturing? Pam: Well, even lighter, sort of computers and shop floor, people who haven’t stayed on at school and did other qualifications.

For Pam, class locations remain contiguous with work and resonate with the notion of unskilled work or heavy, predominantly male, manufacturing work. Again there is the sense here that class (taken here to mean working-class) is aligned with an industrialised past and encapsulated in those who lack academic qualifications.10 Comments here then regarding class definitions, indicate that ‘old’ class appeared to hold no currency whatsoever. For these women, it seemed that talking from a ‘universal’ and wholly biological maternal subject position allowed any social imbalances to become somehow levelled out; yet it was in discussing practices, parenting and appearance that distinctions were borne out. Savage (2000: 107) notes that: …class identities are not to be found within talk about categories but in practices and accounts of practices-in practices of distinction and closure and in the ‘aesthetics of distance’.

Expert knowledges and practices (the clinic/parenting class/childcare manuals) implicitly code and produce class in the discursive formation of the autonomous child (in turn produced through the cultural competencies of his/her ‘knowing’ mother). Cultural capitals11 work through frameworks that govern the family and education to simulate and mark class distinction, and class materialises through 10  Pam’s account points to the ways in which the traditional signifiers of heavy manual labour are being relocated to the less skilled area of component work. Indeed, later employment forms, such as the call centre, have been identified as the new sweatshops and white-collar factories (Taylor and Bain 1999) indicating that a classed differentiation of sorts survives the disappearance of traditional forms of predominantly male, heavy manufacturing employment. 11  Bourdieu theorises a framework of capitals (2005) based on capital movements through social space. These take four forms; economic capital (wealth and income); cultural capital (embodied, objectified, institutionalised); social capital (networks and relationships) and ultimately symbolic capital (this form is the culmination of previous capitals legitimisation). Once perceived and recognised as legitimate; symbolic capital translates into symbolic power (from Skeggs 1997: 8).

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the relations between capital accumulations. The mechanisms by which the child’s central position produces distinction and the notion of the ‘good society’ are worthy of exploration here. Shifts in Locating Class Meaning? For UK New Labour, the thorny issue of class relations remains an embarrassing relic of old Labour orthodoxy. Its retreat from public external life and core Labour sentiments has seen it reinstated in the project of the self (Rose 1998), in private internal worlds and in social policy initiatives; with Sure Start, the New Deal and Welfare to Work forming the plank of governments strategic formation of ‘classlessness’ (via citizenship). Through all the discussions I had in my study around identity, ‘old’ class distinctions, which for these women resonated with redundant industrialisation, were reworked into nature, potentials and cultural capital. A moral economy, attuned to the duty of the self for itself and ultimately for the child, replaced what traditionally stood for class, but I argue here that it is simply that; a re-working. If we cast a gendered light upon ‘old’ class sensibilities we see they revolve as ever around a moral economy and inscription (Finch 1993). The shifts in interpreting class reveal complex continuities; in this sense, can we claim a new agenda for class? As Skeggs (2004) explains, in considerations of class and distinction, the basis of Marxist class theorisation (around economics and property) remains if we are willing to consider extending that analysis to the propertisation of the self, and its inculcation in cultural markets of use and exchange. Classed distinction becomes a strand that thrives through capital markets, inculcated in the promise of potentials and the child (and moreover reflected in both specific and general assumptions around personhood and citizenship). Fraser (2003) neatly points out the need to conflate the material and cultural in discussions of social justice. For Fraser, the cultural and economic are indisputably linked; it is not a question of one or the other, but how redistribution (resting on an economic basis) can be taken forward with recognition (resting on identity politics). Fraser points out the need to confront misrecognitions but not at the cost of ignoring the tangible mal-distributive effects of capitalist systems. Rather, she calls for a social justice framework that stands as ‘an account in which mal-distribution is entwined with misrecognition but cannot be reduced to the latter’ (2003: 3). At the playgroup, Pam, a teacher, explained the ‘problem’ regarding parental expectations and sorts of children: Pam: Well you know, I’m not saying this is generally the case but some of them, the parents, you look at them and you see, you know, you understand why, some of them, the children, are the way they are. SP: What exactly do you mean? How are they?

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Pam: Just, well, all depends what sort of school you’re teaching in, but by and large you just know these kids will have a struggle to achieve. SP: Because of the way their parents look? Pam: No, not just that. I mean,…attitudes. Parents’ evenings are so telling, most of the parents sit there and it’s unfortunate, but they don’t have a clue what is required, the work they need to do to help a child reach their true potential, you know? Of course, a teacher can only do so much, the rest is parental responsibility, interest…environment, but some children, and their parents for that matter, are…well…without sounding cruel, beyond hope. They are hard work. I’m sure you know what I’m getting at.

Reay (1998) has investigated the anxieties and pressures mothers of primary school children face against an educational system that they feel excludes them in terms of networks and knowledge systems. These are the very people that are Pam’s ‘hard work’, they just don’t know and, being ‘beyond hope’, we can assume they never will. Their children however, are in part absolved of their lack as it is returned upon the family (and environment). There are echoes here, of the ‘disgusted subjects’ Lawler (2005) has explored, as Pam notes ‘you look at them and you see’; their bodies are easily read and facile, taken as containers for a wealth of historically sedimented assumptions of ill judged parenting and lifestyle mistakes. In saying this, I mean not to highlight Pam’s ‘beliefs’ as simply personal and privately known, but to show how central these discourses are to pointing up classed distinctions; they are always partial imaginations, a fear and fascination that is pronounced as visceral disapprobation. Identities then become the site where appeals to the self (and political projects require particular selves) can be calibrated through ‘the best interests of the child’ and ‘nature’ (Ball 2003); this does nothing to destabilise enduring core assumptions around class, distinction, culture and worthy selves. For example, Louise, pointing up the coalition of gender and class, was quite certain about the moral position motherhood required. When I asked her what it meant to be a mother, she replied: Well you shouldn’t be going out, being a mother should do, and if you are going out and having a good time, especially if you’re a single mother, you know. It’s a bad thing isn’t it…if you’re enjoying yourself? (40).

Louise understands the easy slippage into being positioned (classed/ misrecognised) as a bad mother. The good enough mother that these mothers strive for must exceed common sense understandings of care, instinct and feminine traits or risk categorisations (and classifying practices) at the hand of others. She went on to tell me about the classes she had attended at the family centre; a ‘positive

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parenting’ course, and an ‘alternative smacking’ course. I asked her what she thought of them: Well, I don’t smack, and I felt that the ‘alternative smacking course’, the lady who ran that didn’t believe me, y’know, that I didn’t smack and I don’t know if anyone got anything out of it.

Louise explains here that she felt as if her mothering practices, and consequently her social and moral behaviour were being judged as defective; she felt her position as ‘good mother’ being destabilised. Clearly judgements were transmitted at the family centre during these parenting courses that had not gone unnoticed by Louise. Her comments highlight relationships between bodies (read as lacking) and sites of expertise, and more importantly, for her, the ways in which the identity she works to project is disrupted by that reading. Louise’s account contrasted sharply with Kate, a family development worker at the centre, who offered a different reading of the impact parenting classes had on service users: Kate: They gain the tools to deal with children’s behaviour, they walk out of here with totally changed ideas and concepts of how to deal with their children that they didn’t know before. People have been empowered and their confidence has grown (29).

At the family centre I asked Louise what her aspirations were for her children. She replied, ‘I just want them to be good citizens, ’cos you see them around here drinking and stealing. I just want them to be nice people, caring people.’ Louise’s ideals centred on respectability and civility to others as did Jackie’s. Jackie told me what constituted being a good mother: Bringing them up properly, well mannered. He knows when he goes out that he’s got to behave himself. Just things like that really. Show him, like, who’s boss [she laughs] (24).

The desire to ‘bring him up properly, well mannered’ demonstrates Jackie’s desire for respectability; here the emphasis is ‘outward’ looking with concern for society rather than ‘inward’ looking ‘centred’ child. As Skeggs (1997: 90) writes, ‘This is the emotional politics of class…they care about how they are seen in the eyes of the “other”’. The mother/child dyad and its relationship with social capital and power relations can be interpreted within an exchange/use paradigm. In Skeggs’ theorization (2004), exchange value legitimates the individual in amounts of capital composition and value (that which is exchangeable across social space activated perhaps through networks, education). Use-value however, inheres as a general sense of self worth, it is not dependant upon exchange, having a value beyond that of market. In this sense, the child is a ‘future’ to be capitalised upon

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and a present ‘us’. For although all the mothers in the study gained use-value (derived as natural/instinctive) from maternity; it was clear that distinctions were being drawn. In discussing what seemed natural/universal (motherhood), some mothers clearly were drawing upon exchangeable accumulated capitals that pre existed their mothering identity in order to produce difference. The existence and mobilisation of exchange values (cultural capitals) become concealed in the mothering role under adequacy as good mothering, and through more recent visions of self enterprising selves12 that draw upon relations of intimacy and trust (Giddens 1998, 2000, Beck 1992). The child then is a tool through which governance urges exchange value (as potential). It is through these conversions, via the child, that some measure of appropriation and entitlement can be (vicariously) achieved. Potentials are unleashed, in current political times, through education and parenting, and the preschool child figures in this discourse. However, even as the women struggle over the child as commodity, and reflective of their own worth, the middleclass mums ‘just know’ what counts, and make confident assumptions regarding accessible futures for themselves and their children. During our interview, which took place at her home, Pam discussed her plans to return to teaching full time; we chatted about the area and if she enjoyed living there. She did, but noted sadly that owing to her husband’s work it was likely they would have to re-locate, adding ‘but we will return when [child] goes to university’. Her child was aged seven at the time and this was taken as a foregone conclusion. This was in comparison to the mothers at the centre, whose aspirations for their children revolved around lack of financial worries/happiness (if university was mentioned it was as part of a ‘good job’ scenario). These discussions, and moreover Laura’s (34) claim that, ‘Everything you do your child is imbibing from you’, can be interpreted as an attempt to (re)produce desirable forms of (classed) status/motherhood.13 Class(ing) underlies Laura’s differentiation of how mothering engages other(ed) women. The young, unemployed, single mother Laura had helped through her work with the church now seems (to Laura) more suited to the demands of mothering:

12  Skeggs (2004: 31–33) explains how the self interested individual of late nineteenth century western society derives from fragments of early liberal political writings (specifically those of economist Adam Smith). The transformation into moral citizenship evolved in the reworking of exchange terminology from a model of economic exchange to one of moral economy (and the responsible worthy citizen). So we see a move away, in contemporary times, from the market perceived as impersonal (though still ultimately effectual) to a more intimate model of inscription concerning bodies and dispositions; ‘in this lack of fit between position and disposition, recognition and mis-recognition, we can see contemporary class struggle’ (Skeggs 2004: 181). 13  So we need to ask; is the child really being encouraged to ‘be their own person’ (as child developmental texts relate)?

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…because I worked before…I had really high ideals I suppose…lots of responsibility and this kind of stuff. And I think she…she did such an excellent job and because she didn’t have such high expectations of herself and she didn’t have any responsibility before really, she took on the responsibility with a real joy and…em…it’s really been the making of her you know? She really enjoys being at home, spending time…I think it’s perhaps harder when you’ve been in a job and you’ve had people say, ‘oh you did that really well’…then suddenly it’s just you at home with your child.

Laura makes complex associations here between class position/proximity to ‘nature’ and possession of symbolic capital. It seemed that some form of cultural reproduction, demonstrated around ‘values’ and worth, especially for those mothers who were teachers, social workers, nurses perhaps, was surfacing in the interviews that pertained to the desires of the mother. Rather than producing the child, it ultimately made for the (re)production of the mother. Moreover, Karen at the family centre had utilised her perspectives on the ‘nurtured self/child’ to accumulate more personal (cultural capital) investments. Training to be a counsellor, Karen had earlier defined working-class as ‘wanting to move from one place to another’. Where counselling work is wholly attuned to a neo-liberal model of self (agency and autonomy are key concepts), I wondered if this was her way of making that journey. In the majority of discussions class was dismissed. Is it that class understandings have constrained and confined subjectivity? When we talk about class, what are we really talking about? Does class, without any specification, become synonymous, as Walkerdine and Lucey (1989: 12) write, with the ‘masses’; as problematic, as signifying lack? If so, then dismissal is not surprising, particularly when we explore media languages around distinction. Media Productions Knowledges, Lawler claims, are produced and ‘do not, as it were, fall from the sky’ (2000: 3). Moreover, Goldblatt notes that ‘The production, dissemination and legitimization of knowledge requires access to and use of resources; economic, political and cultural…these resources are rarely equally distributed’ (2004: 3). I suggest that the explosion of psychological and politically produced knowledge around the mother/child dyad (and by extension whole populations) becomes a way of assembling selves that best fit current social and economic change. This reformulation of traditional class identities in terms of ‘classless’ selves and ‘knowledged’ citizens has implications for what may count as full14 subjectivity; 14  ‘Full’ subjectivity resonates with Rose’s (1998) discussions around the elicitation of potential. In effect under neo liberal visions of good selves, subjectivity never achieves saturation point.

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the role of expertise in pronouncing judgements and inscriptions was clearly expressed by Louise’s defensive account and Pam’s comments above. Skeggs notes that ‘inscription is about making through marking’ (2004: 12), and further that processes of inscription comprise ‘the way value is transferred onto bodies and read off them, and the mechanisms by which it is retained, accumulated, lost or appropriated’ (2004: 13). As good mothers producing good children, the women in the study were always in transactions of cultural exchange; their identity never simply read as maternal (but as interrupted by femininity, bodies, taste, expertise). This qualification is central to an intersectional analysis of classed meanings, as my discussions with Christine (a single parent aged 19) demonstrated. Having previously worked in modelling/promotional work, appearance and body image were extremely important cultural capitals to Christine. I asked her how she had felt on discovering she was pregnant: I was devastated…a real shock…really…that sounds terrible cause I do love him to bits now but I knew I’d have to cope on my own, then…as I got bigger and bigger…I just felt a mess, all my mates were spending money on clothes and that and there was me, I couldn’t get anything on…I just didn’t go out much at all.

Later in the interview Christine disclosed that she was a recovering bulimic. She told me how ashamed she felt when confronted with photographs of her pregnant self, feeling that she (in her own words) ‘looked like a clip’ [mess]; Christine went on: I still like my things though, clothes, makeup and that…but now I haven’t got as much to spend, because I need stuff for him and anyway I don’t go out as much. My mam babysits, but I don’t like to overdo it, y’know?…It looks as if you don’t care doesn’t it? I mean, I wouldn’t want him to think that, I mean he’s the most important thing. I still like to make the effort though, just because I’m a Mam doesn’t mean I’ve got to look like a clip…in leggings and that like that whatd’youcallher…on Sky, Waynetta Slob…God no.

Waynetta Slob was a comic character performed by actress Kathy Burke, her partner Wayne was performed by comedian Harry Enfield and they represent all that is imagined in a portrayal of fetid, excessive and feckless parents (see Gidley and Rooke, Wilson-Kovacs this volume). They are track-suited, unclean, unhealthy (obese), tasteless, work-shy, violent and inadequate as parents. In many ways they are the precursor to current renditions of the ‘chav’, and a more recent rendition of this character is found in the popular UK television comedy series Little Britain in the character of Vicky Pollard. Vicky possesses all the above attributes but the audience have the added piquancy of knowing she is performed by a man, thereby rendering her impossible yet, simultaneously in the portrayal, closer to her intended characterisation, that of an ‘unreal’, feared though fascinating girl.

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These characters frame part of what has become a widespread post-feminist symbolic violence against women.15 McRobbie (2004) theorises visible and visceral connections between the development of increased individualization and the media deluge of ‘tips’ from expert (middle classed) sources that offer to bestow a semblance of taste upon those who are deemed culturally lacking. Pointing up the constant criticism brought to bear against women who don’t manage to ‘get it right’ and the ways in which women are scrutinized for lack in their bodies and postures through media devices, McRobbie identifies a process through which a range of reality/self preservation television programmes ‘actively generate and legitimate forms of class antagonism particularly between women in a way which would have been socially unacceptable until recently’ (2004: 100). These media morality tales, inscribed through corporeality, taste and postures and presented to reflect an essence or ‘truth’ of class as lived experience, produce ‘sorts’. And what they reveal, in the way they are crafted, rather than any actuality of working-class lives, is something about the psycho-social defences and anxieties of their middleclass producers (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989, Skeggs 2004). Elsewhere, McRobbie (2006) notes the ways in which celebrity culture, for young women (see Christine’s comments above) presents an impossible picture of high income/high maintenance ‘yummy mummies’. Status and income here collapse into tropes of femininity and McRobbie notes how this focus on self preservation, couched in terms of a moral economy, serves to bolster government messages regarding teenage pregnancies. Celebrity magazines and websites reinforce this message with references to ‘chav’, ‘essex girls’, or ‘pramface’ mothers, ‘…that is the face of impoverished, unkempt, slovenly maternity and re-stigmatised single motherhood’ (McRobbie The Guardian, 2nd March 2006). This is certainly a rearticulated, but no less damaging, individualist turn from the economic concerns around benefit-scrounging single mothers of the early 1990s16 and their supposed effect on the moral circumstance of the nation. The facile parents then that Pam earlier disparaged as ‘hard work’ are therefore constantly evoked in media imaginations.17 Nevertheless, media texts, central as they may be to a discursive formation of classed distinction, are only partial producers. Policy 15  McRobbie (2004) discusses the symbolic violence enacted in constructing others through primetime television programmes. Such media programming schedules enable forms of class distinction that neatly fit with the shifts in making class that Savage (2000) describes. That is, that a hierarchical model of class has been overlaid with a more fluid horizontal arrangement of responsive, malleable and instructive classed distinctions. 16  ‘Babies on Benefit’ (Panorama BBC1, televised 20th September 1993) was indicative of a moral panic that matched single motherhood, benefit claims and social disordering. Reflecting the then Conservative government’s fears around the fragmentation of the nuclear family, the single mothers in the programme were portrayed as making rational choices to procure benefits/housing, as feckless, as fecund. 17  The ‘Paulsgrove mothers’ (Lawler 2003) and ‘abject whites’ (Haylett 2001) remain sub textual media devices with which to identify unmotherly/unfeminine behaviour as the traceable root of a generalised social disorder.

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interventions, discussed in the next section, similarly reinforce the child/mother as icon (and metaphor for good society) and in this way classing endures. Political Intrusions A raft of UK education and social policy initiatives (Sure Start, New Deal, Parenting classes) indebted to similar US initiatives (Home Start, Workfare) generate, produce, inscribe and maintain class(ing). Insofar as contemporary formulations for citizenship and moral parameters for ‘good’ selves are placed; these initiatives work to pull together social capital, potentials and good society. Moreover, these projects (re)produce class under cover of moral economies instantiated spatially and culturally in everyday worlds (Haylett 2002, 2003). Ultimately they find their locus in the figure of the child (and mother). Haylett (2001, 2003) has written about the place the white working-class occupies in political imagination and the classifying practices policy makers impose upon poor white families as a form of ‘social racism’.18 Such portraits of ‘abject whites’ in policy initiatives render any claims to classlessness wholly misleading. Raising concerns about disparagement and/or ‘retreat from people who are seen to embody an unsettling mix of whiteness, “working classness”, and poverty’ (2001: 353), Haylett argues that moves to welfare reform are invoked by more than concerns about economic impoverishment, rather they centre on distaste. Judgements are made, she writes, as poor white families are pronounced culturally impoverished with ‘a poverty of identity based on outdated ways of thinking and being’ (2001: 352). Relating the ways in which analyses of class have until recently been ‘squeezed out’ of academic discussion with poststructuralist developments in examination of other identity positions, Haylett notes the unfortunate implications therein for constructions of a ‘too white’ working-class19 and raises concerns regarding the continual lack of space given over to positive representations of white working-class in the public domain. Examining Welfare to Work initiatives as reflective of political concerns around a ‘fit’ between ‘community’ and whiteness, Haylett raises the issue of racialization and poses the question ‘Might they be too ambiguous as victims? Too unfashionably unexotic? Too white?’ (2001: 353). These discussions reveal the way in which such interventions remain concerned throughout (across ethnicities) with work upon the self (Foucault 1988, Rose 1999, 1998) capital exchanges and systems of inscription. Haylett (2001) considers then the ways in which multiculturalism is raised to obfuscate both class politics and failures of structural and economic reform; failures that continue to displace both poor black and white subjects in visions 18  Current constructions of the feckless, facile, white working-class, Skeggs notes (2005) survive and take form in the figure of the ‘chav’. 19  Though recent works by working classed academics have ignited a series of debates about racializing whiteness (Skeggs 1997, Lawler 2003, 2005, Roberts 1999).

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of citizenship. Such arguments centre on the production of disgust at those who threaten the political project of civil and moral society and the potential of that society in global free market systems. In a reverse move, class, traditionally understood in the public domain, as externally drawn from the safe place of fixed structural workplace identities, is rendered unstable, innate, as in and on the body; the work of government is to make these ‘others’ recuperable through their own efforts. Though all the women in this study identified as British white, I raise these points to indicate the efforts of government to displace class, across ethnic identifications, with potentials and moral order.20 In this way, those white and black citizens with the least capitals are made the source of dis-equilibriums. Though they stand as ‘imaginaries’, rendered politically problematic for Third Way projects, their welfare, parenting and educational progress deemed less than that required for ‘full’ citizenship, their potentials questionable; such ‘imaginaries’ become marked ‘real’ through a range of policy initiatives (Education Action Zones, schools on special measures, Sure Start, New Deal). Without rehearsing the details in my empirical study regarding the role of Sure Start, I note here simply that the child presents a vehicle for the instantiation and production of class in current visions of neo liberal citizens. Indeed, the foundational stability of assumptions around what constitutes childhood, Jenks (1996) suggests (and to this I would add parenting) arises precisely from the critical debunking of major ideological formations such as class, race and gender. Jenks notes then that, ‘The child, it would seem, has not escaped or deconstructed into the poststructuralist space of multiple and self-presentational identity sets’ (1996: 3). It appears that the child has become a container for the hopes and aspirations around good society and class; the last outpost and irreducible element of our ideological underpinnings. This containment, when married to the cult of the individual driven by the liberalist government administration of the eighties, in which the majority of the women in my study grew up, works to formulate current understandings around potentials, the borders of the ‘self’ and citizenship cultures enshrined in the worker/good citizen. There are strong associations here toward moral economy. What seems on the face of it to be a shift in traditional working-class identities and a space for new claims to class identity, is no more than a response to the ruptures capital markets sustained in the wake of deindustrialisation. Cultural capital markets recovered, reassembled around the self itself and, drawing upon the continuing trajectory of progressive western individualism, made possible the 20  The ‘hyper-whitening’ (Lawler 2005) of poor white people serves also to obscure the problem of class relations for British born Blacks and Asians, whose class politics is made into ‘disaffection’, understood politically and popularly through moral panics around, in the former, the influence of US ‘rap’ and gun culture, and in the latter, through religious fundamentalism and the threat of terrorist activity. In this way, attention is subverted from the structural and cultural inequalities endemic in visions of multicultural and civil society across ethnicities.

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construction of ‘labour imaginaries’ (Haylett 2003). Late liberal government then promotes social capital as a drive to social order/classlessness as social agents become complicit in undertaking the necessary (psycho-social) work that selves do to avoid (mis)recognition (Fraser 2003). Yet as Garminikow and Green (1999) note, New Labours’ use of social capital is far removed from Bourdieu’s notion of social capital (2005). For Bourdieu, social capital is bound up with various cultural and material capitals (financial inheritance, education, bodily postures and appearance) which may or may not, depending upon the accumulation and range of resources, bestow full citizenship/social mobility. In government visions of social capital however, social capital stands over and above economic and fiscal structures and rather than ‘given’ through social circumstance and life chances, is generated by and through appeals to reach ‘our’ potential. Classed subjectivity then, has much to do with the interface of these productions arising from ‘good’ selves, media, political drives and future citizens (the child). Following Skeggs theorizations of selfhood as ‘part of a system of exchange in which classed personhood is produced through different technologies’ (2004: 5), these relations of exchange are centrally located to producing class. Simply put, aside from the material inequalities that organise us hierarchically, there exists a knowledge framework for moral worthy selves who, like the women in the study, can produce worthy citizens (their children). Reinvestigations/Research Though selves, media and children stand as spaces for the production of class, the historical relevance of sociological investigation as productive of classing has been raised within the discipline itself. Savage’s (2005) re-investigation of Goldthorpe et als’ classic analysis of the 1960s reveals the cues and intimations to interpreting class overlooked in that original analysis. Of course, the vocabulary of the self we engage in today, in the workplace (through appraisals and reviews) and in everyday socially mediated communication (television, film and relationship literatures) was relatively underdeveloped at the time of Goldthorpe et al.’s original study. Moreover, interviewee’s voices therein were obscured through a range of dominant welfare and judicial models that privileged male subjectivity in that predivorce, pre-abortion era. This then was an analysis that focussed upon structure and male occupational industrial grouping as indicative of class meanings. Goldthorpe’s predominantly, and unintentionally (given the cultural landscape of the time) structurally focussed andro-centric investigation failed to translate that which working-class academics consider key to the translation of class meanings; that is the intersectionality of class with hetero-normative discourses (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989, Skeggs 1997, 2004, Lawler 2000, 2004, Haylett 2001, 2003, Taylor 2009). Considering Savage’s (2005) reinvestigations, one can only speculate as to the trajectory this ongoing dialogue on class will take, given the dynamic nature

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of the tensions between class culture and identity. Just as second wave feminists remain indebted to first wave feminist writers, then class as emblematic of the post war heroic male worker was perhaps a necessary, if problematic, development in our current classing constructions (if only to recognise the ruptured and fractured subjectivities it failed to fully explain). Responses by Finch (1993), Roberts (1995, 1999) indicate that classed, and specifically gendered, meanings have always revolved around the self, bodies, emotion and affect. These continuities re-surface in the voices of the participants in my study and in recent empirical research that centres on the maternal subject, the production of the child and the re-articulation of class as lived experience (Gillies 2007, Irwin 2005). Savage’s work demonstrates that the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ were simply ones of interpretive schemas implemented by researchers in the context of that particular stage of knowledge productions. Given that those strands of class meaning, currently key to the resurgence of class have been revealed in Savage’s reinvestigations as always already there, how can we, with any certainty, lay claims to authenticity – to the privileging of ‘our’ working-class lives as different? To paraphrase Ricoeur (1980) class becomes what it always was. Future Considerations So let us be under no illusions here, de-industrialisation does not mean the end of class (Pakulski and Waters 1996). The classed distinctions that once inhabited the public work place have simply shored up those that already existed in the private realm of the family. Representations around the family are further driven by media affects (Skeggs 2004, McRobbie 2004) where UK drama series (Shameless) and reality television (Wife Swap, Holidays from Hell) present opportunities to construct those (imaginary) others who disrupt the notion of good citizen. The creation/re-production of a moral economy then is closely tied to economic process and this underpins my concern with continuities (Fraser 2003). The rolling back of the state, initiated during the liberalist conservative governments of the 1980s and simulating freedoms to capitalise upon the self, has served to consolidate the workings and extent of a range of power/knowledge complexes implicit in health, education and welfare. Notwithstanding, this reinterpretation of class and its (re)production is wholly reflective of western capitalism’s ability to initiate a tactical response to the fabric of social and economic change that materialised with de-industrialisation, and which further underscored an emergent political aggrandisement around individualism. As Ball (2003: 115) notes, ‘…middle-class values privilege certain sorts of selfish, or at least short-sighted individualism; [and] the market feeds and exacerbates this to produce attenuated beings’. These shifts in the nature of capitalism enjoin with progressive individualism; they invade ‘whiteness’, childhood(s), parenting, hetero-normative discourse, potentials and ‘multiculturalism’ and remain important drivers in the maintenance and production of difference (Savage 2000, Skeggs 2004).

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We need then to be concerned with the continuing narrative of class, a reinterpreted gaze sideways (Savage 2000). My data, pointing up the persistence and rigidity of particular versions of personhood deemed problematic, and these mothers refusal to appear ‘unworthy’, serves to evidence that there exists something still, call it ‘class’, that conjures up pathology and lack. These concerns with class have continuities across and between gender and generations. And though the ‘enterprising self’ inhabits a very different cultural and globalised sphere than that which framed the economic certainties and continuity of the immediate post war era, I am nevertheless, reminded of Roberts analysis of freedoms in that era, in which she claims; ‘Ordinary people had more but not unlimited choice than ever before’ (1995: 1). The voices here may be characterised doubly, not simply through new contributors to this collection but through the voices of research participants speaking in the era of ‘New’ Labour. And what these particular voices offer is an enduring vocabulary of distinction. They reveal in effect the centrality and continuity of ‘old’ class sensibilities through lived experience; lives here made sense of both through a simultaneous forgetting and remembering of class(ing). It is often, as Skeggs notes, ‘excruciating’ (1997:15) to write about class and I suggest this is recognisable by any of us who speak from a position of being in-between what we were (and are) and in the uneasy position of negotiating our dissonance through our work. I am sure I speak for the contributors to this collection when I say that writing class is precarious; there is always the fear we may be making ‘objects’ in the very act of presenting evidence of misrepresentation. I earlier noted my interest in productions. If the point is to stake claims on knowledge – we cannot stake possession. Researchers cannot stand outside the research process or the researched, nor can they stand outside the social, cultural or historical narratives that produce class. Quite simply attempts to reinvent that wheel are futile. My point is then that to claim authenticity/possession is fraught with danger. To speak of ‘our’ working-class lives, as opposed to ‘theirs’ points up something elaborated in the subaltern work of Spivak (1988) in that our first concern should be not who will speak but who will listen. Whatever interpretations, structural, emotional or affective emerge within dialogues of class as lived experience, the focus remains not ownership of, but space for a sociological explanation and exploration of classed intersections. Mindful that ‘there are no unmediated oppressions’ (Reay 1996: 447), class now opens up to articulations that recognise gender, ethnicity, sexuality, generation and disability (Byrne 2006, Gillies 2007, Taylor 2007, Johnson 2008). The search for meanings around class and its production(s) remains a dynamic process. In recognising that ‘the past shapes us, even as the present erases it’;21 the voices here, of researchers and participants, attest to the resonance and re-articulation of class as lived experience. 21  Linkton, S. 2001. Final plenary speech, Class, Space and Community – A Workshop Conference, Department of Sociology and Social Policy. University of Durham. 8th April 2001.

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Acknowledgements Many thanks to the editor for support with this chapter and the opportunity to add to this collection following an initial paper presented at the funded seminar series: ‘Our Working-Class Lives: A New Researchers’ Seminar Series’, Newcastle University. Bibliography Adair, V.C. 2005. US Working-Class/Poverty-Class Divides. Sociology (special issue on class), 39 (5), December 2005, 817–34. Argylle, M. 1994. The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour. London: Penguin. Ball, S.J. 2003. Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage. London: Routledge Falmer. Beck, U. 2000. Zombie Categories, in The Art of Life: On Living, Love and Death, edited by J. Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (eds) 1994. Reflexive Modernization. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. 1999 [1992]. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. 2005 [1986]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. Byrne, B. 2006. White Lives: The Interplay of ‘Race’, Class and Gender in Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Charlesworth, S. 2000. A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ezzy, D. 2002. Qualitative Analysis – Practice and Innovation. London: Routledge. Finch, L. 1993. The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, Class and Surveillance. New South Wales, Australia: Allen and Urwin. Foucault, M. 1988. Technologies of the Self, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by L.H. Martin, H. Gurman and P.H. Hutton. London: University of Massachusetts Press. Fraser, N. and Honneth, A. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition? A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange. London: Verso. Gamarnikow, E. and Green, A.G. 1999. The Third Way and Social Capital: Education Action Zones and a New Agenda for Education, Parents and Community. International Studies in the Sociology of Education, 9 (1), 3–22. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity. Giddens A. 1994. Living in a Post-Traditional Society, in Reflexive Modernization, edited by U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash. Cambridge: Polity. Gillies, V. 2007. Marginalised Mothers: Exploring Working-Class Experiences of Parenting. London: Routledge. Goldblatt, D. (ed.) 2004. Knowledge and the Social Sciences: Theory, Method, Practice. Second edition. London: The Open University.

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Haylett, C. 2001. Illegitimate Subjects?: Abject Whites, Neoliberal Modernisation and Middle Class Multiculturalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2001, 19, 351–70. Haylett, C. 2003. Remaking Labour Imaginaries: Social Reproduction and the Internationalising Project of Welfare Reform. Political Geography, 22, 765–88. Irwin, S. 2005. Reshaping Social Life. London: Routledge. Jenks, C. 1996. Childhood. London: Routledge. Johnson, P. 2008. Rude Boys: The Homosexual Eroticization of Class. Sociology, 42 (1), February 2008, 65–82. Lawler, S. 2000. Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects. London: Routledge. Lawler, S. 2003. Mobs and Monsters: Independent Man meets Paulsgrove Woman. Feminist Theory, 3 (1), 103–13. Lawler, S. 2004. Rules of Engagement: Habitus Power and Resistance, in Feminism After Bourdieu, edited by L. Adkins and B. Skeggs. London: Blackwell. Lawler, S. 2005. Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle Class Identities. Sociological Review, 55, August 2005, 431–46. McEwan, I. 2002. Atonement. Vintage. McRobbie, A. 2004. Notes on ‘What Not to Wear’ and Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence, in Feminism After Bourdieu, edited by L. Adkins and B. Skeggs. London: Blackwell. McRobbie, A. 2006. Yummy Mummies Leave a Bad Taste for Young Women, The Guardian, 2 March 2006. Medhurst, A. 2000. If Anywhere: Class Identifications and Cultural Studies Academics, in Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change, edited by S.R. Munt. London: Cassell. Murray, C. 1994. Underclass: The Crisis Deepens. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Pakulski, J. and Waters, M. 1996. The Death of Class. London: Sage. Reay, D. 1996. Dealing with Difficult Differences. Feminism and Psychology (special edition on class), 6 (3) August 1996, 443–56. Reay, D. 1998. Class Work. London: UCL Press. Reay, D. 2000. Children’s Urban Landscapes: Configurations of Class and Place, in Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change, edited by S.R. Munt. London: Cassell. Reay, D. 2004. Gendering Bourdieu’s concept of Capital: Emotional Capital, Women and Social Class, in Feminism after Bourdieu, edited by L. Adkins and B. Skeggs. London: Blackwell. Ricoeur, P. 1980. Narrative Time. Critical Inquiry, 7 (1), 169–90. Roberts, E. 1995. Women and Families: An Oral History 1940–1970. Oxford: Blackwell. Roberts, I. 1999. A Historical Construction of the Working Class, in Patterns of Social Inequality: Essays for Richard Brown, edited by H. Beynon and P. Glavanis. Harlow: Longman.

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Rose, N. 1998. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. 1999 [1989]. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. Second edition. London: Free Association Books. Russo, J. and Linkton S.L. 2005. New Working Class Studies. New York: Cornell University Press. Savage, M. 2000. Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Buckingham: Open University Press. Savage, M. 2005. Working Class Identities in the 60’s: Revisiting the Affluent Worker Studies. Sociology (special issue on class, culture and identity), 39 (5), December 2005, 929–46. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge. Skeggs, B. 2005. The Making of Class and Gender Through Visualising Moral Subject Formation. Sociology (special issue on class, culture and identity), 39 (5), December 2005, 965–82. Spivak, G.C. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Taylor, P. and Bain, P. 1999. ‘An Assembly Line in the Head’: Work and Employee Relations in the Call Centre. Industrial Relations Journal, 30 (2), 101–17. Taylor, Y. 2005. The Gap and How to Mind It: Intersections of Class and Sexuality. Sociological Research Online, 10 (3), 1–24. Taylor, Y. 2007. Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Y. 2009. Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capitals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Walkerdine, V. and Lucey, H. 1989. Democracy in the Kitchen: Regulating Mothers and Socialising Daughters. London: Virago.

Chapter 2

Is There Such a Thing as a Working-Class Academic? Paul Wakeling

Introduction Class is often a dirty word in the academy. Class is dead, missing in action or else locked outside the ivory tower unable to enter. Communities of scholars, of the mind, are taken to be communities of equals where reason and meritocracy are the only defining characteristics of the status order, not one’s family of birth, gender, sexuality or ethnicity. Whilst academics, particularly in the social sciences, readily identify inequalities in the world outside the campus, their gaze is seldom turned inward. Recently though, this has begun to change. In the last twenty years there has been no shortage of first-hand accounts of upward mobility into academia, on both sides of the Atlantic. A common experience can be identified across the various narratives, a shared history which has been deployed reflexively by some writers to understand how social class works in general. Many such authors identify themselves as ‘working-class academics’ whilst often acknowledging this epithet is oxymoronic. One might argue that class is only taboo for the middle-class in higher education: only they disavow their class and the salience of social class as a whole (Taylor 2005). More mischievously, I would consider that there is no longer any reticence among academics from working-class families to discuss these matters – quite the opposite in fact. This chapter presents a sympathetic critique of such literature. I first seek briefly to locate academics’ ‘objective’ class position, challenging the argument that many or even all academics might be considered ‘objectively’ working-class. I then present a meta-analysis of the testimonies of academics from the working-class, review the theoretical innovations which have arisen from this – particularly taking the emotional and gendered dimensions of class seriously – and consider some of   One might equally ask ‘is there such thing as the working-class?’ and emphasise any of the last three words of that question…but that is for another book!   Indeed it would seem they are not alone in identifying as working-class: a recent study found 57 per cent of the British population self-identified as working-class, despite only 31 per cent being classified as such using the official NS-SEC scheme (reported in Womack 2007).

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the criticisms others have made of this œuvre. Finally, I try to identify what has been omitted from existing accounts and suggest how this might be addressed. Once upon a time, universities were the preserve of the aristocratic or haute bourgeois male. University professors were well-paid and of high status and what few students they had formed a privileged elite. In 1860, when the higher education participation rate in England was less than one in every 50,000 of the age group (Lowe 1983), the University of Oxford recorded no ‘plebeians’ among its students and indeed few from the middle-class (Perkin 1983). The idea that a university academic might in any way be considered working-class was as absurd as the prospect of Hardy’s eponymous stonemason entering university in Jude the Obscure (Hardy 1896). However, the inexorable growth of participation in higher education through the twentieth century and coeval occupational changes in industrialised economies mean that the academic profession no longer represents comfortable sinecure for a lucky few. There are many more academics now than in the past. They work in a labour market where professional and knowledge-based work has expanded and manual work contracted. Inevitably there is greater internal differentiation within academia, with a division of academic labour emerging as well as the accentuation of status differences between institutions (Leathwood 2004, Shavit et al. 2007). Some would argue that there has been a proletarianisation of the profession, possibly associated with its feminisation, such that the academic is just another kind of wage labourer, indistinguishable from many other such employees in class position (see for instance Aronowitz 2000, Shumar 1997). Thus the profession as a whole has experienced downward mobility – academic jobs are more workingclass in nature than they used to be due to a decline in the degree of control and autonomy over their work which academics enjoy and a deterioration of their market situation (pay and associated benefits) relative to the other professions. The general changes in absolute rates of social mobility associated with these shifts in Western economies and their occupational structures mean that another dimension of the class position of academics has also radically altered in the course of the last 70 years or so. Since there are many more academic jobs now and far fewer traditional working-class occupations, it follows that some entrants to the profession will be the children of solidly working-class parents. Such arrivistes find themselves in a world which for hundreds of years was an aristocratic, clerical and male closed-shop, with a culture which is in any case generally conservative. The clash of cultures this entails has generated a rich seam of social scientific writing based on reflections by academics from working-class backgrounds on the contradictions inherent in their objective and subjective class positions, representing a considerable contribution to the ‘cultural turn’ in class analysis. Straddling the two worlds of a working-class childhood and the bourgeois academy gives a unique insight into the ontological workings of class. Far from  Things were rather different in Scotland however, where up to one-third of the university intake were working-class in the 1830s (Perkin 1983).

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being simply a material, economic phenomenon class is cultural too, experienced emotionally and in a gendered manner. Thus there are two distinct paths to follow in determining whether any academics can be considered working-class. Firstly, the ‘objective’ class position of academics, as represented by their wealth, status, the position of their occupation in the relations of production (and consumption) and all other such class markers, can be scrutinised. And secondly (and more productively), the subjective claims of individual academics of working-class heritage can be assessed and hopefully lessons learnt about what class ‘feels’ like and when (or whether) feeling is (not) enough. Academics in the Class Structure Where do academics sit in sociologists’ accounts of class structure? For the most part, they are unambiguously in the middle-class, usually in upper-middle-class positions. It is difficult to find a social scientist supporting the notion that all academics are members of the working-class. Even applying classical Marxist theory academics are problematic proletarians. They may be wage-labourers, but arguing that their surplus value is expropriated by the bourgeoisie is a little tenuous, not least because the ‘product’ – knowledge and educated minds – is so intangible. Although the chemist, engineer or clinical academic relies on the provision of certain large facilities to work effectively, this is not so for those in a great number of academic disciplines who possess their own means of production (and are thus arguably petit bourgeois): philosophers may have a desk, classroom, computer and a library provided, but ‘production’ takes place in their head. Gouldner’s (1979) theory of the ‘New Class’ gives a similarly prominent role to intellectuals and the technical intelligentsia, a class which includes academics. The power base of the New Class is its control of knowledge rather than ownership of the means of production; it is, if you like, the bourgeoisie of the service sector. Although potentially an agent for progress and change towards a fairer and more just society, the New Class is primarily an alternative elite, with interests sometimes in common with and sometimes opposed to those of capitalist owners. For Gouldner, academics are resolutely not working-class, although nor are they straightforwardly ‘middle-class’ or upper-class either. It is easy to conflate the two terms ‘intellectual’ and ‘academic’ but they are not one and the same. One can be an intellectual without being an academic and vice versa. The proportion of the total academic staff of universities who might be considered prominent or influential intellectuals is slight, a group much smaller   Indeed, intellectual property often remains with its originator in universities, not the employer.   On this basis Wright (1980) suggests ‘credentialed intellectuals’ have a contradictory class location, since they own ‘property’ in the form of skills, but not in the traditional Marxian sense of material goods.

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than the professoriate even. There undoubtedly is such a group of relatively powerful academic-intellectuals, advising government or prominently opposing it, appearing in the mass media or inter-connected with industry. But for every intellectual household name there are thousands of unknown lecturers, research assistants and the like. The current UK Government and the boards of many of its agencies contain plenty of PhD-holders, with academia the single most important source of quango’s board members (Griffiths et al. 2008) but the politicians and ‘quangocrats’ do not straightforwardly have common cause with the majority of ordinary higher education teachers. Many are willing to argue that the mass of academics are exploited, an exploitation thought to be increasing in tandem with the corporatisation of higher education and increasing management interference in teaching and research, particularly the rise of audit culture. Moreover, a number of those self-identifying as academics from working-class backgrounds highlight exploitative relations within the academy. Thus contract researchers are seen as higher education’s own working-class or even lumpen proletariat, one which is disproportionately working-class in origin, black and female (Black 2005, Reay 2004). This is the group which actually carries out the research that then appears under the name of the (typically white male) professor in charge, who may no more have done the research than Brunel ‘built’ the Great Western Railway. That such exploitation and hierarchy exists within higher education, together with a gendered division of labour, seems certain. In itself though, this is insufficient justification for identifying any academic as working-class. Most professions have a form of hierarchy which involves a degree of exploitation: junior doctors are lower paid and work longer hours than consultants and often perform many of the more routine tasks demanded of a physician. Similarly junior lawyers taking their ‘articles’ are low-paid and likely to work on the most routine cases. These professional hierarchies also have a gendered dimension. It does not follow that the occupational position and life circumstances of a junior professional such as an academic can be compared to that of someone in a ‘solidly’ working-class occupation such as a bus driver, cleaner, supermarket checkout assistant or lathe operator. In general, pay and conditions are better in the professions, as are the measurable outcomes for quality of life. Moreover, serving time as a junior professional leads for many (if not all) to better prospects: today’s junior doctor is tomorrow’s consultant, just as today’s research assistant is tomorrow’s senior lecturer. By contrast, many traditional working-class occupations are literally ‘dead end jobs’. Ryan and Sackrey (1996: 9–10) acknowledge this when they argue that all academics should be seen as part of the same social class (what they term the ‘professional/managerial’ class), although their assertion that academics’ ‘vital function is one of reproducing capitalist-class relations’ is starkly reductionist. Thus all modern schemas allocating occupations to social classes place academics somewhere in the middle-classes. A neo-Weberian approach taking into  As does the 2009 Obama government in the USA.

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account market conditions and work conditions as the determinants of one’s class, gives academic jobs a positive evaluation: they are relatively well paid, with good conditions of employment (working hours, holidays and other benefits) and with (again relatively speaking) a high degree of control of the work process. How many academics have been sacked or had their pay docked for poor punctuality? The ‘objective’ evidence is that academic jobs are not working-class. Academics do well even in income-based comparison with the male-dominated skilled workingclass occupations often popularly held to be very well-paid (Rose 2004). There is very little large-scale research on the social class background of academics. In the UK, the most recent relevant sample survey was undertaken by Halsey (1992: 203), finding 13.3 per cent of professors and 17.2 per cent of other academic staff were from a manual class background. Although the survey is now rather old, the proportion from manual backgrounds is quite low, bearing in mind that the manual working-class was much larger in the past than it is today and hence might have been expected, by sheer weight of numbers, to have provided a higher proportion of entrants to the rapidly expanding profession. On that basis, the number of academics who could ‘legitimately’ claim working-class heritage would also appear to be rather small: most academics seem to be the children of middle-class parents. The ‘employment-aggregate’ approach (Crompton 1993), where class position is entirely derived from occupation, is not the only way to conceive of or measure social class. As we shall see, most of those writing as academics from the workingclass employ a Bourdieusian-feminist perspective, with working-class affiliation based on heritage, social and cultural capital (see, for instance, most of the contributions in Dews and Law 1995, Mahony and Zmroczek 1997, Ryan and Sackrey 1995 and Tokarczyk and Fay 1993). This conception of class as lived identity underpins and influences the cultural turn in the sociology of class. It is a fine example of sociological imagination (Mills 1959), relating the biographical to broader social and historical processes and vice versa. Following Byrne (2005) however, I want to identify some ‘absences’ from the extant accounts and consider their implications for class analysis. Confessions and Caveats Before analysing the accounts of academics from working-class backgrounds, some confessions, excuses and qualifications are required. Presenting a critique of this writing is difficult because much of the literature is already reflexive, selfaware, self-critical, often knowingly ironic but above all honest. Even if, as I shall   It is worth remembering also however that higher education participation rates for those from such backgrounds were far lower a few decades ago.   In many cases this is a proto-Bourdieusian perspective, particularly when the writer in question is not a social scientist.

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argue, there is a certain cachet associated with working-class identity in some academic circles, it is self-deprecatingly acknowledged by many writers and one’s over-riding impression is of deeply-felt convictions laid bare, not identity-political dissembling. Where the object of criticism is as insightful and powerful as much of the writing I am discussing, the critic is faced with the dangers of over-statement, repetition, misrepresentation and pedantry. Moreover with such an emotionally charged subject, there is the potential to be unintentionally offensive too; however, emphasising the emotional aspect of social class is precisely the strength of this literature, so there is no avoiding engaging at this level. But there is a trickier predicament for a male author like me. I am acutely aware that much of the literature I am evaluating does not seek to separate the experience of being an academic from a working-class background from being a woman in academia; if I am drawing on my own experience in interpreting these writings, it is inevitably a partial one. In the spirit of honesty, I should admit that this gives me a sense of unease, lest I appear to be arrogantly dismissive of others’ experiences, or inadvertently plagiarise their reflexive discussion of their positions (see especially Childers 2002 and Hey 2006a). As is the custom (and necessarily so) in this debate, I should be upfront about my own background. The point is, as Bourdieu suggests in Sketch for a SelfAnalysis (2007), to make plain the personal history which inevitably influences one’s position (social and intellectual) and thus to declare an interest. In doing so I take heed of Morley’s counsel (1997: 109) on such confessionals: ‘there is always the danger of producing a piece of unrivalled self-indulgence, or worse, a literary strip-tease’. I was born in 1973, the only child of a sheet-metal worker and hosiery worker turned housewife, both themselves from white workingclass families, both born before World War II and both of whom left school at 15 without qualifications. We lived in a detached two-bedroom bungalow in a village just outside the city of Leicester, in the Midlands region of England and although not as comfortably-off as most of the neighbours, my parents could afford a family car and an annual holiday on the south coast. Their main aspiration for me was that I avoid factory work. There were books in the house, but they were all mine and I was encouraged academically but never pressured. I attended the local state primary school, high school and community college through to sixth-form, all of which had a pre-dominantly white middle-class intake. When I was 12 years old, my Dad suffered a heart attack and was unable to return to his job. Two years later, after a long bout of chronic illness, my Mum died. We went from relative prosperity to being a single-parent unemployed household with free school meals.   In hindsight, the neighbourhood I grew up in was obviously a big influence on me. In fact if one were to classify me on this basis (that is using a geodemographic rather than occupationally-based definition of social class) I would probably come out as lower middle-class. Recent research suggests that geodemographic measures may be better for prediction of various outcomes (health, education, etc.) than traditional employmentaggregate approaches (Burrows and Gane 2006).

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It was only really at this point that the class differences between me and most of my friends became apparent to me and it is no coincidence that this is when my interest in sociology began. Even so, when I compare my experience to my friend who grew up next door there is not a great deal of difference in eventual outcome, despite his being the son of a polytechnic lecturer and a social worker. We were born within a week of each other, went to the same schools, achieved very similar examination results, both went to Russell Group universities and both continued to PhD, albeit in different subjects. It is only looking back that I can see the advantages I had compared to most of my relatives who grew up on council estates and/or in larger nuclear families. I suppose the main difference between me and many of those writing about entering academia from a working-class background is that most of them experienced something of a culture shock at the school-to-university transition and had to quickly learn to switch class codes. I, on the other hand, was ‘class bilingual’ from a very early age, although like Halsey (1996: 237) haunted by his ‘manual uncles’, I can never quite shake the feeling that research is not ‘proper work’. ‘Caught in the Middle’ This feeling of being trapped between two class cultures, belonging in neither, is a common theme throughout the ‘working-class academic’ literature and recurs, although often with a highly reflexive and critical edge, in the Bourdieusian-feminist strand of writing.10 There is no ‘going back’ to working-class origins because university education and upward mobility change the individual psychologically and set them apart in the eyes of those ‘left behind’. At the same time, coming from a different class background to that dominant within the academy means one is similarly marked out and never quite able to gain full acceptance (or selfacceptance).11 Many describe feeling like a ‘fraud’ and a fear of being ‘found out’ as not quite good enough; conversely there is fear of appearing pretentious to family and friends who have been ‘left behind’, of being ‘above oneself’ and a strong sense of guilt at having ‘escaped’ (Mahony and Zmroczek 1997). The upwardly mobile are thus caught in a kind of academic purgatory. These ‘hidden injuries’ of class (Sennett and Cobb 1977) continue to disadvantage the scholar of working-class origin well into their academic career. However, research on US sociologists from working-class backgrounds found little outward sign of classcultural difference in pastimes, friendships and intimate partnerships: on the face of it, such individuals had been assimilated into a middle-class professional academic lifestyle. Differences were emotional – despite appearances, such individuals feel 10  It is difficult to categorise these latter approaches appropriately – I use this phrase for convenience, but recognise that it over-emphasises the influence of Bourdieu on this tradition. 11 This experience is common to a great many social and geographical migrants.

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very different (Grimes and Morris 1997). These differences are psychologically tangible, encompassing feelings of shame and rage and a constant (material and existential) struggle to prove oneself. The position that such writers find themselves in – that of simultaneously being both an insider and outsider – lends itself to sociological insight. They become covert participant observers, to whom the familiar is also strange. From this position, the class-partiality of the academy is visible (and so too, its highly gendered ordering). Bourdieu’s (1988) study of the French university system as a ‘field’, with hierarchies built on the basis of social class and academic judgements correlating closely with the mobilisation of cultural capital is one example. Another is found across the English Channel: a number of British sociologists from working-class backgrounds have highlighted class and gender injustices in higher education’s promotion system (Reay 2004), external audit and assessment processes (Black 2005) and the kinds of work which men and women from different class backgrounds carry out within it (Hey 1997, Reay 2004). Lucky Jim provides literary evidence for much of this some 50 years ago (Amis 1954). But the key contribution of the genre is to influence the way in which we conceive of social class in the first place. Ryan and Sackrey (1996), who arguably originated this sub-field with their influential book Strangers in Paradise, argue that the existential doubt and conflict of identity suffered by academics from workingclass backgrounds are an internalisation of the contradictions and conflicts of the US capitalist system in which they and their institutions are implicated. A strength of their analysis is placing the accounts of their upwardly-mobile respondents in the historical context of a rapidly burgeoning and increasingly hierarchical higher education system which faced an urgent need for new teachers and was ‘forced’ to find these outside of its traditional recruitment groups. The weakness is their insistence on seeing higher education as principally determined by the broader capitalist system. Although they mention the white-dominated and patriarchal facets of higher education, its classed aspects are most emphasised. But even including these other axes of inequality, it is a mistake to see the university as simply reflecting society as a whole. Bourdieu’s insistence on viewing higher education as an autonomous ‘field’, affected by its relationship with wider society but not completely controlled by it, is a subtler and more accurate portrayal (Bourdieu 1988). That is to say, the ‘rules of the game’ within higher education are subtly but importantly different to those outside it, with greater value attached to the metaphysical than the material and where, consequentially, very fine gradations of social distinction take on increased significance. Recent British feminist narratives of upward mobility to academia have helped to change the ontology of social class itself. Starting from the principle that ‘the personal is political’ (Hey 2003) they have sought to change how social class is understood, arguing that its cultural and psychological (or subjective) manifestations are equally important in understanding its causes and effects as its macroeconomic, labour-market derived expression. Social class is shown to be as much about the (largely feminine) domestic sphere and community as it is

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about the predominantly masculine and public world of work, the setting in which it has usually been analysed. Influenced by Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital and habitus, they show for instance how their socialisation in the family and their formative experiences shape an enduring set of dispositions and practices. This ‘habitus’ persists through their adult existence and influences their life-trajectory in myriad ways. Thus the culture of the academy is experienced as alien and is evaluated from the position of an outsider as privileged, hierarchical and indeed class-ridden, not to say full of ‘crap’ at times (Mahony and Zmroczek 1997), but this world also evaluates them in ways which might include initial exclusion through to marginalised accommodation or begrudging acceptance. This is a resolutely female experience however, different to ‘the wistful reminiscences of scholarship boys’ (Hey 2003: 320) and unapologetically emotional. It does not separate the experience of being a woman from the experience of coming from a working-class background and it takes seriously how it feels to be in such a position in institutions which are dominated by a middle-class and masculine culture. Thus whilst ‘objectively’ these academic women are successful and generally financially comfortable (relatively speaking of course) they suffer from what Bourdieu labels hysteresis: the habitus of their family and community of origin is ingrained and will not easily go away, leading to the reported (and very real) feelings of guilt, inadequacy, alienation but also anger. The tension between subjective and objective positions means that the female academic from a workingclass background experiences social class more intensely. Wise (1997: 123–4) summarises this nicely: [In the university] my identity as a person with a ‘working-class’ background predominates, and deeply affects the way I feel about the work that I do. This is because it is the only place left that I ‘feel’ working-class, where I am surrounded by people…posher than me, who have a ‘better’ education…speak differently and for all I know, think differently. Outside my place of work…I am to all intents and purposes a member of the educated middle-class.

At times, some writers in this tradition suggest that one’s social class is almost innate, if not quite something one is born with, at least then something which made an early indelible mark: ‘to be born in the working-class is to be etched in particular ways that are immutable’ (Ryan and Sackrey 1996: xvii); or as Kuhn (1995: 98) argues, ‘Class is something beneath your clothes, under your skin, in your reflexes, in your psyche, at the very core of your being’. Being workingclass becomes an impermeable identity one can never get away from, even having apparently left it.

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Working-Class Academics: A Critique Having rejected an ‘objective’ allocation of academics to the working-class, how should the arguments set out about subjective class identity in the academic diasporic literature be judged? A key difficulty in the autobiographical approach is that one is always faced with someone who had it harder and to whom the inner traumas and claimed oppression of those in collections such as Strangers in Paradise or Class Matters seem like the whingeing of the (relatively) privileged. Adair (2005: 827) argues that educational opportunity is open to the working-class in ways that are denied those from the severely materially-deprived, benefits-dependent ‘poverty class’, a group separate from and disdained by the working-class: Tellingly, none of the contributors to [Working Class Women in the Academy or Strangers in Paradise] described experiences of homelessness, lack of food, being left to fend for themselves while parents worked, the material costs of going without medical or dental care or the pain and humiliation of public vilification.

From the point of view of someone growing up ‘in a profoundly poor family …constantly ill…because we could not afford medical attention’ (Adair 2005: 822) the grief and grievances of scholars from working-class backgrounds are themselves a privilege, an angst which those from the ‘poverty-class’ literally cannot afford. Adair’s critique, a swing back in the direction of a materialist view of class, also points the way to Bottero’s (2004: 999) broader critique of recent developments in class analysis. Bottero argues that the very concept, ‘class’, is not developed beyond an ill-defined and ‘notoriously slippery’ ‘popular usage’, seen in catch-all categories such as ‘working-class’ and ‘middle-class’. Empirical investigation shows these ‘classes’ to be highly differentiated internally, to the extent that is more useful to talk of ‘hierarchy’ or ‘stratification’. In these terms, any claim to be from ‘The Working-class’ (sic) is problematic. Adair has correctly (in my view) identified an absence: consideration of relative positions within a ‘big’ working-class. However, her account has its own weaknesses. Firstly, the concept of ‘poverty class’ is quite difficult to sustain because much research suggests that enduring material poverty is quite rare (at least in the UK), with few families remaining in poverty for an extended period and a fluid boundary between those on benefits and the working-class (Spicker 2002). Another problem with this criticism is the danger of (unintentional) self-parody: there will always be someone in more difficult circumstances and the situation of the US poor looks very different viewed from Mali or Rio’s favelas. Such discussions are always at risk of degenerating into a version of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, where a group of men become ever more outrageous in their attempts to outdo each others’ reminiscences of childhood poverty.

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Keeping my tongue in my cheek, this links to another potential criticism of the diasporic literature: that the claim to working-class identity is a claim to a kind of subversive badge of honour such as is beloved of academics everywhere. Fish’s (1994: 278, emphasis added) devastating turn of phrase captures this better than I could: If one listens to academics, one might make the mistake of thinking they would like their complaints to be remedied; but in fact the complaints of academics are their treasures, and were you to remove them, you would find either that they had been instantly replenished or that you were now their object. The reason that academics want and need their complaints is that it is important to them to feel oppressed, for in the psychic economy of the academy, oppression is the sign of virtue.

As someone who worked in universities in a non-academic post for a long time, this seems a very telling summary of the academic mindset! But more seriously, there is definitely a certain kudos, particularly in branches of the social sciences, attached to oppressed identities, including coming from a working-class background. Taylor (2005) elaborates on this point when she found in a seminar on working-class lives that the ‘real’ working-class subjects of sociological research were positioned as dis-identifying from their class and only ostensibly middleclass academics embraced the label (whilst at the same time few embraced or even acknowledged the label middle-class). Skeggs has made a similar point in relation to her research on working-class women’s class identities (Skeggs 1997, Hey 2003). This is also perhaps reflected in the popularity of the ‘working-class academic’ topic, judged by the number of those ‘coming out’ as working-class in the various books on the subject. Tokarczyk and Fay (1993) reported that their session on it at the Modern Languages Association conference was so popular the room was filled to capacity and their book has over twenty personal testimonies, as do each of Strangers in Paradise and This Fine Place So Far From Home (Dews and Law 1995). The same observations are repeated over and again in these books. The repetition and weight of numbers lends credence to the experiences articulated, but paradoxically also builds into something of a discourse of the ‘working-class academic’ as different. In fact, the mobility experience is a very common one: Stories of social mobility are ‘two a penny’. The sociological evidence shows that lots of people in Britain have enjoyed mobility from working-class origins to middle-class destinations, via education or otherwise, since the 1940s. It has not been unusual for social mobility to be of the long-range kind either – including mobility from unskilled manual origins to high-level professional destinations (Devine 2004: 171).

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That is not to deny that upward mobility into academic jobs is a struggle. However, there is the possibility that academics from working-class background are under a misapprehension of ‘false uniqueness’ similar to that identified among new working-class entrants to higher education, thinking that their experience is uncommon and that they alone feel different (Thorpe et al. 2007). The weight of evidence from studies of social mobility is on the contrary: absolute mobility is such that most members of the ‘service-class’ are not from service-class origins (Bottero 2005). Thus in the vastly expanded university system, the availability of many new positions means upward mobility from a working- or ‘intermediate’class background must be relatively common. Without comparing the experience of academics to those upwardly mobile into other professional or managerial positions it is difficult to judge whether academia is a special case. Such comparisons are missing from the genre. The possibility remains that the nature of the scholarly life means experiences and feelings reported by those academics who have ‘moved up’ from the working-class are substantially different to those in other middle-class jobs who may experience no such psychic trauma. The dominance in the field of higher education of cultural capital as a positional resource perhaps means that the ‘clash of class cultures’ will be more sharply felt than elsewhere. More prosaically, those attracted to an academic career are typically much more given to introspection and to habitually questioning everything about the world (since that is in essence the scholar-researcher’s vocation). Grimes and Morris (1997) note that a common explanation of the academic success of their sample is simply ‘being clever’; and Mahony and Zmroczek (1997) also recount their respondents’ delight in study, books and intellectual pursuits. Therefore it is highly likely that academics from a working-class background will feel differently about upward mobility than those in other fields who are similarly mobile: the difference is one of personality perhaps, not of social structure. In a similar vein, without hearing of the fate and feelings of the working-class contemporaries of academics from a working-class background neither can we be certain of how those ‘left behind’ feel. It is quite possible that the longed for or wistfully remembered working-class community of the diasporic writers is despised or rejected by those that remain. At the very least, the class expatriate would find the ‘old country’ has changed if they were to return for good. Finally, there is a question of subject discipline. In all of the writing about academics from working-class backgrounds there is a conflation of the terms ‘academic’ and ‘social scientist’ and/or ‘arts/humanities professor’. As Ryan and Sackrey admit, there are no natural scientists, medics or engineers in their sample, nor do they appear in any of the other collections. Instead we find most of the autobiographical accounts are written by sociologists, those working in literature, history, gender studies and so on. The voices of those from workingclass backgrounds working in chemistry, mathematics, civil engineering, business studies or any number of other subjects are absent. There are a number of reasons why this might be the case. Social scientists and humanities scholars are less likely to come across scientists and engineers in their professional (or social) lives: they

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go to different conferences, work in different buildings and so on. Those in the sciences will therefore be less likely to encounter formal or informal discussions of the type which have generated the literature under discussion, although conversely, there are likely to be greater numbers of academics from working-class backgrounds in the sciences as many science and engineering subjects have high concentrations of working-class students (see, for England: National Audit Office 2002: 9). The concepts under discussion are more likely to be alien too, such that it is possible that the experiences of an academic engineer and a sociologist from working-class homes are similar, but the former lacks the language with which to describe them. However, the null hypothesis cannot be ruled out: that is, the feelings of dislocation, exclusion and being ‘caught in the middle’ reported in the social sciences and humanities are just not there in the sciences. This disciplinary lacuna is a weakness of most writing in this area. However, it is possible to account for different working-class experiences by subject whilst retaining the overall analytical framework used, even though previous writers in this tradition have not explicitly addressed the relationship between social class and subject of study. In the typology of subjects developed by Bourdieu in his studies of the French higher education system (Bourdieu 1988, 1996) subject disciplines occupy positions in a hierarchy internal to the ‘field’ of higher education which are broadly determined by their relation to the dominant culture (that is the value they place on cultural capital and ‘taste’) and their degree of abstraction. In other words, ‘pure’ metaphysical subjects requiring talent are generally more highly regarded than applied subjects requiring diligence and hard-work. These evaluations mirror class cultures: high culture, abstract thought and an aversion for practicality are bourgeois characteristics, whereas concern for practical application and usefulness are typical of working-class dispositions.12 It is no surprise then that those from working-class backgrounds end up more often in applied subjects, nor is it surprising that when employed there as academics they are apparently less likely to articulate a sense of disjuncture. Conclusion: A Class Act? Is there such thing as a working-class academic? On the basis of occupational definitions of social class or other measures such as education the answer is clearly in the negative. Are the insights of those academics from working-class backgrounds therefore delusional and of no value? Clearly not, since they have contributed to the productive cultural turn in the sociology of stratification. 12  These traits are also gendered: think of the (again stereotypical) contrast between subjects requiring emotional engagement (for example, social psychology, literature, creative and performing arts; large female majority in the student body) and those needing logic and rationality (economics, experimental psychology, the physical sciences; large male majority among students).

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This school of thought has eschewed an exclusive concentration on the material dimensions of class, giving us new ways of: better specifying the construction of the conditions and the effects of material inequalities outside of what (for some) are the customary heroic narratives of collective struggle. To argue this is not to reduce class to ‘the personal’, more the case of showing how new times massively amplify how class has always worked its way through, on and behind us (Hey 2003: 320, emphasis added).

True, there is a danger of sociological ‘group-think’ in this tradition, with writers of similar background and history reinforcing each others’ stance rather than trying to identify how their experiences are different from others (on grounds of subject discipline, poverty, sexuality or ethnicity for instance). But this homophily is not necessarily a weakness, since it was the initial catalyst for the genre. Although these writers emphasise the ‘working-class’ rather than ‘academic’ aspect of their identity, many make the point that the internal moral conversation about class is universal: Bourdieu is right to emphasise the dangers of projecting features of the special conditions of academic life onto others, particularly the contemplative relation to the world, but there are also dangers of doing the opposite – denying or marginalising the life of the mind in others…As Margaret Archer’s research shows, reflexivity is certainly not the preserve of academics but is common to people regardless of their social position (Sayer 2005: 29).

Reflexivity is a great strength of much of the writing of academics from workingclass backgrounds. Thus Hey (2006a) takes the invitation to ‘get over it’ from a respondent to her paper on class and success in the academy as the starting point for a meta-analysis of the ‘melancholia’ of the discourse. She notes that some within the tradition have seen the autobiographical voice as a regressive reaction to the trauma of a working-class childhood (Childers 2002) or even as a form necessarily expressed in terms which unwittingly support the dominant discourse of workingclass inferiority (Skeggs 1997). Perhaps a greater strength of the narratives though, particularly those in the Class Matters collection (Mahony and Zmroczek 1997), is their demonstration that social class is experienced as innately gendered: it is ‘different for girls’. As some of them hint (Reay 2004) there is a racial dimension to social class too, but this is largely absent from the discourse.13 I am reminded of an old theory of social mobility which distinguishes between ‘sponsored’ and ‘contest’ mobility (Turner 1960). It seems to me that progress in the academy, in what, after all, remains a profession which retains guild-like features, is easier if one is ‘sponsored’ (in the moral, not financial sense), serving an apprenticeship to become a copy of the master (sic) one follows. This sponsorship may be unconscious, but it helps explain why it appears easier to get on if you are 13  See hooks (1993) for a notable exception.

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white and male, even if you are also working-class. That is perhaps why those sociologists who had been ‘scholarship boys’ emphasised the formal, ‘objective’ aspect of class and educational progression, rather than how it felt – they knew they were a minority of their class peer group, but once through the eleven-plus examination which controlled entry to grammar school, they were not made to feel like outsiders. The cultural turn, of which the working-class academic literature is part, has fundamentally undermined the thesis that ‘class is dead’ by showing how it manifests itself in the personal, in the psyche and in emotion. The problem is in this tradition that class is not ‘undead’ as in Beck’s (1992) contention that it is a ‘zombie’ category. Rather it becomes immortal: no amount of social mobility or conscious effort on the part of even a highly socially mobile individual can scrape away the traces of the birth class, even if this were desired. At times we are faced with a class fundamentalism, not to say essentialism. If class is ‘something in the blood, in the very fibre of a man or woman’ (Reay 2005: 911), then we are faced with a paradox: how is it that those from working-class backgrounds can ever enter and succeed in the university, gaining professorships or in some cases becoming some of the leading scholars of their generation? Butler (1990) famously argued that gender roles are not determined by sex but only emerge through repeated practice and active performance. If such an apparently fixed category as gender is not biologically determined, then class, which is after all social, must result from similar performances. Hey (2006b) has begun to show how this might be understood in an educational setting and it is writ large in the autobiographies where the process of self-consciously adopting another habitus than one’s ‘own’ is recounted time after time. Thus even for Halsey, home and school: was a double life, rather like the old film in which Alec Guinness appears as a sea captain shuttling backwards and forwards between Gibraltar and Morocco and changing his personality and…the photos on the cabin wall at each crossing (Halsey 1996: 22).

In George Bernard Shaw’s famous play Pygmalion (2008 [1913]), a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, makes a bet with his friend about Eliza Doolittle, a poor street flower seller that ‘in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party’ (19), and succeeds so convincingly that no-one will believe him when he tells them ‘the truth’. The academic from a working-class background is neither Henry Higgins nor Eliza Doolittle; in the end, she is both. Acknowledgements I am grateful to participants in the ‘Our Working-Class Lives’ seminar series and to Wendy Bottero and Analía Meo for comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

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Bibliography Adair, V. 2005. US Working-Class/Poverty-Class Divides. Sociology, 39 (5), 817– 34. Amis, K. 1954. Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz Press. Aronowitz, S. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Black, P. 2005. Class Matters in UK Higher Education. Women’s Studies International Forum, 28 (2), 127–38. Bottero, W. 2004. Class Identities and the Identity of Class. Sociology, 38 (5), 985–1003. Bottero, W. 2005. Stratification: Social Division and Inequality. London and New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1988. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press [translated by P. Collier]. Bourdieu, P. 1996. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press [translated by L.C. Clough]. Bourdieu, P. 2007. Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press [translated by R. Nice]. Burrows, R. and N. Gane 2006. Geodemographics, Software and Class. Sociology, 40 (5), 793–812. Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Byrne, D. 2005. Class, Culture and Identity: A Reflection on Absences Against Presences. Sociology, 39 (5), 807–16. Childers, M. 2002. ‘The Parrot or the Pit Bull’? Trying to Explain Working-Class Life. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (1), 201–20. Crompton, R. 1993. Class and Stratification: An Introduction to Current Debates. Cambridge: Polity Press. Devine, F. 2004. Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dews, C.L. and C. Leste Law (eds) 1995. This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Fish, S. 1994. The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing Too, edited by S. Fish. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 273–80. Gouldner, A.W. 1979. The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era. London: Macmillan.

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Griffiths, D., Miles, A. and M. Savage 2008. The End of the English Cultural Elite? The Sociological Review, 56 (s1), 187–209. Grimes, M. D. and J. M. Morris 1997. Caught in the Middle: Contradictions in the Lives of Sociologists from Working-Class Backgrounds. Westport, CT: Praeger. Halsey, A.H. 1992. Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Halsey, A.H. 1996. No Discouragement: An Autobiography. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Hardy, T. 1896. Jude the Obscure. London: Osgood, McIlvaine. Hey, V. 1997. Northern Accent and Southern Comfort: Subjectivity and Social Class, in Class Matters: ‘Working-Class’ Women’s Perspectives on Social Class, edited by P. Mahony and C. Zmroczek. London: Taylor & Francis, 140–51. Hey, V. 2003. Joining the Club? Academia and Working-Class Femininities. Gender and Education, 15 (3), 319–35. Hey, V. 2006a. ‘Getting Over It’? Reflections on the Melancholia of Reclassified Identities. Gender and Education, 18 (3), 295–308. Hey, V. 2006b. The Politics of Performative Resignification: Translating Judith Butler’s Theoretical Discourse and its Potential for a Sociology of Education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27 (4), 439–57. hooks, b. 1993. Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education, in Working-Class Women in the Academy: Labourers in the Knowledge Factory, edited by M.M. Tokarczyk and E.A. Fay. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 99–111. Kuhn, A. 1995. Family Secrets–Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso. Leathwood, C. 2004. A Critique of Institutional Inequalities in Higher Education (or an Alternative to Hypocrisy for Higher Educational Policy). Theory and Research in Education, 2 (1), 31–48. Lowe, R. 1983. The Expansion of Higher Education in England, in The Transformation of Higher Learning 1860–1930: Expansion, Diversification, Social Opening and Professionalization in England, Germany, Russia and the United States, edited by K. H. Jarausch. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 37–56. Mahony, P. and C. Zmroczek 1997. Why Class Matters, in Class Matters: ‘Working-Class’ Women’s Perspectives on Social Class, edited by P. Mahony and C. Zmroczek. London: Taylor & Francis, 1–7. Mills, C. W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Morley, L. 1997. A Class of One’s Own: Women, Social Class and the Academy, in Class Matters: ‘Working-Class’ Women’s Perspectives on Social Class, edited by P. Mahony and C. Zmroczek. London: Taylor & Francis, 109–22. National Audit Office 2002. Widening Participation in Higher Education in England. London: The Stationery Office.

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Perkin, H. 1983. The Pattern of Social Transformation in England, in The Transformation of Higher Learning 1860–1930: Expansion, Diversification, Social Opening and Professionalization in England, Germany, Russia and the United States, edited by K.H. Jarausch. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 207–18. Reay, D. 2004. Cultural Capitalists and Academic Habitus: Classed and Gendered Labour in UK Higher Education. Women’s Studies International Forum, 27 (1), 31–9. Reay, D. 2005. Beyond Consciousness? The Psychic Landscape of Social Class. Sociology, 39 (5), 911–28. Rose, D. 2004. Class Equality [Letter to the editor]. Times Higher Education Supplement, 21 May. Ryan, J. and C. Sackrey 1996. Strangers in Paradise: Academics From the Working Class (Second Edition). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Sayer, A. 2005. The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sennett, R. and J. Cobb 1997. The Hidden Injuries of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shavit, Y., Arum, R. and Gamoran, A. (eds) 2007. Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shaw, G.B. 2008 [1913]. Pygmalion. Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books. Shumar, W. 1997. College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education. London: The Falmer Press. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Spicker, P. 2002. Poverty and the Welfare State: Dispelling the Myths. London: Catalyst. Taylor, Y. 2005. By the Skin of My Teeth: Working-Class Academics and the Career Ladder. Network, summer 2005, 21. Thorpe, A., Snell, M., Hoskins, S., and J. Bryant 2007. False Uniqueness: The SelfPerception of New Entrants to Higher Education in the UK and its Implications for Access – A Pilot Study. Higher Education Quarterly, 61 (1), 3–22. Tokarczyk, M.M. and E.A. Fay 1993. Working-Class Women in the Academy: Labourers in the Knowledge Factory. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Turner, R.H. 1960. Sponsored and Contest Mobility in the School System. American Sociological Review, 25 (6), 855–67. Wise, S. 1997. What are Feminist Academics For? in Knowing Feminisms: On Academic Borders, Territories and Tribes, edited by L. Stanley. London: Sage, 120–31. Womack, S. 2007. So Who do We Really Think We Are? The Edge, 24, 6–8. Wright, E.O. 1980. Varieties of Marxist Conceptions of Class Structure. Politics and Society, 9 (3), 323–70.

Chapter 3

Becoming ‘Somebody’: Examining Class and Gender Through Higher Education Sarah Evans

Introduction One of the aims of new working-class studies is to find ways to better explore the interconnections between class, race and gender (Russo and Linkon 2005). The ‘cultural turn’ in sociology created possibilities for further understanding how social injustice can be reproduced via cultural mechanisms and was particularly helpful in producing space for new discussions about intersecting identifications and politics. However, it was later argued that the theorising borne of the cultural turn failed to produce a framework which fully analysed the relationship between different subject positions and economic distribution. This has led to research that examines how particular groups are excluded as legitimate participants in the economies of capital and morality. For instance, Fraser and Bedford (2008) have argued that welfare-towork programmes in the United States are premised upon particular assumptions about the place of women as workers such that women (black women particularly so) are framed as undeserving subjects of social welfare, whereas unemployed (white) men are framed as deserving a helping-hand to return to their natural position as participants in the labour market. Similarly, Phoenix has suggested that social and cultural constructions of lone mothers in the Britain and the US have increasingly positioned them as ‘undeserving of either public sympathy or economic support,’ (Phoenix 1996: 175). Focusing on the UK case, Skeggs has argued that workingclass and lone-mothers are constructed as ‘both the problem and the solution to national ills. They can be used and they can be blamed’ (Skeggs 1997: 48). Despite the different histories of state welfare, and the differing ways in which social class has been framed historically in the US and the UK, it is clear that these constructions have great significance to the structure of inequalities within the United Kingdom. Indeed, it can be argued that the demise of a public discourse about social class in the UK has left working-class people unable to participate in political questions of distribution in ways that were more common in the earlier half of the twentieth century (Evans 2008, McKibbin 1998). At the same time, discourses about racial and gender inequality have been mainstreamed within politics and public policy to the extent that further debate about the effects of racial and gender inequalities is seemingly considered to be anachronistic by those in power (McRobbie 2007). The space between political rhetoric about higher

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education (HE) and how it is lived and experienced by students in England and Wales can be a particularly telling lens through which to examine these issues. This chapter raises questions about the (im)possibilities for working-class women who hope to achieve symbolic capital and recognition via the mechanism of higher education. It points to the discourses in educational policy and practice which work to exclude working-class women from parity in access to higher education and the professional labour market in which these young women aim to eventually participate. The young women with whom I spoke were loaded with a deep sense of personal responsibility in ‘becoming someone’. They wanted to be recognised as legitimate participants in the economies of morality and capital, and viewed higher education as the means through which status and respect would be achieved, but also as the means through which their responsibility for others would be materialised. Methodology This chapter draws on a study which took place during the academic year 2005– 2006 at a mixed comprehensive school in a South London borough. The borough was ranked as the 12th most deprived in England and Wales in the 2001 census which also showed the area to have a high proportion of council tenants (tenants of rented social housing). The school’s results in GSCE and A level examinations had significantly improved in recent years and the Sixth Form culture was one in which entry to higher education was increasingly normalised. As evidence of this, since 2001 on average just over half of the cohort has gone on to study for a degree at a HE institution, and in the academic year previous to this study 63 per cent of the cohort enrolled for a university degree (albeit with a significant preference for those London universities which fall outside the remit of the prestigious University of London colleges) (Evans 2009). A group of 21 female students aged 17 or 18 were interviewed on two separate occasions during their final academic year in Sixth Form college. All of the students were studying at least two subjects at A level. Between the first and second rounds of interviews one of the respondents had dropped out of college, reducing the overall number of respondents to 20. Both sets of interviews were organised around key themes about the transition from school to university, hopes for the   Most social housing in the UK is managed by the local authorities and is a service which was central to the formation of the post-World War II Welfare State.   In the UK GCSE examinations are the public examinations taken at age 16. A level examinations are the most commonly taken examinations at age 18 and remain the most significant requirement for application to university study.  As an indication of this improvement, in 1995, 18 per cent of the year group obtained five or more A* to C grades. Nine years later in 2004, 75 per cent of the students obtained five or more A* to C grades at GCSE, which was not only high for the Local Authority (41.6 per cent), but was also high for the country in general (53.7 per cent).

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future and expectations of female adulthood. Running through all of these areas were ideas about commitment to current and potential future family circumstances, as well as reflections on friendships, teachers and identity. The interview data was complemented by observational data collected during periods of participant observation on the school premises, enabling further informal contact with the respondents as well as discussions with staff and other students. I was present at the school during the day on which the respondents’ A level results were released and was able to talk to the majority of the respondents about their plans for the following year. Of the initial 21 respondents, seven came from ethnic minority backgrounds from first generation immigrant families from Somalia, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and India. These girls all spoke a language other than English at home, but had either been born in the UK or had lived in the UK since pre-school age (Evans 2009). The level of ethnic diversity in the sample was reflective of the diversity in the borough in general (in the 2001 Census, 37 per cent of the borough were classified as from ethnic minority backgrounds). The remaining respondents were White British and had been born in the United Kingdom; all of these girls had at least one parent who was from London and 12 (just over half of the entire sample) had at least one parent who had always lived in the local area. The vast majority of the sample had little contact with higher education through the experiences of family and friends. Of the 21 respondents, only one had a parent who had been through higher education in the UK while two had older siblings who had been to universities in England. The remaining respondents would be the first in their immediate family to embark upon a higher education degree at university in the UK. The issue of parental educational background was particularly significant to finding a sample during the early stages of the research. However, once initial contact had been made with the respondents, it was a combination of parental education, parental employment and self-definition which were used as the key indicators of class background. In simple terms the majority of the sample conformed to social-classes III to V (of the Registrar General’s scale) and identified themselves as ‘working-class’. Nevertheless, the issue of identifying and ascribing class was not one which was straightforward – particularly given the interaction between ethnicity and class. From the outset of this research Bourdieu’s conception of capitals was crucial to understanding the way in which material deprivation becomes manifest in cultural and symbolic terms. Bourdieu’s conception of the reproduction of class through culture allows for an understanding of the relationship of working-class people to middle-class institutions, and attaches importance to those everyday experiences of class which   The census data showed the largest ethnic minority group to be Black African (McDonnell 2002).   Indeed, the problem of conflating of ethnicity and social class is exposed by work which demonstrates substantive differences in economic advantage between different ethnic groups (for example: Modood et al. 1997).

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are more complicated than objective measures would suggest. This was important in this study for while in objective terms the majority of the sample could easily be classified as ‘working-class’, the young women’s experiences of class were (as is documented here) lived through their gender and ethnicity as well in and through family structure, background and relationship to the local area. In understanding and recognising class in the lives of these respondents it was significant that I had grown-up in the area local to the school and had been a student there from the ages of 12–18 (leaving in 1997). My parents still live in the house in which I grew up and both of my younger siblings were also pupils at the school until they were 18. My sister was in the academic year above the respondents in this study. In saying something about my relationship to the site of this research, and to the people upon whose words and lives this research project is based, I acknowledge the inevitable incompleteness of this research and lay open to interpretation my own habitus and its potential bearing upon this project. To ignore this aspect of the social research would be to enhance the position of privilege with respect to the respondents already entrenched in the research relationship. Furthermore, significant criticisms have been directed at middle-class researchers attempting to interpret the lives of working-class people. Indeed, as Bourdieu has put it, intellectuals usually apprehend ‘the working-class condition through schemes of perception and appreciation which are not those that the members of the workingclass themselves use to apprehend it’ (Bourdieu 1984: 373 in Charlesworth 2000: 203) such that the ‘limitations of middle-classness should be acknowledged’ (Hey 1997). My siblings and I were unusual at the school in that we came from a middleclass household in what was then, and essentially still is, a mainly working-class area. Given the class background of my parents and the material advantages I had when growing-up, the habitus of the respondents was not mine. Local knowledge and shared experiences of social space provided common talking points and were significant in achieving and maintaining good relationships with the respondents. In addition, I would suggest that the similarity that the lives of these respondents bore to the lives of the close friends I had while growing up was important in that it enabled sensitivity ‘to the character of existence that social conditions circumscribe and which people articulate in their being-in-the-world, even when they are consigned to silence’ (Charlesworth 2000: 73). Mix and That ‘Something Special’ The UK New Labour drive to ‘widen access’ to higher education is one that has spoken of the need to address inequalities in access to universities whilst at the same time refusing to concretely acknowledge that social class is a key factor in determining access to and experience of Higher Education. Indeed in 2003, The Guardian newspaper reported that Margaret Hodge (the then Higher Education Minister) had been encouraged by Charles Clarke (the then Education Secretary) to retract plans which would specifically aim to increase the proportion

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of working-class students attending university in England and Wales (Woodward 2003, Taylor 2008). It was reported that the plans were regarded by Clarke to be ‘inappropriate’ and that rather than addressing class in particular he preferred to broaden the ‘mix’ of students more generally. As has been addressed by writers such as Bryne (2006), members of the white middle-class often value openness to ‘mix’ (ibid.: 1008) particularly with regard to ethnicity since this fits into ‘general liberal desires for freedom, creativity and friendliness’. Bryne’s work has outlined how a particular form of cultural capital associated with this ‘openness to mix’ can be acquired by middle-class people, especially within the context of large cities and commitment to ‘liberalism’ but that this commitment is bounded by the fear of ‘too much difference’ (see Taylor this volume). I would suggest that for the dominant classes the attitude towards ‘mix’ in terms of ‘background’ (in this case as tautology for class) operates in a similar manner. The presence of ‘respectable’ working-class people in middle-class spaces and institutions serves to symbolize liberal beliefs in equality and meritocracy. The caveat to this is that those most visibly identifiable as from the poorest ‘backgrounds’ (‘chavs’ and the ‘undeserving poor’) remain excluded from these spaces, for it is these people who serve as a constant reminder of the limits to the kind of liberalism to which the dominant classes subscribe (see Gidley and Rooke this volume). Representations of ‘mix’ and discussions about commitment to ‘increasing mix’ are relevant to this chapter because it is in using this kind of discourse that the most prestigious universities have framed their plans to widen access. This first section will examine some of the respondents’ ideas about elite institutions with reference to the pervading discourses about higher education at the time of the interviews. It aims to demonstrate that the kind of commitment to widening participation with which these institutions are engaged is embedded within the kind of liberal framework outlined above, namely one which does very little to acknowledge ways in which class, gender and race shape the way that young people are able to engage with higher education. The young women with whom I spoke often felt a combination of desire and repulsion when we discussed the elite universities of Oxbridge. Many of the respondents had been selected to visit Oxbridge with some of their teachers (the year before I met them when they were aged 16 and 17), but despite enjoying the splendour and beauty of the colleges, strongly felt that these social spaces were ‘foreign’ and seeped with references to a past which did not belong to them. The responses of Hetal (British Indian working-class) and Jo (white working-class) were typical in this respect: Sarah: What did you think of Cambridge? Hetal: Erm, I liked the buildings and what it was like, but erm, I think, I just thought that going there was just too frightening, you know it’s completely the opposite to London and it’s...it didn’t really appeal to me that much.

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These responses echo those given by respondents in studies by Archer et al. (2003) and Reay et al. (2005), who interpreted such narratives to be part of a process of self-limitation which operates (in part) as a defensive reaction to embedded and exclusionary systems of power. Like the young people in these earlier studies, Hetal and Jo were acutely aware that the walls of Oxbridge were not designed with ‘people like them’ in mind. The feelings of ‘foreignness’ felt by non-traditional applicants upon entrance to elite institutions is very much a part of the visibility of the exclusive past of these social spaces which were demonstrably not designed for women, ethnic minorities or working-class people. While this is important in examining the still difficult relationship between non-traditional university entrants and elite universities, it is also important to do this with reference to the ways in which this form of exclusion is reinforced by those practices which purport to stem from the liberal project. In-so-doing we are drawn to focus more broadly on the way in which dominant neoliberal discourse misframes the issues of social injustice (Fraser and Bedford 2008). UK policy recommendations which have emerged recently in response to considerable discussion about the dominance of privately educated (and top state school educated) students at Oxbridge and Russell Group institutions are indicative of this misframing. These recommendations tend to outline the relationship between social class and the higher education system in the following way: [The Steering Group] does not believe that the higher education admissions system should be responsible for compensating for social disadvantage or shortcomings in other parts of the education system. What it does believe is that universities and colleges have a responsibility to identify the talent and the potential of applicants and to treat all applicants fairly and transparently. Institutions should also recognise that talent and potential may not be fully demonstrated by examination results. Recruiting the best students for their courses is a legitimate aim and, in order to achieve this aim, institutions should explicitly consider the background and context of applicants’ achievements (Schwartz 2004: 23).

Here we can see that ‘social disadvantage’ is identified as a pre-existing problem for higher education institutions which are located as separate from those processes which produce social inequality. Rather, it is the role of universities to ascribe to a meritocratic discourse to seek to identify those students who have ‘talent’ (despite their ‘disadvantage’) and to find ways to nurture this talent, presumably in such a way as to promote social mobility. This approach is problematic in a number of

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different ways; two of which were particularly relevant to the girls with whom I spoke. First, this approach supposes a transparent conception of talent, as well as one which is shared by those in positions of power and subordination with respect to the admissions procedure. Secondly, it ignores the way in which the recognition of ‘talent’ depends in part upon a suitable performance of ‘talent’ and as such may be seen to be tied to cultural heritage and symbolic capital. In this paradigm it is therefore assumed that liberal, educated middle-class persons are skilled in the identification of this talent, that their conception of talent is composed objectively and is easily read and engaged with by ‘disadvantaged’ members of society. The fact that those in control of the admissions procedure are at liberty to rework what does and what-does-not constitute talent is not considered, nor is the way in which this ownership of ‘talent’ feeds into re/producing the illusion of equality through the right kind of mix. Some of the respondents in this study were highly aware that elite institutions – and in particular Oxbridge – operated to include particular kinds of people and to exclude others. For instance, Jo (white working-class) spoke to me about the relationship she saw between that ‘something special’ required by Cambridge and the social class of those who conformed to a particular view of talent: Jo: […] I know it’s very difficult to like think that only upper-class or middle-class or rich people can go there but it’s got a certain reputation…and I know, I know I would be – I dunno – because I know you’ve got to have something special – well, I think you should have something special to go there and I dunno…

For many of the young women in this study the idea of ‘talent’ (or as Jo put it ‘something special’) that was associated with the Oxbridge colleges was something that would be difficult to achieve as a working-class person. Jo recognized that in terms of the admission procedure ‘talent’ was more easily attached to (or associated with) those people who were middle-class. In her narrative she transformed the workings of class inequality into her own personal deficiency, thereby deflecting the painful acknowledgement of the cultural disadvantage that may come with being a white working-class woman. As far as Jo was concerned, there was a degree of transparency in terms of the individual characteristics which comprise that ‘something special’ that Oxbridge has traditionally sought in potential students. Yet the embodied nature of this ‘something special’ meant that it was likely to be inaccessible to her as a white working-class woman, unless perhaps she should pursue performative measures to render her class background ambiguous. Nevertheless, for many of the respondents in this study, those people who embodied talent were always middle-class which reaffirmed their sense  A good example of the way in which the combination of educational capital and masquerade can be used to make class identity ambiguous within establishment walls is explored by Christina Hughes (2004). Her white working-class respondent, Sian, was particularly aware of the extent to which her performance of a middle-class ‘career women’

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that even with high examination results it was unlikely that they would enter the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. Not all of the respondents perceived a direct connection between social class and the idea of talent. For some of the ethnic minority girls with whom I spoke, talent was presumed to be equivalent to academic ability and thus cultural and educational capital were seen to be equivalent (or at the very least mutually reaffirming), as Kim-Ly (Vietnamese working-class) described: I think people look at you in a different way when you have started, as though you are able to achieve something, you’re going into Higher Education…people have more respect.

This interpretation was perhaps connected to the invisibility of ethnic minorities in British class history which made it less likely that the girls from ethnic minority backgrounds should offer the reading of class cultures that (white workingclass) Jo gave of the operation of elite institutions. At the same time however, the demonstration of academic ability is also about the performance of the ‘good girl’. McRobbie has asserted that: ‘The pleasingly, lively, capable and “becoming” young woman, black, white or Asian, is now an attractive harbinger of social change’ (McRobbie 2007: 722), suggesting that a particular kind of post-feminist feminine masquerade (which necessarily includes educational achievement) has enabled young women legitimate, yet limited, participation in public institutions. However, this does not address explicitly the way in which the production of this ‘becoming’ young woman can serve to conceal the extent to which race remains an issue for ethnic minority women. It is arguable that these young women are being sold a story which suggests that academic achievement will render their minority ethnic status (and all the readings of this status by the majority white population) invisible in the public sphere. Moreover, they are told that social mobility will come easily to them if they demonstrate a willingness to participate in this model: in this way being remoulded as the face of acceptable ‘mix’ therefore becomes a small price to pay for the chance to achieve a sense of status and public worth. Decisions in Context The previous section has noted how working-class girls feel limited in the way they are able to use and appropriate elite higher education institutions. It has also enabled her particular interactions and relationships with colleagues in her work at the Houses of Parliament.   This also makes sense given the way in which a class-consciousness can be complicated by an ethnic minority identity, which, as Anthias puts it is already tied to an ‘inescapable logic of physiognomy or bodily characteristics’ that becomes imprinted as a ‘reaction/response to the…positions bestowed upon individuals’ (2005: 39).

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addressed the way in which current discourses about ‘widening access’ under the guise of liberalism can in fact operate to reproduce existing forms of what might be seen as symbolic violence towards working-class and ethnic minority people. With this context in mind this section will examine how the young women with whom I spoke envisaged their engagement with higher education and framed their decisions to undertake a university degree. Before doing so it is worth turning briefly to the way in which higher education has, in the last ten years, been marketed as the correct choice to make for those who want to better themselves. The ‘Aimhigher’ (AH) programme which was a national programme run by Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) with support from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) can be seen as guilty of engaging with such perspectives. In asking socially disadvantaged people to ‘aim higher’ HEFCE reproduced arguments which focus the blame for the low uptake of university places by working-class people upon dispositions and attitudes related to the ‘culture of poverty’ (Taylor 2008). Indeed, it can be argued that the kind of higher education offered to young people through the AH programme is one which presumes that these young people would not wish to enter higher education for education’s sake and in-so-doing asserts a cultural difference between traditional (or legitimate) entrants and non-traditional ones. In the below example we can see how the AH programme represents university to young working-class people as a means to ‘have the time of one’s life’: Considering higher education? Aim higher!: Everyone has dreams and whatever your dream career, one thing is for sure – going into higher education to study will help make your dreams a reality. It will open up more possibilities than you imagined possible, and you’ll have the time of your life into the bargain!

The young women with whom I spoke were highly motivated and looked forward to the identity that participating in the adult world of work would bring them. They often envisaged higher education in instrumental terms as a means of acquiring the capital to embark upon the career pathway of their choice, and all imagined themselves into middle-class, professional (and often traditionally masculine) careers in medicine, dentistry, law and in the new media and creative industries. Indeed, their high aspirations operated in direct conflict with the representations of working-class people described above in which: …low rates of achievement and/or educational progression among workingclass groups are represented as resulting from their lack of appropriate attitudes, aspirations, motivations, or abilities (Archer and Leathwood 2003: 228).  This programme was launched in 2001 largely in order to ‘raise the aspirations’ of ‘young people from disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds’.  Online government agency source: http://www.aimhigher.ac.uk/home/index.cfm [Accessed 17 June 2007].

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Achieving these high aspirations was generally considered by the respondents as a personal journey and despite the material and emotional struggle that would be required, they did not express entitlement to state provision or outside support in obtaining their degree (Evans 2009: 352) This individualised attitude towards navigating the pathway towards higher education was offset against a highly altruistic attitude in terms of the potential benefits of higher education. All of the young women with whom I spoke talked about the way in which their education would benefit their immediate and extended families, as Keira (white workingclass) put it: The one thing I want to do is just give something back to my family really, that’s the most important thing to me, and helping my Nan and all […] that’s the main thing, because my Mum’s given me a lot – she’s worked hard – I mean, she has two jobs, so she’s worked quite hard.

The commitment to others that was demonstrated by the young women in this study can be interpreted to be part of a feminine habitus, which involves prioritising family relationships and the emotional and care-work which ‘falls more particularly to women’ (Bourdieu 2001: 68). The desire to improve family circumstances and to maintain existing family relationships by young people embarking upon a university degree has certainly been ignored within political discourse about the transition to university and has (until recently) been understated in the literature about transitions (Archer et al. 2003, Reay et al. 2005). Yet the strength and frequency of the altruistic narratives for the respondents in this study were such as to suggest that the necessity (and/or desire) to care was central to the decisionmaking process about university. Not only was it a motivating factor in achieving higher earning power, but it was a force which provided boundaries of context which served to determine the respondents’ geographic mobility. The extent to which this was visible provides a clear example of the relationship between social class and gender. Of the 20 final respondents in this study, only four harboured the express desire to study outside of London. For the remainder of the respondents, living at home whilst studying was considered to be the only viable option for a number of interconnected reasons. First, these young women were reluctant to leave their family and the locality that was home to these relationships, as Susie (white working-class) and Hetal (British Indian working-class) described: Susie: […] I think erm, by me moving away I’d be more worried about my family, not seeing them, so I wouldn’t be focussed on my work. So by being at home, I’ll be able to like be with my family and just not, not have to worry of not seeing them. Like, I can just focus on my work. Hetal: […] I don’t feel like leaving London – I like it too much here. Erm, and we get, erm we always have loads of stuff, we always have family gatherings

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and stuff and when I’m not [here] I’ll miss out. Because quite a few of my cousins live out and when we have birthday parties and things like that they can’t come.

This commitment to home-life and family could be interpreted as part of a defended response (Hollway and Jefferson 1997) by young women who in reality have little option other than to study at a local university. I would however, move beyond this interpretation to suggest that this is part of a feminine orientation to being-in-the-world in which not producing oneself as a person for whom the other is central is almost unimaginable. Related to this was the way in which the existing relationships had already structured their sense of social space and their apprehensions about geographic mobility. Of those interviewees who were considering applying to universities outside London, two were only considering moving to cities in which they already had family ties. Jennie and Milly (both white working-class) wanted to go to universities in cities in which extended family lived. Milly described how choosing a university town in which family members were present had economic consequences and was also important for the reciprocal relations of care it would facilitate: …well I’ve got family who live there – my aunt, my uncle and a couple of cousins, and they’ve got another house that they rent out to students so they said that I could stay there for free which would save me a lot of money […] So that would really help me, so financial-wise it would be brilliant if I got in there and plus I’ve got the support from my family because leaving my Mum is going to be hard. So, having my family around is going to make it a little bit easier for me.

For the remainder of the respondents who intended to live at home and study in London, the areas with which they were familiar provided points of orientation. Visiting family and friends was one of the main activities that filled free time for the respondents, and it very much shaped their knowledge of London. In fact, it became evident that family homes and the spaces that family members inhabited provided significant boundaries to the girls’ mobility and had a strong impact on their perception of geographical space, and of London and the rest of the country more generally. This is supportive of Appadurai’s (1996) work which suggests that ‘localities are not contexts, but that contexts define the boundaries of localities’ (Savage et al. 2005: 4). For the respondents in this study, many parts of London remained ‘strange’ and existed beyond the boundaries of the world that they were able to, or willing to inhabit. The safety of the locality and the relationships that existed within it exaggerated the ‘foreignness’ of unknown spaces, thus consolidating the relationship between identity and place whilst also constraining the possibility of forming connections elsewhere. Indeed, what was particularly noteworthy was that although the several of the respondents lived within walking distance of a tube station, they seldom used the London Underground, but rather used the bus to make journeys to places which were already known. The unfamiliar

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geography of London affected the young women’s outlooks so much so that many expressed extreme trepidation about travelling to universities which were within London and of commutable distance from their homes. This had a considerably constraining effect when it came to deciding upon which universities to apply for, as is evidenced in the following exchange I had with Ellen (white workingclass): Sarah: So are you er, are you going to try and have a look at some of these places [universities]? Ellen: Yeah...I just...I don’t have time! To do all that travelling and stuff, I dunno, I’m not confident. Because I live round the corner I’ve always had to walk to school […] So yeah, I just like, I’ve always like...travelling I’m so…I’m not nervous, I’m just not...do you know what I mean? Don’t know the routes or nothing, I’m just useless!

She went on to describe how she was extremely nervous about travelling on the tube: it was something she was simply not used to doing, despite living within a short walk of two different tube stations. Just as Jo reframed her unlikely entrance to Oxbridge in terms of her own personal deficiency, Ellen blamed herself for her own immobility. This tendency of young working-class women to frame issues of inequality as personal deficit demonstrates the audacity of political discourses which seek to individualise failure. The sense among these young women that achieving their ambitions required that they overcome these individualised ‘deficiencies’ demonstrates strongly the pervasiveness of the rhetoric of individualism. Ellen was far from alone in feeling apprehensive about travelling within London, and it was quite striking just how many of the respondents expressed a fear about travelling – particularly on the underground and overland trains. For example, Rachel (Chinese working-class) said she did not feel ‘comfortable’ trying to use the tubes, while Saida (Somali working-class) highlights the preference for bus travel and the limited mobility which was so common amongst the respondents: Saida: I don’t go travelling, I just go to the places that I need to go…Like erm, I take two buses to get to school and erm, just around my area basically.

In part the reluctance to use the underground and overland train reflects the fact that tubes in London are far more expensive than using the buses, especially for full-time students who are resident in London (aged 16 to 18) for whom buses and trams are free. For adults too, it remains cheaper (often by at least 50 per cent) to use the bus than to use the tube and as such becomes the obvious mode of transport for people on low incomes. It can be argued that the limited mobility of working-class people in this locality has led to a cultural norm in which tube travel to unknown areas of the city is avoided and sometimes even feared. The fact that the respondents were restricted in their geographical mobility because

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of a combination of fiscal considerations, family commitments and their lack of confidence about travelling became a considerably limiting factor in terms of access to higher education institutions. It is worth considering that geographical (im)mobility has been linked to social (im)mobility, and as has been suggested by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2001) may be particularly important for women, since it is those relationships that are established outside of kin-relations and the domestic agenda which are most likely to be beneficial in terms of employment and social mobility. Becoming Somebody: Education and Motherhood As mentioned above, McRobbie (2007) has written of the way in which the continued social necessity for young women to perform femininity has been reformulated in recent years as an ironic reaction to feminism. At the same time, she has suggested that young women are heralded as the harbingers of social change; that they (consciously) symbolise that social equality in the western world has been achieved. This supposed sense amongst young women of having ‘made it’ in a post-feminist world is made problematic when young working-class women’s ideas about future motherhood are considered. Previous studies of working-class young women have indicated that motherhood was conceived of as the legitimate and most viable route towards achieving a respectable adult identity (Skeggs 1997, Armstrong, this volume). For the young women in this study, motherhood was no longer seen as a route to autonomy (Hey 2005) or respect, which in many ways is unsurprising given the vilification of working-class mothers in political and public discourse (Skeggs 2004, Skeggs and Wood 2004). Rather, as Kim-Ly earlier implied, education was the means through which a sense of respect and status would be achieved. Yet, despite the association of education and status, heterosexual motherhood was considered to be an inevitable part of adulthood for nearly all of the respondents irrespective of their ethnicity. There were differences in their version of motherhood and those produced by young working-class respondents in earlier studies (Griffin 1985, Skeggs 1997) for whom motherhood could be a signifier of heterosexual success and respectable adulthood. For the young women in this study the overwhelming sense was that little social value was ascribed to motherhood and that motherhood could take place only once a career had been established (thus mirroring middle-class ideals about deferred parenting). Nevertheless, the respondents’ thoughts about motherhood bore some significant similarities to those of young women speaking 20 or so years before them. Indeed, the inevitability of a heteronormative future resonated strongly with the words of Griffin’s (1985) respondents who saw ‘heterosexuality, marriage and motherhood’ as ‘facts of life’ (Taylor 2009). For these young women the post-feminist and highly reflexive feminine performance about which McRobbie (2007) has written featured on the horizon as a potentially enjoyable aspect to the world of work, but there was no

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sense of irony about their commitment to highly gendered and traditional roles in the home. Not only did the young women find imagining a future which did not include within it a long term heterosexual relationship very difficult to do, but imagining a future without marriage itself remained difficult even when marriage was something that was necessarily not ‘desired’, as Gracie’s words illustrate: Gracie (white working-class): I don’t think I could actually see myself getting married, but at the end of the day, I’d also want that traditional idea of it, because of...I always...because my Mum and Dad are married and they were married the whole time, so I, I’ve always grown up with that, so I also think it wouldn’t be right not to be...so, it’s a really weird idea, I don’t see myself getting married, but I also couldn’t have a family without being so, because I think I’d have to be stable, and secure before I did.

At the same time, all of the respondents who wanted children implicitly asserted that childcare was primarily the responsibility of the female partner in a heterosexual relationship. The young women expressed the idea that they would take primary responsibility for caring for their children rather than share work equally with their (male) partners or outsource the work to childminders. Indeed, what was extremely noticeable by its absence was the failure of any of the respondents to describe childcare as something which fathers as well as mothers might be responsible for: the logic to this, as part of a feminine habitus is revealed in Miriam’s words, which were typical to the ideas expressed by the group as a whole: Miriam (British Asian working-class): I think I can manage both [work and motherhood] at the same time, however I do think being a full-time parent is more important, you’ve got to look after the kids – I don’t want them to grow up, like with baby-sitters and all this stuff – like I want to give them all my time.

This provides evidence for McNay’s (1999) argument that the potential for gender detraditionalisation is limited since many of those aspects of gender which could potentially be reworked or refashioned to flatten out the effects of gender are in fact deeply entrenched as gendered habitus, such that women and men ‘often [have] unconscious investments in conventional images of masculinity and femininity which cannot easily be reshaped’ (McNay 1999: 103). Thus, while the respondents all desired a male partner who wanted to be ‘involved’ in parenting and domestic life, it was clear that they expected to be the main carers of their children and having a career break to do this (or working part-time) was frequently described as ‘normal’ way in which this could be achieved. As Rachel (Chinese working-class) put it, ‘I suppose I really do feel so strongly towards childhood, so I couldn’t possibly let my career ruin – that – um, what is very important to children.’ Having a partner who is capable of earning money becomes particularly important in situations in which women expect to be the primary carer for their

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young children; and as we will now see, men who demonstrated a capacity to earn money and ‘work hard’ were spoken about as desirable partners. While all the young women emphasised the importance of male partners who were in regular employment or had ‘careers’, few described it as important to find a partner who was ‘middle-class’. This fits with the findings of Lawler and Johnson (2005) who found that class-difference within a heterosexual relationship is considered antithetical to its success (also see Taylor 2007). They suggest that signifiers of class – read from the body and seen to demarcate ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ – become key determinants in recognising potential partners. It was certainly apparent here that for the white working-class girls in particular their perceptions of ‘emasculated’ middle-class men rarely fitted with their ideas about the kind of competent man who would be able to contribute to a household economy, as Jo’s words illustrate: Sarah: What about the boys, the blokes that you’ll meet at university then? Jo (white working-class): People say to me like ‘oh when you go university you’ll meet someone else’ and I just think, ‘oh, they’re not my type of people’. [...] That’s the [local area] in me, I think I just like the bloke that goes out and earns money and he is just a bloke. He’s not like a, oh, I don’t know...[Sarah: Like he’s a ‘bloke’s bloke’?] Yeah and he gets on with his mates, and he goes down the pub and he plays football and he goes and earns money. You see I like that. But at the same time I don’t like the idea of...Oh, I don’t know, at the same time I do like the idea of a professional – like someone who’s got their own career, or a business or they’ve got discipline: they’ve done this and they’ve done that – I do like that, I do like that – someone that’s successful, but I don’t think that I would really like someone, you know, like the typical university student I’m thinking of – I’m thinking of stereotypes like, I don’t know, erm, shaggy looking and sitting in a coffee bar writing poetry – do you know what I mean?

So, while Jo quite clearly rejected the notion of forming a relationship with a middle-class man who did not fit with her conception of masculinity, she was concerned that her future partner should be committed to and capable of earning money. This concern was shared by the group as a whole and again is supportive of McNay’s (1999) argument that for most young women ‘traditional’ ideals of gender are more appealing and realistic than those which require transformation or renegotiation. This section has suggested that young working-class women often anticipate higher education as a means through which to secure a stable income and achieve status through professional employment. Yet it has also been shown that the simultaneous investments which they make in existing family relationships and heteronormativity have the capacity to not only limit their engagement with university, but also to affect the extent to which they are subsequently able to accumulate social and cultural capital. The concurrent investments these young

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women make in education and relationships with others illuminates strongly issues that impact on equality and parity that have been overlooked by the current UK government. First, the notion of the individualised autonomous young person as the idealised user of higher education is shown to be highly problematic. The extent to which young people are able to act as individualised agents is considerably affected by access to capital and by their commitments to significant others. Secondly, deeply internalised gendered expectations continue to affect the way young woman organise their futures and structure their investments in different capitals. Furthermore, that these young women expect to provide the primary care for their children demonstrates that the ideal of joint parental responsibility in the domestic care of children espoused by the second wave feminist movement has not yet been fully realised nor internalised. This is perhaps unsurprising given evidence from other sociological work (notably that by Crompton 2006) which shows the limits of ‘flexible’ and ‘parent-friendly’ employment policies in addressing the gendered division of labour (particularly with regards to care work). Thus while these young women represent the ‘right kind of mix’ and thus deserve a (limited) presence in universities, this very limited opportunity of engagement with HE is further bounded by the enactment of internalised expectations and values of care. Concluding Thoughts This chapter has drawn on the results from a qualitative study to show how the liberal framework used in much higher education policy has misframed issues about access to higher education in ways that can serve to reproduce the inequalities these policies purportedly attempt to address (Fraser 2008). Talking about social class and gender has been particularly problematic for New Labour which has consciously and openly attempted to distance itself from the politics of emancipation which were central to the history of the party, but came to be seen as outmoded. One of the problems inherent to this has been that the shift in rhetoric has left little space through which to address inequalities of class, race or gender in ways which do not make the overall agenda problematic. For example, McRobbie’s (2007) critique of the rhetoric of ‘gender mainstreaming’ demonstrates how issues of inequality can be simultaneously recognised and undermined, suggesting that the policies which accompany ‘gender mainstreaming’ mask considerably the still continuing issues of gender inequality in employment. For a government which promotes an individualised approach to ‘getting on’, the implementation of policies and jurisdiction which police racial and gender discrimination in institutions (particularly in the labour market) facilitate the impression that inequalities have been taken into account. Indeed, and as outlined in this chapter, practices in higher education which seek to ensure ‘mix’ are often premised upon conservative ideals about the extent to which the inclusion of minority groups is desirable. Thus, a public discourse in which class, gender and race can be addressed in ways that are not deemed anachronistic is elusive, or

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indeed, as McRobbie (2007) has outlined, is no longer regarded as necessary since these issues have been dealt with through ‘mainstreaming’. The young working-class women with whom I spoke were often committed to a class politics in their everyday lives: improving the material circumstances of the family was described as central to the decision-making process about higher education and interviewees often felt a strong attachment to the area in which they had grown up. Many also saw social class as a significant feature of particular institutions (namely the elite universities of Oxbridge) and this shaped the extent to which they felt entitled to engage with these institutions. Despite these commitments and understandings the young women did not have a broader political framework upon which to draw that connected these issues for them. The workings of social class and feminine habitus strongly shaped their choices and quite literally provided boundaries to their movement in the social world, but were interpreted to be part of the personal and everyday in such a way that removed these issues from broader political interpretation. One of the outcomes of this was that these young women themselves reframed the social inequalities that excluded them to be either part of their personal deficiency, or at the very least part of a personal struggle which it was their duty to overcome through commitment to education and hard work. Thus, the young women with whom I spoke were loaded with a deep sense of personal responsibility about their ‘becoming someone’. Higher education would be the means through which status and respect would be achieved, but would also be the means through which their responsibility for others would be materialised. They aimed to become someone who would be seen as a legitimate participant in the economies of morality and capital, but did not feel any sense of entitlement or outside help in achieving this. There were feelings of predetermination about their future heterosexual relationships and about motherhood for which the young women already took responsibility; already reading their future commitment to their own families into their current plans. The fact that these young women took on this responsibility so readily perhaps says something about the extent to which gender reconfiguration has been achieved, while also further pointing to the need to find a language which reasserts an entitlement to participate for young workingclass people also situated and constrained by gender and race. Bibliography Anthias, F. 2005. Social Stratification and Social Inequality, in Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyle, edited by F. Devine, M. Savage, J. Scott, and R. Crompton. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Archer, L. and Hutchings, M. 2000. Bettering Yourself: Discourses of Risk, Cost and Benefit in Ethnically Diverse, Young Working-Class Non-Participants’

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Constructions of Higher Education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21(4), 555–74. Archer, L. and Leathwood, C. 2003. New Times – Old Inequalities: Diverse Working-Class Femininities in Education. Gender and Education, 15(3), 227– 35. Archer, L., Hutchings, M. and Ross, A. 2003. Higher Education and Social Class: Issues of Exclusion and Inclusion. London: Routledge Falmer. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. 2001. Individualization. London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. 2001. Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bryne, B. 2006. In Search of a ‘Good Mix’: Race, Class Gender and Practices of Mothering. Sociology, 40(6),1001–17. Butler, J. 1998. Merely Cultural. New Left Review, I/227, 33–44. Charlesworth, S.J. 2000. A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge Cultural Social Studies. Crompton, R. 2006. Employment and the Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, M. 2008. Stranger than Fiction: Harry Potter and the Order of the Entitled. Times Higher Education, 31 July. Evans, S. 2009. In a Different Place: Working-Class Girls and Higher Education. Sociology, 2009, 43(2), 340–55. Fraser, N. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. New York: Routledge. Fraser, N. 1998. Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler. New Left Review, I/228, 140–49. Fraser, N. and Bedford, K. 2008. Social Rights and Gender Injustice in the Neoliberal Moment: A Conversation About Welfare and Transnational Politics. Feminist Theory, 9, 225–45. Griffin, C. 1985. Typical Girls? Young Women from the School to the Job Market. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hey, V. 1997. Northern Accent and Southern Comfort: Subjectivity and Social Class, in Class Matters: ‘Working-Class’ Women’s Perspectives on Social Class, edited by P. Mahony, and C. Zmroczek. London: Taylor and Francis. Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. 1997. Eliciting Narrative Through the In-Depth Interview. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(1), 53–70. hooks, b. 2000. Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York and London: Routledge. Hughes, C. 2004. Class and Other Identifications in Managerial Careers: The Case of the Lemon Dress. Gender, Work and Organizations, 11(5), 526–43. McDonnell, B. 2002. 2001 National Census: Key Statistics for Southwark. Planning and Business Development Unit. Available at: www.southwark.gov. uk/uploads/file_8212.doc [accessed 20 February 2008]. McKibbin, R. 1998. Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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McNay, L. 1999. Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity. Theory Culture Society, 16(1), 95–117. McRobbie, A. 2007. Top Girls? Cultural Studies, 21(4), 718–37. Modood, T., Berthoud, R., Lakey, J., Nazroo, J., Smith, P., Virdee, S. and Beishon, S. 1997. Ethnic Minorities in Britain. London: Policy Studies Institute. Phoenix, A. 1996. Social Constructions of Lone Motherhood: A Case for Competing Discourses, in Good Enough Mothering, edited by E.B. Silva. London and New York: Routledge. Reay, D., David, M. and Ball, S.J. 2005. Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and Gender in Higher Education. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Reese, E. 2005. Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Russo, J. and Linkon, S.L. (eds) 2005. New Working-Class Studies. New York: Cornell University Press. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. and Longhurst, B. 2005. Globalization and Belonging. London and California: Sage. Schwartz, S. 2004. Fair Admissions to Higher Education: Recommendations for Good Practice. Higher Education Steering Group. Available at: http://www. admissions-review.org.uk/downloads/finalreport.pdf [accessed 12 December 2007]. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Skeggs, B. and Wood, H. 2004. Notes on Ethical Scenarios of Self on British Reality TV. Feminist Media Studies, 4(1), 205–8. Taylor, Y. 2007. Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Y. 2008. Good Students, Bad Pupils: Constructions of ‘Aspiration’, ‘Disadvantage’ and Social Class in Undergraduate-led Widening Participation Work. Educational Review, 60(2), 155–68. Taylor, Y. 2009. Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capital. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Woodward, W. 2003. Row Over Student Class Gap, The Guardian, 4th March. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/mar/04/uk.students [accessed 20 February, 2008].

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Chapter 4

The Significance of Bonding Capital: Class, Ethnicity, Faith and British Muslim Women’s Routes to University Jody Mellor

Introduction The focus of this chapter is on a group of Muslim women from workingclass backgrounds and the way in which social capital influences the women’s educational trajectories, especially in relation to higher education progression. Ethnicity as social capital has received a great deal of attention but it has tended to overstate the advantages of social capital, whilst downplaying the disadvantages of networks (Shah 2007). This chapter emphasises both the enabling and constraining factors of social capital in relation to the women’s educational trajectories, paying particular attention to the interconnections between ethnicity, faith and class in relation to the deployment of social resources. Though the social network literature has emphasised the importance of parents to the educational outcomes of students, the significance of siblings has received less attention. I suggest, however, that older siblings in particular were central to the women’s educational trajectories. In contrast to research findings which have emphasised gendered divisions of social connections and capitals, as they are offered to children, my research indicates that these were less clear-cut. The chapter contributes to understandings of the way in which class, ethnicity and faith interconnect in relation to the social networks of the women I interviewed. As working-class students with limited resources, the women were encouraged by parents to study vocational subjects which would lead directly to a career in order to limit the risk of unemployment, and, as they were from minority ethnic and religious backgrounds, a traditionally ‘Asian’ subject was also a way to avoid ethnic or religious discrimination. Moreover, the history of migration patterns, socio-economic contexts and geographical location of the women’s hometowns   I would like to thank the participants in this research who were willing to discuss their experiences and aspirations. I would also like to thank the participants at the EURODIV conference, ‘Diversity in Cities: Cultural Diversity in Europe’, Rome, in September 2008, for the very useful discussion of the paper, as well as to Haleh Afshar, Stevi Jackson, Lisa Parmiani and Yvette Taylor who provided very helpful comments.

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have given rise to certain norms, behaviours and values (including varying interpretations of Islam) which, through family fears about community gossip circles and the loss of izzat (or honour), often impacted upon the educational opportunities available to the women. Bridging capital has been seen as the route to social mobility by ethnic capital theorists; however, for the group of women I spoke with, bonding capital, rather than bridging capital, was particularly significant to their movements. The women came from working-class migrant families with very few economic or cultural resources that would be of use to the women in their educational paths. Tight-knit ethnic networks compensated for the material constraints by providing strong levels of support and assistance that enabled them to move ahead for the sake of themselves and their families and communities. The women’s families prioritised the moral economy of kin, which emphasised the social mobility and wellbeing of the family as a unit, rather than individual needs, and the few resources that families had were divided on the basis of strategic advancement. Bonding capital had a particularly positive influence on the women’s educational trajectories because of duty to and respect of kin and the umma was considered a cultural tradition and an Islamic requirement. It was this specific interconnection between class, ethnicity and faith within the women’s lives that provided these ethnic networks as well as the women’s desire to make full use of them. Through a strong immersion in faith and ethnic-related community events, the women demonstrated close bonds and sociality. Several were heavily involved in local university Islamic societies, others attended halaqas – or Islamic discussion groups – and other mosque events, in addition to getting involved in other community events such as weddings and Eid celebrations. The women spoke about an obligation to the wellbeing of the umma – the global Muslim community – which involved a responsibility to ‘give back’. This high level of civic engagement was related to the women’s classed, ethnic and religious positions; this chapter focuses specifically upon relationships within the extended family as it was these ties that were most significant to the women’s educational trajectories. Of the 18 women to whom I spoke, all (apart from the one British white woman who had recently converted to Islam) enjoyed close relationships with family and community members; family bonds were characterised by the moral economy of kin (Afshar 1989a), where respect for kin was not only considered a cultural tradition but was seen as an Islamic requirement. After briefly outlining existing research on class capitals, I discuss the research background, including a reflexive analysis of my situatedness in this project. I then interrogate the enabling factors associated with social capital, arguing that parents exerted important direct and indirect influences on the women to pursue higher education. Though several theorists have pointed to a gender divide in the capitals that mothers and fathers offer to their children, the women I spoke to indicated no distinct gender differences in social networks provided by mothers and fathers. The women were encouraged by parents to study vocational subjects in order to limit the risks of unemployment and to avoid ethnic or religious discrimination.

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Despite this, I argue that the women did not have access to high-volume social capital; the limited resources of family and community members may be of very little help after graduation, and these ties could ultimately reinforce class inequalities rather than challenging these. I then move on to explore the negative aspects of social capital which served to limit the educational trajectories of the women. The history of migration patterns and the socio-economic contexts of these northern localities give rise to certain norms and values which can cast doubt on university as an appropriate activity for a woman. As the ‘cultural carriers’ of the family, I argue that women’s opportunities were influenced by the fear of loss of izzat, which was policed through community gossip circles. Family fears about the loss of izzat impacted upon the educational opportunities available to the women. Finally, I analyse the ways that the women negotiated the constraining and enabling factors of social capital in relation to their educational and career goals. For example, interviewees used textual interpretations of Islam as a tool to challenge the ‘cultural’ or ‘traditional’ practices of certain groups. Certain social networks were significant to this vocabulary of women’s rights within Islam, where respondents learnt about these women-centred views of Islam by coming into contact with certain family members (women and men) who supported such interpretations. Nonetheless, such social networks, and capitals, may not be enough to guarantee educational and social mobility for second generation minority groups. Ethnicity as Social Capital Social capital can be defined as networks of communities and families which involve the transmission of resources, knowledges and values. Putnam (2000) emphasises the values of trust, reciprocity and cooperation and his concepts of bonding and bridging capital offer a particularly useful framework for understanding the diverse forms of networks available to the women I interviewed. Bonding capital highlights the ties that reinforce connections within groups involving reciprocity and trust, enabling people to ‘get by’. On the other hand, bridging capital refers to ties that connect heterogeneous groups, allowing people to ‘get ahead’. However, the implicit assumption often found in the work of social capital theorists such as Putnam and Coleman is that working-class families are responsible for their disadvantaged positions by failing to generate their own networks of support (Gillies 2006). Government discourses have represented tight-knit minority ethnic and religious communities, particularly Muslims, as problematic, and have emphasised the benefits of bridging social networks as a route to social mobility and as a way to curb Islamic extremism. These representations are problematic because they place blame on the actions of individuals for their marginalisation rather than recognising the effects of poverty, ill health, poor living conditions and ethnic/religious discrimination on both the ability to establish and maintain ties and the efficacy of these social networks in ‘escaping’ social disadvantage.

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Scholarship on social capital, educational achievement and upward class mobility as experienced by minority ethnic groups in the US has focussed upon how the second (and subsequent) generations are influenced by family and community members (Zhou 2005, Zhou and Kim 2006). The concept of ethnicity as social capital (or ‘ethnic capital’) – which is defined as the values, norms and resources that form a central part of an ethnic group’s organisational structure – has been used to explain how ethnicity can result in advantageous outcomes for some communities. In their research on ethnic capital and the educational outcomes of younger members of Chinese and Korean communities in the US, Zhou and Kim (2006) argue that the availability of strong co-ethnic ties in these communities provides young people with the tools needed to avoid the damaging behaviours of other ethnic groups in poor inner-city areas, whilst encouraging them to regard social mobility as desirable. However, Shah (2007) suggests that ethnic capitals do not always result in positive outcomes for younger community members; in her exploration of second generation Laotian girls in North America she indicates that the strong unequal power relations within this ethnic community along the lines of gender and generation lead girls and young women to search for alternative ties outside kin and community networks. Thus Shah (2007) argues that it cannot be assumed that ethnicity as social capital will always lead to positive educational outcomes for all minority ethnic community members; instead, family and community networks both help and hinder educational trajectories. Within the literature, the emphasis has been placed upon the importance of ethnicity (rather than faith) as social capital, even if religious networks were also significant to the groups researched (Zhou 2005, Zhou and Kim 2006). This is true even in the work of Cherti (2008), whose research focused upon social networks of Moroccans in London. Despite the apparent importance of faith for this group, the work attends only briefly to issues of Islam. In light of Jacobson’s (1998) work which highlights the growing importance of textual based practices of Islam to current struggles for power and recognition, some may consider it appropriate to replace the term ‘ethnic capital’ with ‘religious capital’. In this chapter, however, I continue to use the term ‘ethnic capital’ because this concept can successfully encompass faith as an important aspect of ethnicity and ethnic capital. Moreover, considering the complexity of the ways in which faith and ethnicity are embedded in the lives of respondents, who came from ethnically homogenous Muslim communities, it is neither appropriate nor possible to divide the women’s social networks into either ‘ethnic’ or ‘religious’ groupings because these British Pakistanis are also Muslims, although individually they identify (and are identified) to varying degrees as legitimate members of these ethnic and religious communities (Jacobson 1998). Recent British research on social capital within education has focused upon middle-class students and their families (Ball 2003, Devine 2004, Power et al. 2003). These works have centred upon mainly white ‘indigenous’ middle-class families indicating how these groups perpetuate advantage in the education market

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through their use of social resources and the way in which social networks are exchanged in securing economic and cultural capitals. British research focusing on working-class people and social capital include MacDonald et al. (2005) and Gillies (2006): MacDonald et al.’s research explores the ways that local social networks of socially excluded young people living in de-industrialised localities in the north-east of England ‘become part of the process whereby poverty and class inequalities are reproduced’ (2005: 873). Though these networks of support offered young people a sense of belonging and inclusion, ‘the sort of social capital embedded in them served simultaneously to close down opportunities and to limit the possibilities of escaping the conditions of social exclusion’ (2005: 873). Gillies’s (2006) study explores how working-class mothers from diverse ethnic groups sought to assist their children at school. However, structural issues, including a lack of financial resources, impacted on the types of social capital these mothers could pass on to their children, preventing them from ‘getting ahead’. In the remainder of this chapter I explore the role of bonding capital in the women’s educational trajectories. There have been several studies which have explored minority ethnic (particularly working-class) students’ decisions relating to higher education institution, indicating that the interrelationship between positions and identities of ethnicity, gender and class relate to choices about higher educational institution or location (Ball et al. 2002, Smith 2007). However, these studies have not considered the influence of family on these decisions. In a UK project exploring the educational aspirations of South Asian women from both working- and middle-class families, Abbas (2003) points to the ways that workingclass Muslim women face negative influences on their educational progression; whereas certain types of interpretations of Islam were used as a way to inhibit the chances of working-class women, the middle-class women to whom he spoke did not often encounter these religious-cultural norms. In my research, bonding capital was particularly significant for working-class interviewees where respect of kin and the umma and duty towards family was considered a cultural tradition and an Islamic requirement. The women’s families prioritised the moral economy of kin, which emphasised the social mobility and wellbeing of the family as a unit, rather than individual needs, and the few resources that families had were divided on the basis of strategic advancement. Siblings, in particular, exerted a positive influence on the women’s educational progression, despite the representation of brothers and sisters as having negative effects on sibling development. However, not all social resources available to the women had a positive impact on their educational achievements and opportunities: in the second section of this chapter I explore ‘negative’ bonding social capital in the form of close knit community and kin ties, which constrained the women’s educational progression through community surveillance and the fear of the loss of izzat. Finally I highlight the ways that interviewees were exposed to a vocabulary of women’s rights within Islam which they could use to understand their own identities as Muslim women and assert their right to a university education as a requirement of their faith. Before discussing these themes in more detail, I turn to the research methodology.

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In particular I point to the way in which the connections between class and faith had methodological implications; all the women held an interpretation of Islam that positioned class divisions as irrelevant to or outside of their faith, which was one of the central reasons for the women’s reluctance to discuss class or to assign themselves to a class position. Research Background Most interviewees came from Lancashire, although smaller numbers were from Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire. I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 15 women, and a further three participated in a focus group. All the women were born in Britain and are ‘second’ or ‘third’ generation, of Pakistani origin, with the exception of Sara – a focus group participant – who identified as a ‘white convert’ and had white British parents. Faith was used as a primary identity for all the women, who defined themselves as ‘Muslim’ rather than ‘Punjabi’, ‘Mirpuri’, ‘minority ethnic’, ‘Asian’ or ‘Pakistani’ (or British-Asian or BritishPakistani). The labels I utilise throughout this chapter remain sensitive to this preference. Though I accept that these labels – like all kinds of categorisations – have limitations (Din 2006), it has been necessary to utilise classifications in order to explore issues of identity, positioning and experience. The central focus of the research was on subjective experiences of class and faith as experienced by women from working-class backgrounds in relation to their educational pathways. Apart from Sara who described her upbringing as middleclass, all the women came from working-class backgrounds. In most cases mothers were housewives and had never worked outside the home and fathers worked in (or were retired from) manual jobs, with parents having received only a low level of education. However, amongst interviewees, there was a large degree of dissatisfaction with ‘class’ as a term; most were reluctant to discuss their place on the class hierarchy and none of the women defined themselves unproblematically as working-class. This phenomenon has also been found in other class research, which has indicted that whilst people in the UK agree that Britain is a class divided society, and frequently categorise others into distinct hierarchies, most people are reluctant to assign themselves to a class category (Ball 2003, Devine 2004, Sayer 2005) or to reflect on how class affects their own lives (Savage et al. 2001). This, however, is not to say that class was absent from interviewees’ accounts. On the contrary, class identities could be traced, with the women using a range of economic and cultural factors to define their class position and their anticipated (or actual) class movement, including their parents’ and siblings’ occupations, their socio-economic background, as well as their own current situation. Only Cantara   Apart from Jasminah’s father, who had gained a degree in Pakistan. However, his qualification was never recognised in the UK and he worked as a skilled manual worker until retirement.

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(who identified as middle-class although she described her upbringing as workingclass) and Sara (who defined herself as being from a middle-class background) had a strong sense of their class identities and defined themselves as currently being middle-class. The 15 other women occupied what I call an ‘in-between’ status where ambivalence was central. On the one hand, the women took pride in their working-class family culture, and at times acknowledged the unequal class position they were born into. Yet on the other hand, they were shamed and embarrassed by their class backgrounds, wanted to avoid low-skilled and lowpaid work and often challenged the existence of class inequalities. Although these two sentiments may be contradictory, these accounts demonstrated both. Similar findings have also been reported by Lawler (1999) and Skeggs (1997) who argue that women from working-class backgrounds, who move into middle-class space, do not fit entirely into middle-class or working-class positions. Two types of class positioning existed: the first group consisted of those who sought elite careers in areas such as law, science or business and were willing to change – or had already changed – aspects of their classed selves in order to gain such employment, and were prepared to compromise important relationships. The second group typically sought careers in lower-middle-class occupations, especially teaching. They did not want to ‘sell out’ and were not prepared to change extensively in order to forge a successful career. Instead, they prioritised family (and current or future husband and children) and hoped to fit their careers around these commitments. As I go on to explore, class was experienced through and bound up within the women’s faith. However, a methodological implication of this intersection was that the women were reluctant to discuss class or to assign themselves to a class position because they held an interpretation of Islam that positioned class divisions as irrelevant to or outside of their faith. There have been claims made by Hizb ut-Tahrir that ‘Muslims belong to the single community of the umma that, according to the teachings of the Prophet, recognises no divisions by race, class or nationality’ (Afshar et al. 2005: 263). Frequently I was told by the women that what people are given is ‘Allah’s will’ and struggling with life is part of being a good Muslim. As one interviewee, Yusra (age 21), stated in response to my questions about class and gender: ‘in the eyes of the god, we are equal, regardless of appearance, so that’s why I think, a lot of the things don’t matter.’ As a type of social division with similar implications as class, caste inequalities were significant to class experiences of the women. All expressed a very strong distaste for caste distinctions, because according to their interpretation of Islam, caste is fundamentally wrong for Muslims to practice. In line with findings of research on ‘first generation’ migrants from the Indian subcontinent (Werbner 1990, Bradby 2002), caste hierarchies remained important for the Pakistani diaspora in the communities from which I recruited. The caste system, which is a heredity and closed social position based on notions of pollution and purity,   Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international Islamic political party that aims for a unitary Islamic state for all Muslim countries.

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has several sub-castes (Shah et al. 2005). Though most women claimed that their families did not practice caste, the hierarchies of caste continued to influence their lives because caste exists ‘out there’ in the wider community. Whilst the practice of caste primarily centres on the marriage market, the rishta, hierarchies also influence status more generally. In the Indian subcontinent, caste operates through occupational segregation, so in practice caste and class are mutually re-enforcing even if the terms cannot necessarily be used interchangeably. In the UK, however, caste and class do not necessarily correspond and there is no straightforward relationship between class and caste hierarchies in Pakistan and the UK, making generalisations impossible. In order to make sure I recruited a diverse group of young women, I decided against contacting community leaders. As a white non-Muslim with no existing contacts within the Pakistani diaspora before embarking on fieldwork, this would certainly have been the quickest route, but I was concerned that these ‘gate keepers’ would negotiate access to the daughters of respected members of the community and would limit access to women deemed unsuitable, such as those from underprivileged castes or from families living in poverty or with a tarnished izzat (Din 2006). Instead, I posted messages on a social networking site, attended university Islamic Society meetings and displayed posters in university spaces. In the field of ethnicity studies, some scholars are unhappy about white ‘outsiders’ researching minority ethnic groups and there have been suggestions that white people should instead focus on white people’s practices of racism and on racism within ‘white’ institutions (Egharevba 2001). This advice is guided by fears that researchers with different positionings may misinterpret or misrepresent minority groups. As Hall (2004) notes, ‘outsiders’ may find it particularly difficult to gain access to groups to which they are not connected and due to recent events, many Muslims in the UK are now suspicious of researchers and journalists (McLoughlin 2005), also feeling over-researched (Bolognani 2007). The 2005 UK bombings are particularly significant to this project because at the time of these events I was ‘in the field’, and in particular, the ‘21/7’ bomb plot occurred the day before the focus group took place. Yet, a growing number of reflexive accounts challenge the assumption that outsider and insider positions are necessarily in opposition, emphasising instead the way in which boundaries between the two identities are not always clearly defined (Merriam et al. 2001). ‘Matching’ is problematic, it is argued, because it may fix identities and experiences as unitary, one-dimensional and unchangeable (Subedi 2006, Reay 1996, Rhodes 1994). In relation to my research project, as I am a white non-Muslim most would consider me an ‘outsider’. However, apart from Sara, the women and I shared a working-class background. The complexity of these shared and differing   On 7th July 2005, 52 people were killed, and over 700 injured, by several coordinated explosions in London, and on 21st July 2005, similar bombs were left on public transport in London which failed to detonate. Several young British Muslim men had organised and carried out these attacks, some of whom came from West Yorkshire.

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experiences and situations along the positions of class, ethnicity and faith influenced the dynamics of the interviews in ambiguous and fluid ways. Sometimes my position served to close discussions down. Being Muslim was the central identity for all the women: as Yusra told me, ‘Honestly, if you were a Muslim, you’d be like a sister to me. That’s how it is.’ The importance of belonging to the global community of Muslims (the umma) – which I was told transcends ethnic and socioeconomic groupings – often dwarfed the importance of class background as a basis on which to build rapport. Even when class was acknowledged as significant, it was clear to the women that I had not experienced many of their classed experiences. For instance, frequent racial and Islamophobic discrimination in the labour market and exclusion from public space compounded classed (dis)locations for the women and their families in ways in which my family (as white and nonMuslim) had never experienced. Perhaps for this reason, Jasminah and Rashida in particular seemed reluctant to discuss interpersonal experiences of ethnic and religious prejudice. This lack of rapport may have been related to my position as a white non-Muslim from a working-class background, and from the same locality (especially as these women attended the same educational institutions as I had). Problems of multiculturalism, including BNP politics and inner-city racism have been attributed to the white working-class population (Haylett 2001), particularly in the northern English communities from which I recruited. Perhaps they associated me with what was seen as the ‘opposing side’, especially in light of the representations and experiences of Muslim/non-Muslim polarities in these towns. In this way, my working-class background may have limited discussions about Islamophobia and racism. Nevertheless, on other occasions my situatedness opened up accounts. Sometimes, my non-Muslim position was advantageous as it enabled the women to discuss the ‘obvious’. Because certain experiences may remain unspoken when researcher and participant come from similar positions, the ‘gap’ in experience between researcher and participant ‘creates a space for respondents to describe and tease out meanings and assumptions that may otherwise remain unspoken’ (Carter 2004: 348). For instance, the women I interviewed patiently explained issues of importance to class, such as zakat (the religious duty of giving to charity), caste and the process of sending remittances to family in Pakistan. This is data that ‘insiders’ may neither want to hear nor be able to access (Reay 1996), especially considering the women’s openness about their faith seemed guided in part by da’wah, the Islamic requirement for Muslims to educate non-Muslims about their religion. On many occasions I was touched by the women’s honesty in relation to details of their lives that were unknown to their families, such as love relationships and their experiences of social events and intoxicating substances. It is probable that participants can discuss ‘taboo’ issues with non-Muslim researchers because of the low risk of judgement, gossip or backlash (Bolognani 2007). Though class sometimes closed down possibilities for rapport, on other occasions, our shared class background did create such a basis, especially relating to accent. Even though

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I did not ask specifically about this, accent was mentioned by every participant, and occasionally it was the first thing a woman talked about after we had met. Ethnic Ties and Educational Trajectories For all interviewees, the expectation that family members would work together to achieve a common goal characterised the decision making processes concerning university. The social resources available to the women made their progression to university a possibility, supporting previous research findings on the ongoing importance of the moral economy of kin (Afshar 1989a). Lawler’s (1999) research indicates that white women from working-class backgrounds used upward mobility as a tool of escape and with time, their links with their working-class families and communities became tenuous. Although the future paths of the women I interviewed remain to be seen, they all expected to retain very close bonds to family and community members. For instance, almost all aimed to settle down in their hometowns in order to be close to their families, continuing to assist parents and siblings, and all expected to ‘pay back’ to kin after attending university. Cantara (age 27), who had recently married, lived next door to her parents and sister, and continued to offer emotional and practical support to her parents in their old age: ‘my mum has supported me in everything that I do, so this is the least I can do. It’s not even the least, it’s only a small drop in the ocean really.’ Duty to and respect of kin was seen as an Islamic requirement: It’s like a code of conduct, for a person, I’ve been sent rules from God: my parents are most important to me. I must respect them, the role my brothers and sisters play for me. And if they’re in need, I must help them; that’s my duty. And if one day, one of my brothers, like they’ve got no money and they want to…instead of giving to charity I should give to them. Help them (Shoneen, age 19).

The women indicated that family members discussed the possibilities, considering the best options for the family as a whole, and in this process, each family member contributed in various ways. Research conducted by Afshar (1989a, 1989b) points to the ways in which Muslim mothers encouraged their daughters to get educated, in the face of scepticism from men in the community. More recently, Reay (1998) and Gillies (2006) have also indicted important gendered dimensions to social capital offered to children by parents. However, in my research there was no distinct gender divide. In some families, mothers provided the main source of support; in other families it was the father. Some women described their mothers and fathers reaching an agreement about their education, whereas other women stated that this transition was a source of argument between their parents. For

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instance, Gazala explained that her father encouraged her to attend university, even though her mother was against the idea: …I didn’t tell her [mum] until like 4 weeks before I was going to go, and then she said ‘oh no you can’t go’ and I said ‘dad said I could go’ and she wasn’t happy that he hadn’t told her (Gazala, age 21).

The strongest source of inspiration for the women to attend university came from parents, many of whom had endured difficult lives involving poverty, ill-health and poor housing, and had sacrificed much to enable their children to progress. Parents’ lost opportunities were placed onto the shoulders of the younger generation and if the women succeeded, their parents’ ongoing sacrifices would not have been in vain. For instance Kaleemah (age 27) told me that being witness to her mother’s difficult life had encouraged her to get a degree and PhD and to postpone marriage and childbirth. Because of early marriage and migration, Kaleemah’s mother had had no opportunity for education or training and due to cultural/religious norms and preferences, she did not engage in paid work outside the home. Kaleemah wanted a different life: JM: What were the motivations for you to go to university? Kaleemah: To be honest with you, because I’d saw my mum having a difficult life, erm, I didn’t want to follow the same kind of footsteps. […] Erm, I really couldn’t think of being married, having a family with nothing behind me. I just want to improve myself really.

Siblings have often been viewed as a negative influence on the achievement of other children within the family because of the assumption that in large families, parents have fewer opportunities to offer uninterrupted, high-quality attention to each of their children (Gillies and Lucey 2006). Social capital theorists such as Putnam, Coleman and Bourdieu have tended to regard children not as active producers of social capital but as passive recipients (Holland et al. 2007). However, research on minority ethnic families in the UK has found that older siblings play an important role in assisting their younger brothers and sisters with academic work and by helping to liaise between home and school (Gregory 2004, Crozier and Davis 2006). The findings of my research support this claim. For interviewees who had older siblings, all spoke about times when their brothers and sisters had been central to supporting their educational trajectories by transferring social capital, especially when parents could not speak English or were not familiar with school procedures. For instance, as a college student, Yafiah benefited from having an older brother who had studied the same syllabus and was able to help with her coursework: ‘whenever he [brother] came home I was like “don’t understand this: double fractions” and all this sort of thing. I would always go to my brother’ (Yafiah, aged 21).

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According to the women’s accounts, families used various strategies of deploying limited family resources between siblings in order to ensure the wellbeing of the family as a whole. Jasminah and Yafiah explained to me that they were successful at school and university partly because their families ensured that daughters were treated equally to sons: I was lucky in that I suppose I did have parents who were more sort of very… sort of ‘learn this, learn that’, ‘take your time doing stuff’ rather than actually being like other parents – girls whose parents make them cook and look after their younger siblings and things (Jasminah, age 26).

Other women highlighted how their parents decided to divide resources unequally, giving some siblings less in order to allow other siblings to have greater educational opportunities. Age was a factor in these decisions for some families, for others it was gender. For instance, the families of Amatullah and Munazzah were in a financial position – however precarious – to make strategic decisions about utilising their limited economic resources to provide an Islamic education at fee-paying schools for some of their children. In order to prioritise their daughters’ religious and moral education, and to ensure the izzat of the family, Munazzah told me that her parents sent their daughters to a fee-paying Islamic establishment, whilst her brother attended the local comprehensive school. According to Amatullah, on the other hand, her family pooled their economic resources and sent her oldest brother to an Islamic boarding school, whilst her oldest sister agreed to get married shortly after leaving school. Amatullah, who is the youngest sibling, understood her academic progress to be the result of her elder sister’s help, who took charge of her primary education. As she is the youngest in the family, Amatullah was under no pressure to ensure the family’s honour by finishing her studies early and getting married: …my mum said to my sister that she’s planning on getting me married when I’m 25, so it’s nice in a way that she’s letting me wait so long. I think my sister feels a bit…She got married when she was 17, so I think she does feel a bit… – because I’ve had the opportunity to go to university, and I think in a way she does feel a bit like I’ve got everything that she never (Amatullah, age 19).

Women received the ongoing support of their families during the transition to university and whilst they were students; as all the women attended local universities (either commuting from home or living in the university town and visiting home frequently) they remained intertwined within their families and communities. These strong social familial networks provided practical support and positive emotional capital that made the transition to university easier. It was notable that all the women attended local universities; though Ball’s (2002) analysis of student decisions concerning university institutions indicates that these

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choices are complex and multifaceted, for the women I spoke to staying close to kin was the most important factor. My interviewees were following highly successful educational paths, if this success is understood in a traditional sense; apart from Yusra and Zahida, all the women were studying what were considered prestigious degrees, such as law, science or business. Several women told me about the strong preference in their families for these vocational or ‘traditional’ subjects. This preference has been widely reported within other research findings (Abbas 2004, Din 2006, Ahmad 2001). According to Jasminah, class position was central to this preference for elite subjects within the British-Asian community. She suggested that working-class community members were not financially in the position to take a risk by selecting a degree subject purely based on interest and noted that community members who had a high regard for these elite subjects ‘tend to be working-class, from that kind of environment, and they know that the only way their children can succeed is by having an education which pushes them straight into a job’ (Jasminah, age 26). Similarly, Abbas notes that compared to middle-class South Asian parents he spoke to, who were more laid back about subject selection, ‘[w]orking-class South Asian parents tended to exert as great an influence as possible on subject selection’ (Abbas 2004: 67). This strategy of choosing traditionally ‘Asian’ vocational subjects at university was also a way to avoid ethnic or religious discrimination at university and in the workplace. The way that the women were encouraged by family members to enter certain careers is an example of the way in which class, ethnicity and faith interlock in relation to social capital. Constraining Ties Certainly, the narrow concentration on these subjects within the South Asian diaspora might open the possibility of achieving elite degrees and professional careers but I would caution against understanding these subject selection strategies solely in terms of advantage. None of the women had access to the high-volume social capital consisting of networks which provided direct, relevant and supportive resources offering valuable advice at key moments that middle-class students are able to draw upon (Ball 2003). Instead, the women I spoke to indicated that their families demonstrated hazy, unclear understandings of professional careers and when they knew of others working in such jobs, the links to these individuals were distant and limited. Though families offered all they could, their limited resources were often of very little help. For instance, Munazzah indicated that her father gave her unreliable advice because he underestimated the demands of a career in medicine. Munazzah worked hard to convince him that studying medicine and becoming a doctor was not appropriate for her as a woman with caring responsibilities:

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Irrespective of degree classification and the type of higher education institution attended, it is questionable whether a professional job would automatically follow a degree in an elite subject. The vast majority of women were planning to settle down in their hometowns where they would receive help to find employment by local social networks. However, as these areas were characterised by high unemployment rates and severely depressed economies, these tight-knit networks of support could paradoxically enclose the women into narrow confines of the community, for instance, by directing the women to specific types of roles. This could prevent the women from seeking diverse opportunities or networks outside the area (MacDonald 2005), serving to reinforce class inequalities rather than challenging these. Though I have aimed to demonstrate how the women worked with their families as a team to ensure the best outcome for the family as a whole, this did not mean that there were no disagreements about, concerns for, or challenges to the women’s educational paths. The history of migration patterns, socio-economic contexts and geographical location of the women’s hometowns have given rise to certain norms, behaviours and values (including varying interpretations of Islam) which may not be found in larger, more cosmopolitan areas (Ali 1992). For instance, Zahida (age 19) stated that Mirpuris living in her hometown ‘are really backward, their mentality is a lot different, like in the 1960s, that’s what they’re still living in, they can’t seem to go forward’. Six women to whom I spoke reported widespread suspicions of university within the Pakistani community. According to Kaleemah (age 27), there were doubts within some sections of the Pakistani community about the usefulness of a university education for women: ‘It’s mainly “you shouldn’t go out of the house, it’s not women’s role to go out of the house”; “‘there’s no such thing as a woman working, the man’s the breadwinner and the woman’s the housewife, to bring up the kids” et cetera.’ As the ‘cultural carriers’ of the family, women represent the honour and respectability of the family through their behaviour and values (Anthias 2000). Other suspicions, these women told me, were based on representations of student life which involved young people becoming ‘free’ and independent, and were influenced by the perception of the institutional emphasis on alcohol at university. The historical, geographical and classed contexts of these localities also influences the surveillance and policing of women’s actions by families and the wider community, through the use of gossip (Lloyd Evans and Bowlby 2000). Whatever the women’s behaviour at university, the risk of gossip was a very real one which could ruin a family’s izzat, including the marriage prospects for other daughters. Family fears about gossip and the loss of izzat impacted upon the educational opportunities available to these six women. For instance, Bilqis

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struggled to convince her parents to allow her to attend university: ‘Like my uncles and my aunties, they told my dad not to send me, because they said [university town] is a different place, and they’re worried, and stuff like that.’ Although Bilqis’s parents did finally agree to let her attend, this was only on the condition that she continued to live at home, which enabled her parents to ‘keep an eye’ on her. Not only did commuting to university add considerable strain to Bilqis’s workload, staying local limited other women’s educational and career options. The Negotiation of Constraining and Enabling Factors In response to the educational constraints imposed by community and family members, the women who faced these restrictions used textual interpretations of Islam as a tool to challenge the ‘cultural’ or ‘traditional’ practices of certain groups. Zahida, for instance, suggested that many community members used a problematic interpretation of the Qur’an in order to justify the limited rights of women: ‘it’s not religion, it’s culture. And they’ve got the two completely mixed up’ (Zahida, age 19). The women also used textual based understandings of Islam in order to argue that a university education was a requirement of their faith. For instance, Sara emphasised the importance of having an education in her future role as a mother: ‘if you’re going to be a mother to those children, you’re going to be their teacher for five years. If I’m uneducated and they come home from school and they go “mum what’s two plus two?” and I don’t know the answer’ (Sara, age 19). The use of Islam as a tool in order to assert the rights of young Muslims – particularly women – has been found in other research (Jacobson 1998, Afshar et al. 2005). As Browne (2005) notes, Muslim women’s requests for increased rights are more successful if they based these demands on women’s roles as mothers or wives. As the women learnt about these women-centred interpretations of Islam by coming into contact with family members (women but also men) who supported such interpretations of the Qur’an and Sunnah, certain social networks were significant to this vocabulary of women’s rights within Islam. Women had other networks outside of family (e.g. friends, teachers or prominent community members) that supported them in practicing a textual based interpretation of faith. For instance, according toYafiah, her mother ran a women’s halaqa, and she was able to draw on her established status within the community to support the rights of young women during family disputes: ...a lot of the girls in [town] go to my mum, and say ‘oh will you speak to my mum, I don’t want to get married at 16 please’. And so they’ll go to my mum and my mum will go round to their house: ‘don’t do this to your daughter, let her get an education first at least’. And of course some of them went away and got   Sunnah – which means the path or way – consists of the recorded actions and words of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH).

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a great education, and some of them didn’t, but she tried to help them as much as she could (Yafiah, 21).

This struggle for claims to religious authenticity involving the ‘turn to Islam’ included significant class components (Abbas 2003) where the socio-economic contexts and history of migration patterns in these localities have enabled certain interpretations of Islam which justify limited opportunities for women (Ali 1992, Sardar 2009). Though the women successfully challenged certain Islamic practices which they considered ‘cultural’, tribal or national in order to access higher education, it remains to be seen whether revivalist Islamic discourses can be used by women in these northern localities to justify their right to a career after marriage and childbirth. Conclusion I have explored the significance of social capital for a group of Muslim women negotiating the transition to university. These dense ethnic ties facilitated the women’s educational trajectories and possible routes to social mobility by offering the women access to personal and emotional support and practical help. Though some social network literature has emphasised the importance of parents to the educational outcomes of students, the significance of siblings has received less attention; however I have suggested that older siblings in particular were central to the women’s educational trajectories. Whilst some research findings have emphasised the gendered divisions of social networks as they are offered to children, my research indicated that for interviewees, the gendering of this was often less clear. Overall, this chapter emphasised the role of social capital in relation to the women’s educational trajectories, paying particular attention to the interconnections between ethnicity, faith and class in relation to the deployment of social resources. The findings of this research indicate that contrary to Putnam’s conceptual framework, bridging capital is not the only route to social mobility. For the working-class Muslim women I interviewed, bonding capital was an invaluable resource which facilitated their paths to university. Due to the specific interconnections between class, faith and ethnicity, bonding capital has proved to be important for this particular group of women. Tight-knit ethnic networks compensated for the lack of resources that families could offer. The women’s religious obligations ensured that they made optimum use of these networks as a way to move ahead for the sake of themselves and their families and communities. Yet social networks in the form of ‘bonding’ or ‘bridging’ social capital may not, however, be enough to guarantee the educational progression of and social mobility for second generation minority groups. The women I spoke to were students at university, but it is yet unknown whether the women will face barriers – financial or otherwise – in accessing the postgraduate qualifications necessary for their chosen careers, or what kind of local job opportunities will open or

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close to the women after graduation. This research reveals only a partial story of the women’s mobilities (or immobilities) and it remains to be seen whether a university degree provides the women with the tools to help themselves and their families out of poverty. The women’s classed, religious and ethnic based social practices and values were manifested in their aims to settle in their hometowns after graduation, despite a severe lack of career opportunities and economic investment. This could return the women to working-class inequalities rather than helping them to escape these. Despite the strong desires of the women to engage in paid work (even after childbirth), completing a university education may not be able to transcend the traditional gendered division of labour within the household. It is necessary for future research and scholarship on ethnicity as social capital to take account of class inequalities and local social hierarchies which are significant to the opportunities available to young diasporic groups. Bibliography Abbas, T. 2003. The Impact of Religio-Cultural Norms and Values on the Education of Young South Asian Women. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(4), 411–28. Abbas, T. 2004. The Education of British South Asians: Ethnicity, Capital and Class Structure. London: Palgrave. Afshar, H. 1989a. Gender Roles and the ‘Moral Economy of Kin’ Among Pakistani Women in West Yorkshire. New Community, 15(2), 213–54. Afshar, H. 1989b. Education: Hopes, Expectations and Achievements of Muslim Women in West Yorkshire. Gender and Education, 1(3): 261–72. Afshar, H., Aitken, R. and Franks, M. 2005. Feminisms, Islamophobia and Identities. Political Studies, 53(2), 262–83. Ahmad, F. 2001. Modern Traditions? British Muslim Women and Academic Achievement. Gender and Education, 13(2), 137–52. Anthias, F. 2000. Metaphors of Home: Gendering New Migrations to Southern Europe, in Gender and Migration in Southern Europe: Women on the Move, edited by F. Anthias and G. Lazaridis. Oxford and New York: Berg, 15–47. Ball, S.J. 2003. Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage. London: Routledge. Ball, S.J., Reay, D. and David, M. 2002. ‘Ethnic Choosing’: Minority Ethnic Students, Social Class and Higher Education Choice. Race Ethnicity and Education, 5(4), 334–57. Bolognani, M. 2007. Islam, Ethnography and Politics: Methodological Issues in Researching Amongst West Yorkshire Pakistanis in 2005. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 33(1), 59–76. Browne, K. 2005. Realising Muslim Women’s Rights: The Role of Islamic Identity Among British Muslim Women. Women’s Studies International Forum, 29(4), 417–30.

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Carter, J. 2004. Research Note: Reflections on Interviewing Across the Ethnic Divide. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 7(4), 345–53. Cherti, M. 2008. Paradoxes of Social Capital: A Multi-Generational Study of Moroccans in London. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Crozier, G. and Davies, J. 2006. Family Matters: A Discussion of the Bangladeshi and Pakistani Extended Family and Community in Supporting the Children’s Education. The Sociological Review, 54(4), 678–95. Devine, F. 2004. Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Din, I. 2006. The New British: The Impact of Culture and Community on Young Pakistanis. Aldershot: Ashgate. Egharevba, I. 2001. Researching An-‘other’ Minority Ethnic Community: Reflections of a Black Female Researcher on the Intersections of Race, Gender and Other Power Positions on the Research Process. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 4(3), 225–41. Gillies, V. 2006. Marginalised Mothers: Exploring Working Class Experiences of Parenting. Abingdon: Routledge. Gillies, V. and Lucey, H. 2006. ‘It’s a Connection You Can’t Get Away From’: Brothers, Sisters and Social Capital. Journal of Youth Studies, 9(4), 479–93. Gregory, E. 2004. ‘Invisible’ Teachers of Literacy: Collusion Between Siblings and Teachers in Creating Classroom Cultures. Literacy, (July), 97–105. Haylett, C. 2001. Illigitimate Subjects?: Abject Whites, Neoliberal Modernisation, and Middle-Class Multiculturalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19(3), 351–70. Holland, J., Reynolds, T. and Weller, S. 2007. Transitions, Networks and Communities: The Significance of Social Capital in the Lives of Children and Young People. Journal of Youth Studies, 10(1), 97–116. Jacobson, J. 1998. Islam in Transition: Religion and Identity Among British Pakistani Youth. London: Routledge. Lawler, S. 1999. Getting Out and Getting Away: Women’s Narratives of Class Mobility. Feminist Review, 63(Autumn), 3–24. Lloyd Evans, S. and Bowlby, S. 2000. Crossing Boundaries: Racialised Gendering and the Labour Market Experiences of Pakistani Migrant Women in Britain. Women’s Studies International Forum, 23(4), 461–74. MacDonald, R., Shildrick, T., Webster, C. and Simpson, D. 2005. Growing Up in Poor Neighbourhoods: The Significance of Class and Place in the Extended Transitions of ‘Socially Excluded’ Young Adults. Sociology, 39(5), 873–91. McLoughlin, S. 2005. Mosques and the Public Space: Conflict and Cooperation in Bradford. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31(6), 1045–66. Power, S., Edwards, T., Whitty, G. and Wigfall, V. 2003. Education and the Middle Class. Buckingham: Open University Press. Putnam, R.D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Reay, D. 1998. Class Work: Mothers’ Involvement in their Children’s Schooling. London: University College Press. Rhodes, P.J. 1994. Race-of-Interviewer Effects: A Brief Comment. Sociology, 28(2), 547–58. Sardar, Z. 2009. Islam, Public Space and British Muslims. Paper to the Public Lecture Series, Cardiff University, 3 February 2009. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. and Longhurst, B. 2001. Ordinary, Ambivalent and Defensive: Class Identities in the Northwest of England. Sociology, 35(4), 875–92. Sayer, A. 2005. The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shah, B. 2007. Being Young, Female and Laotian: Ethnicity as Social Capital at the Intersection of Gender, Generation, ‘Race’ and Age. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(1), 28–50. Shah, G., Mander, H., Thorat, S., Deshpande, S. and Baviskar, A. 2005. Untouchability in Rural India. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Smith, H. 2007. Playing a Different Game: The Contextualised Decision-Making Processes of Minority Ethnic Students in Choosing a Higher Education Institution. Race Ethnicity and Education, 10(4), 415–37. Subedi, B. 2006. Theorizing a ‘Halfie’ Researcher’s Identity in Transnational Fieldwork. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(5), 573–93. Werbner, P. 1990. The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings Among British Pakistanis. Oxford: Berg. Zhou, M. 2005. Ethnicity as Social Capital: Community-Based Institutions and Embedded Networks of Social Relations, in Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the USA and UK, edited by G. Loury et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 131–59. Zhou, M. and Kim, S. 2006. Community Forces, Social Capital, and Educational Achievement: The Case of Supplementary Education in the Chinese and Korean Immigrant Communities. Harvard Educational Review, 76(1), 1–29.

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Part II Mapping Class: Location, Distinction and Belonging

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Chapter 5

Asdatown: The Intersections of Classed Places and Identities Ben Gidley and Alison Rooke

Introduction This chapter will explore the intersections between classed places and identities, focusing on the UK and examining the ways in which the figures of the ‘chav’ and the ‘pikey’ have been represented in British popular culture and in official policy discourses. We will argue that these representations conflate the racialized identity of the Gypsy Traveller with white working-class identities and draw on the presence or proximity of Irish or Gypsy Travellers to the white ‘underclass’ in order to metonymically racialize the white working-class as a whole. The politics of space, we will argue, is central to this process. Existing sociological and cultural geography literature hints at the active role of the spatial imaginary in classing people (Charleworth 2000, Robson 2000, Haylett 2000, Hewitt 2005, Skeggs 2005). We will argue that particular spaces and places – housing estates, and places described as ‘chav towns’ – are used discursively as a way of fixing people in racialized class positions. In British culture, there is a long history of reading poverty and class spatially. Indeed, the roots of British empirical sociology can be found in a middle-class preoccupation with the poor working-class others who could be located in districts of the city. While the persistence of poverty is explained in policy discourse in terms of ‘cycles’ and ‘cultures’ of poverty entrenched in a regressive or ‘backwards’ working-class, we will argue that what is regressive – and tainted by its Victorian imperialist history – is the persistent classing gaze which fixes working-class people in place. The Role of Place in Poverty Our cities were long ago sectioned into poorer and richer areas and…socially the distance between the poorest areas and the rest of the city was vast (Mumford and Power 2004: 14).

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, the maps produced by Charles Booth represented cartographically the intensity of poverty in London, showing

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how poverty was geographically concentrated (Gidley 2000). A century later, the New Labour government published an Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), mapping the whole of the UK by intensity of a variety of forms of poverty (2001, revised in 2004). The IMD revealed the striking continuity of the geographical concentration of poverty across time (Davey Smith et al 2001, The Economist 2001, Vaughan et al. 2005). There has subsequently been debate as to whether such deprived areas impart what the Social Exclusion Unit calls ‘area effects’ to their residents in which a ‘culture’ of ‘worklessness’ becomes the norm (Lupton 2003a). As Hirsch writes, the correlation of place and poverty ‘appears to have increased in recent years, with concentrations of disadvantage becoming more acute and people’s long term prospect of escaping disadvantage more heavily influenced by geography’ (Hirsch 2004: 16). The influence of geography on poverty has increased in part as some neighbourhoods are identified as ripe for ‘regeneration’ or ‘gentrification’ while others, such as outer city and post-industrial areas, continue to decline economically, their residents moving further into poverty (see Paton, this volume, Lupton 2003b). This phenomenon has been described in terms of ‘postcode poverty’, as disadvantage becomes geographically concentrated and acute and the possibilities of escaping poverty are increasingly circumscribed. Certainly, research shows that, in poor areas, there is an interaction between ‘deficits’ in several different forms of ‘capital’, which drives the persistence of poverty in certain areas (Piachaud 2002). A concentration of poverty can be compounded, for example, by high rates of crime and other dangers, poor reputation and inadequate schooling. Research since the 1950s and 1960s, including the Plowden Report (Central Advisory Council for Education 1967), has shown that low educational attainment is a feature of poor neighbourhoods (Lupton 2004). This persists today: Lupton’s (2004) work evidences the fact that school quality tends to be lower in high poverty areas than others. Similarly, many deprived areas are ‘labour market deprived’; different forms of isolation, both social and geographic, of many deprived communities, may make it difficult for residents to get in touch with work opportunities and form the networks essential to creating such opportunities in the first instance (Smith 1999). In outer city areas, such as Newtown, the area discussed in this chapter, this is largely about geographic isolation, often exacerbated by lack of transport. But in inner city areas, too, research shows that people can experience equally intense social isolation: many residents’ geographies can be extremely circumscribed and constrained (Crabbe et al. 2006, Räthzel 2008, Reay and Lucey 2000, Rooke et al. 2005). Deprived areas may have a stigma attached to them in public opinion, and people from these areas may be discriminated against in their obtaining paid employment. So for example,   This was first pointed out to us by Keib Thomas, a South London anti-poverty campaigner, who sadly passed away in 2007.   We are grateful to India Court MacWeeney for additional research for this section.  All names and placenames in this chapter have been anonymised.

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Atkinson and Kintrea (cited by Lupton 2003a) found that the perceived ‘reputation’ of an area was important in structuring residents’ perception of opportunities in the wider community. Difficult Spaces: Newtown In this chapter we discuss the process by which certain kinds of places (specific estates) that contain certain kinds of people (the ‘underclass’) are characterized in terms of a pathological lack, relating one micro-level case study, that of Newtown, to macro-level discourse. Newtown sits on the outskirts of London. A large part of the town is made up of an estate of social housing built in the inter-war years, Hopefields. Newtown in general and Hopefields in particular appear in the 2001 census as having high indicators of ‘deprivation’ and ‘social exclusion’. Hopefields was the location of the Newtown Neighbourhood Project, an action research project conducted by Real Strategies Ltd, West Kent Extra and the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. The project set out to understand patterns of neighbourliness in this estate, which was widely described by agencies working there as ‘hard to reach’, ‘difficult’ and having problems with ‘anti-social behaviour’. The project carried out interviews with these agencies, and then interviews with residents of the estate, both of which we will draw on in this chapter. The project also used more participatory methods in order to use research as a tool for making concrete improvements in the area (Gidley et al. 2008). This area in general (and in particular two streets on the Hopefields estate: Orange Grove and Flower Street) has suffered a negative reputation. In interviews with representatives of local agencies with a role of addressing social exclusion, this area and the two streets in particular were often differentiated from other streets in the location. Residents of these streets were perceived in a negative way by virtue of merely residing there. This appeared to have been the case for a long time. The agencies considered residents from these streets as making high levels of demands on services. Agencies discussed this population as lacking self-help skills, having health and social care problems associated with smoking and poor diet and having high levels of rent arrears and debt and benefit problems. As several interviewees  The term social exclusion, is as Levitas points out, intrinsically problematic, as it works to discursively place the poor and disadvantaged outside society (Levitas 2005: 7).   The majority of the research on the ground was carried out by Real Strategies: Sue Lelliott, Debbie Humphry, Ros Young and Imogen Slater. Additional research at Goldsmiths was carried out by Alison Rooke, Ben Gidley, Emma Jackson and Martin Myers. The project was managed by Eamonn Dillon and Genette Allen at West Kent Extra. We are grateful to all of our partners in this collaborative work, to the Housing Corporation who funded the project, and to the participants in Newtown. A full list of collaborators can be found in Gidley et al. (2008: 50).

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iterated when approached with a proposal for an action research project: ‘You will never get anything off the ground there.’ This perception has been passed on to residents themselves and experienced as shameful with, for example, interviewees describing never naming the streets they came from when meeting new people. This chapter examines the process by which such ‘area effects’ work, how proper nouns – place names like Orange Grove and Flower Street – become metonyms for narratives of abjection, serving to fix classed subjects in place. The Classing Gaze: Scopic Regimes of Class [T]he conditions of emergence of a particular discursive class group…were articulated, not through economic ordering, but rather through the use of moral and cultural categories (Finch 1993: 11).

In the empirical research into the spatial concentration of poverty described above, the concepts which frame the analysis – deprivation, worklessness, deficit, poverty – are not neutral, but rather are already moral terms drawing their explanatory power from bourgeois moral regimes with deep cultural roots. We can see the deployment and development of such moral regimes at work in the ways in which class was envisaged – and thus made visible – by the early figures of British social science (Stedman Jones 1984, Gidley 2000). The classification used by statisticians today to frame class derive from the pioneering work of Charles Booth at the end of the nineteenth century, which grouped the different people of London into eight classes, from Class A at the bottom to H at the top. His schema was adopted for the 1911 Census and thus ‘became the basis of all succeeding official analyses of social class’ (Scott 1990: 84–90). Booth mapped the streets of London by these class categories, using a system of visual recognition to allocate them. The bottom two (A and B) of Booth’s classes were the ‘residuum’, the surplus population, colour-coded with the darkest colours on his map: A. The lowest class, which consists of occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals, and semi-criminals…little regular family life…homeless outcasts… of low character…Their life is the life of savages…They degrade whatever they touch, and as individuals are perhaps incapable of improvement. B. Casual earnings, very poor [including many] who from shiftlessness, helplessness, idleness, or drink, are inevitably poor… [This is] the ‘leisure class’ amongst the poor (in Fried and Elman 1969: 11–14).

Booth and other early urban explorers, such as Henry Mayhew and Friedrich Engels, entered the urban underworlds of the industrial metropolis with a desire to make sense of emerging urban industrialisation and the resultant conditions that

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the working classes were living in. These early sociological explorations were integral to the development of a Victorian bourgeois imaginary which produced the working-class as almost less than human and in need of cultural reform and civilisation. As Stallybrass and White (1985), for example, have noted, the framing of class in these texts was informed by a particular set of moralizing tropes and figures. In the remainder of this section, we will briefly look at some such tropes, before demonstrating their remarkable persistence in both policy discourse and popular culture. One such trope is the association of the working-class with various forms of incivility, judged against a bourgeois standard. For example, Engels, one of the earliest urban explorers, writing in the 1840s, condemned the Irish who made up a large percentage of the working-class people he observed in Manchester for their drinking habits: Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman’s life worth having…his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat (1973: 118).

A key form of incivility the social investigators associated with the working-class was sexual excess. A central theme throughout Engels’ work is the ways in which the conditions of urbanisation under capitalism loosened the bonds of family and patriarchy leading to sexual immorality in the overcrowded conditions of the factory and the slum. Engels wrote of the ‘filthy language’ to which women are exposed on the factory floor, where men are ‘unsexed’ and women are deprived of their ‘womanliness’ through physical labour. Financial independence under industrial capitalism led, for Engels, to a concern about the dangers of women falling into prostitution, as well as ‘immorality, illegitimacy, the breakdown of family life, and bestial excess’ (Wilson 1992: 73). The Victorian imaginary of the working classes and their unruly sexualities was deeply erotic: Walkowitz’s (1994) and Weeks’ (1989) work shows how the imaginaries of middle-class reformers were realized in a concern with regulating working-class women’s sexualities through legislation and education. In fact, it was not just the sexual behaviour of the working-class that the middle-class investigators found disgusting (but also desirable): their very bodies were seen as excessively sexual, indeed excessive in general. The excessiveness of working-class bodies in this discourse is understood by Stallybrass and White (1985) through Bakhtin’s (1968, 1981) concepts: the working-class body was figured as grotesque, infinitely permeable and spilling out, in contrast to the disciplined  See for example Walter: My Secret Life, believed to be authored by the urban explorer Henry Spencer Ashbee, is an even more extreme example of this classed imaginary and its confusion of desire entwined with disgust.

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‘classical’ body of bourgeois ideals. Along with the corporeal excessiveness of the working-class, middle-class observers identified them with excessive forms of display and decoration. Mayhew’s writing produces a taxonomy of the exotic dress and decorative practices of working-class ‘tribes’ such as the costermongers with their baggy trousers, jewellery, tattoos. The late nineteenth century figure of the ‘gent’ or ‘swell’, a working-class man inappropriately dressed in high fashion clothing, as satirized in music hall songs and the comic character Ally Sloper, continued to frame working-class subcultures in terms of sartorial excess (Walkowitz 1994). The nineteenth century parents of social science such as Booth and Mayhew saw the working-class as failing to respect the spatial order built into bourgeois morality. On the one hand, these investigators saw the working-class as allowing the domestic to spill out of its proper place, the private sphere, into public, just as their bodily excess and ostentatious display of wealth was a spilling out of that which, according to bourgeois morality, ought to remain private. For example, the key indicators of belonging to the lower ranked classes in Booth’s visual taxonomy were represented as various forms of spilling out: conducting domestic affairs on the street (for example by arguing loudly), hanging washing in the street and so on. In a departure from his normal scientific language, Booth wrote: ‘No sooner do [the casual poor] make a street their own than it is ripe for destruction and should be destroyed’ (1903: 186). At the same time, the investigators condemned the working-class for allowing the undomesticated into the domestic sphere. Engels, for example, obsessively remarked on the Irish of Manchester keeping animals – in particular pigs, the ultimate signifiers of dirt – in their homes. In fact, for Engels, in the working-class home, the domestic/wild distinction that guaranteed the human/animal distinction, was broken down – workers’ homes, he wrote, were ‘cattle-sheds for human beings’ (1973: 82) – rendering the proletariat infra-human. As the pigs became domestic, the proles became feral. The Working-Class as Race Apart …it is not surprising that the working-class has gradually become a race apart from the English bourgeoisie (Engels 1973: 14).

Crucially, each of these tropes – incivility, sexual immorality, bodily excess, excessive decoration and disordered space – were modalities through which the working-class was racialized: constructed as a racial Other. Indeed, Engels constantly used the language of race to frame the proletariat, who he called ‘these helots of modern society’: in the working men’s dwellings in Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience and consequently no comfortable family life is possible; that in such dwellings only a

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physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home (1973: 93).

The presence of the Irish amongst the working-class reinforced this racialisation. Irish migrant labourers in the English urban landscape were exotic and abject racial others for the Victorian investigators, but also constituted a metonym for the working-class, thereby racializing the whole class. Beatrice Potter, one of Booth’s assistants, wrote in her diaries that: ‘The worse scoundrel is the cockney-born Irishman. The woman is the Chinaman of the place, and drudges as the women of the savage races’ (1982: 205). Most dockworkers were Irish and Potter clearly saw them as a race apart: ‘low-looking, bestial, content with their own condition’ (ibid), and ‘even the best of dockers bear the brand of London cunning and London restlessness’ (ibid: 351). In Booth’s writings, there is a constant association of Irish Catholics with all the vices of the lower classes: idleness, gambling, drinking, sexual immorality, coarse language: ‘The poor Irish, who form the bulk of the Catholic population, are careless, but are naturally devout. They are roughmannered and fight amongst themselves, or with the police at times, and they drink a great deal’ (in Fried and Elman 1969: 160). We will now move on to argue that this racialisation, alongside the associated moralizing tropes, persists in contemporary middle-class depictions of the proletariat. While racializing terms are muted in policy discourse, lingering in the survival of the language of Booth and his contemporaries, they are remarkably explicit in middle-class popular culture and coalesce in the figures of the ‘chav’ and the ‘pikey’ and in a spatial imaginary which fixes working-class people in place. Poor Places, Poor People The tropes discussed above – incivility, sexual immorality, bodily excess, excessive decoration and disordered space – have persisted over the years (Morris 1994), and are clearly in evidence in a range of contemporary discourses, doing considerable performative work in producing classed understandings of both subjectivities and spatialities. In this section, we discuss two spheres in which this occurs. Firstly, within UK New Labour discourse we see a continued concern about unruly and immoral working-class bodies, a concern coalescing in certain figures and places which have come to serve as shorthand for incivility, immorality, excess and disorder. As Haylett writes, the policy field works as ‘a symbolic regime partly constructed through representations of what “poor people and places” are and should be like according to modernising political imperative’, based on putative ‘observable differences in the ways of life of poor people’ (2003: 57). Crucially, though, these representations of poor people and places, and of the modernizing norm to which they are contrasted, are frequently drawn from the second sphere in which the racialized tropes discussed above circulate: in middle-

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class popular cultural texts, and their spectacular and demeaning representations of working-class bodies and places. In this section, we shall show each of these tropes, from incivility to spatial disorder, persist today, circulating between and across the spheres of popular culture and policy discourse. We shall also show how some of these tropes were played out in the very local context of Hopefields and Newtown. Working-Class Incivility The incivility that Engels and Booth described is today usually described as ‘antisocial behaviour’, a term that is heavily classed in its inflection and strongly associated in both policy and media discourse with the ‘underclass’ (Gillies 2005, Levitas 2005, Skeggs 2005, Garrett 2007, Sadler 2008). While politicians have unveiled ever-tougher measures to deal with incivility, from ASBOs and parenting orders to curfews and dispersal zones, middle-class popular culture has given us texts like How to Get an ASBO (Wallace and Spanner 2006), part of a trend of cruel ‘ironic’ portrayals of Britain’s social housing estates as places of crime,violence and stupidity which use humour in the service of classed contempt. Hopefields in Newtown is consistently associated with anti-social behaviour in both local policy discourse and in local media representations. For example, an article about Newtown in local paper the News Shopper is entitled ‘Welcome to Beirut’: ‘Burnt out cars, joyriding and violence on [Hopefields] in [Newtown] are turning it into an area where residents are “afraid to go about their everyday lives”’ (11 April 2001). The area is portrayed in this and other articles as an unpleasant place to live where residents feared reprisals to their families if they complained and where complaining to the police was futile. Orange Grove and Flower Street in particular emerge as a ‘problem area’ for joyriding and ‘chicken running’. These media discourses directly affect the way the area is governed and policed, and the way that agencies providing services to the residents in the area perceive the residents. In interviews with local service providers, more than one interviewee described ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) as medals carried by young people locally. Councillors asked the local police to use ASBOs and curfew orders to deal with joy riding (‘Curfew for Estate’ 15 November 2000) and a dispersal zone was subsequently introduced in parts of Newtown (The Newtown Messenger, 9 June 2005). A Community Warden was introduced in Newtown to address these issues – but was not allowed to walk the streets of Hopefields because it was considered too dangerous! Sexual and Corporeal Excess Victorian tropes of working-class bodily excess continue in contemporary debates around promiscuity, obesity, smoking and health. Again, these tropes are evident in the media and popular culture. In television show such as You are What You Eat and Fat Kids Can’t Hunt, the unruly working-class body is repeatedly regulated

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and educated out of its unhealthy classed habitus by overwhelmingly thin middleclass experts. The failure to regulate bodily tastes is firmly located with the lower classes, as with Jamie Oliver educating the working-class dinner ladies, children and parents of Greenwich, London, in his Jamie’s School Dinners programme. But, again, these concerns circulate from popular culture into policy discourse. Oliver went on to launch a ‘Feed Me Better’ campaign, shortly after which the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, announced investment in improving school meals. And in September 2005 the Department for Education and Skills established the Schools Food Trust. Concerns over childhood obesity, embodied in the figure of the fat child, coupled with a projection of poor parenting on to working-class parents, thus circulate between popular culture (Jamie’s School Dinners, Fat Kids Can’t Hunt) and the policy field exemplified by the Schools Food Trust. The workingclass body, in these representations is guilty of what Nunn and Biressi (2008) describe as ‘misdirected consumption’ a popular trope in media representations of the working-class as the ‘undeserving, feckless and/or downright disorganised poor’. As well as this sort of irresponsible consumption, the ‘undeserving’ poor of Victorian bourgeois morality are frequently signified today by ostentatious display as a sign of excessive consumption. Drawing on Skeggs’ work, Back writes: The phrase ‘dripping in gold’ is used as a means to pour scorn on working-class women. It is meant to fix young women and the nouveau riche as brash or gaudy …and mark them as inferior within the hierarchies of taste and class distinction. It is a stock phrase in the lexicon of class conceit (2007: 88–9).

Working-class sexuality is another site whereby the grotesque body is failing in self regulation. Popular culture is filled with images of unruly and promiscuous working-class bodies (and especially female bodies) that spill over, from the Viz cartoon strip ‘Fat Slags’ to the Little Britain comedy character Vicky Pollard squeezed into a pink Kappa track suit (Tyler 2008), or in the obsessive focus on under-dressed over-weight young women behaving badly in reality TV programmes like Ibiza Uncovered and Undercover Britain. This is not merely a matter of classed prejudice in the realm of representation. Nunn and Biressi (2008), in a critical examination of the media’s treatment of the case of Karen Mathews, the mother of nine year old Shannon whose 24 day disappearance was the subject of an extensive police investigation in April 2008, examine representations of Matthew’s sexual excess: evidenced in her excessive breeding – her seeming inability to commit to respectable monogamy (having seven children to five fathers) – and her dependence on state benefits, which distilled a range of classed cultural meanings. The figures of the promiscuous working-class woman, the single mother on benefits and the feckless father or boyfriend operate in a range of popular cultural milieus. These classed figures serve as shorthand for classed discourses which have real consequences in the social world, whether this is directly in policy agendas or implicitly in post code discrimination.

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Excessively decorated, promiscuous, voluptuous or obese bodies are ever present in popular culture and in particular the makeover TV genre. These grotesque bodies are contrasted to the somatic norm (Puwar 2004) of bourgeois femininity of middle-class body. The latter is probably best represented by the disciplined bodies of female reality TV experts like What Not To Wear’s Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine. As McRobbie points out, in an examination of the ways in which make-over TV generates and legitimates class antagonisms through an attention to gendered and classed embodiment: [t]he bodies of young women are now to be understood according to a scale running from welfare-dependent, single maternity, marking failure, to wellgroomed, slim, sophistication, marking success (2004: 102).

The poles of this scale are represented, McRobbie notes, by the ‘pram-faced girl’ and the slim, stylish sophisticate – in other words, by Vicky Pollard and Trinny Woodall respectively. In Newtown, interviewees working in local agencies described residents in exactly this language: images of cheap gold jewellery cropped up frequently in descriptions of local residents’ ways and tastes. And, again, residents were aware of the ways that their tastes and bodies were perceived by others. To give just one example, a resident interviewee, a young woman, described her shame at being called fat: I don’t like people calling me names, that’s one…well, I don’t mind, it’s when they say ‘Fat’, that gets me. That’s the only word what ever gets me. When she calls me it I have to call it back to make myself feel [OK]…

The trope of bodily excess and immorality works discursively to incite judgement and generate classed positioning in today’s cultural landscape. McNay and Skeggs, drawing on Bourdieu’s work on the intimate connection between taste and bodily dispositions, interrogate the ways in which social value is ‘read on the body’, how it is ‘produced through symbolic systems which set limits on who can be known and how’ (Skeggs 2004: 26), at the centre of modern strategies of social control (McNay 1999). Crucially, Skeggs is concerned with how this process of inscription makes entitlements and fixes limits, ‘enabling some groups to propertise their personhood and others to be beyond appropriation as the foundational ground of valuelessness from which others can mark and know their distinctions’ (ibid). The scale from the fat slag to the A1 girl, like Booth’s grid of Classes A to H, is a device through which subjects are gendered and classed. While make-over TV presents the illusion of the possibility of self-improvement, this scale is not one along which it is easy to move. The paradox of make-over TV is that it promises mobility while fixing subjects in place. These scales, moving from popular culture into policy, provide the repertoire of classed images through which the targets of initiatives like the Schools Food Trust are able to be imagined.

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Disordered Space The spatial signifier ‘the estate’ has come to stand in for a range of classed understandings which cross the media landscape to be realized in the national imaginary. The Victorian pleasure of gazing on the spectacle of the chaos and sheer excess of working-classness, encapsulated in the early sociology of Booth and Engels, endures today in UK TV drama programmes such as Meet the Braithwaites and Shameless. Shameless takes place on a large council estate, Chatsworth, where notions of community, local identity, gender, ethnicity and sexuality collide in promiscuous ways. The estate is a complex moral universe that exists beneath the radar of official understandings of place or community. The programme is filled with sexual promiscuity, non-traditional families (i.e. not middle-class, stably heterosexual, monogamous and nuclear), excessive drug and alcohol consumption and petty criminality, and narratives of complex community and ingenuity in the face of ‘officialdom’. In Shameless, as Munt points out, ‘the viewer is seduced into a cacophonic world that is not generally different from a Dickensian novel’ (2008: 149). Shameless can be read as a ‘popular cultural cartography’ (Haylett 2000: 7) which represents estate life to the contemporary class tourist gazing from the comfort of their living room. In this way the programme serves as a reference point for understanding lives on estates in general. Newpaper columnist Allison Pearson, for example, writing in the Daily Mail, describes the Karen Mathews case discussed above, as possibly ‘inspired by an episode of Channel 4’s Shameless’: Whether or not this is the case, her life in general certainly echoes the TV series. For those who’ve never seen it, Shameless is a brilliantly-scripted ‘comedy’ set in underclass Britain. Feckless fathers, drug abuse, teenage pregnancies – name any contemporary social ill and Shameless shows it; not as a vision of a living hell, but as a two-fingers-up-to-authority scally-romp in which the moral of the story is that morals don’t really matter…Hilarious. Unless, of course, you happen to be a real child living in that kind of couldn’t-care-less home. Anyone find the plight of Shannon Matthews funny? Thought not. Yet her family could come from Central Casting for Shameless Britain.

Here, Pearson blurs the distinction between a fictional popular representation and a range of social policy concerns around ‘underclass’ behaviour. The imagery of estate life central to Shameless also appeared in Newtown in the agency interviews. The disordered space of the streets of Hopefields was regularly invoked – images of burnt-out cars and abandoned white goods on the front gardens, of the residents’ habits of parking their cars on the kerb and of keeping horses and caravans in their   We do not have the space to go into this here, but we are not arguing that there is nothing more to Shameless than the ironic deployment of classed tropes. Especially when placed in the context of Paul Abbot’s whole oeuvre, there are many aspects of the series which exceed such a description. Not the least of these, arguably, is the series’ queerness.

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back gardens – as spatial disorder comes to stand in for moral disorder. Thus, moral disorder, like bodily excess and incivility, continues to frame the workingclass as it did for the Victorians. The Racialisation of the Working-Class The racialised production of the white working-class poor can be understood as part of the production of the modern social (Haylett 2001: 354).

Earlier in this chapter, we argued that these tropes allowed Victorian social observers to construct the working-class as a ‘race apart’. In this section, we will argue that the persistence of these tropes means the continued racialisation of the working classes. Pearson’s column cited in the previous section focuses in on two families in Shameless, the Gallaghers and McCanns. In the series, the Gallaghers in particular are coded as Irish, with common Irish names and Catholic signifiers in their homes (Munt 2008). As with the Irish in Engels’ Manchester and Booth’s East London, the Irishness of the Gallaghers, both racial others and metonyms for the English unruly classes, serves to racialize the class in general. We can see a particularly extreme and widespread example of the intense racialisation of the working-class today in the figure of the ‘chav’, through which white working-class people are positioned as utterly racially other. In the midnoughties, there was a wave of popular websites like Chav Scum and Chav Towns, followed by several well-selling books – such as The Little Book of Chavs: The Branded Guide to Britain’s New Elite (Bok 2004), and Chav! A User’s Guide to Britain’s New Ruling Class (Wallace and Spanner 2004) – which constitute a veritable chav hate genre. The genre spells the return, in spectacular form, of the racializing and moralizing tropes we identified in the Victorian bourgeois. Here the tropes of incivility, sexual immorality, bodily excess, excessive display and disorderly space collide in a racialized popular imaginary. A glance at the proliferation of chav hate groups on the web provides manifold examples: there chav girls are breeding from an early age; their children have several fathers who are unable or unwilling to look after them. As Tyler (2008) demonstrates, the ‘chav mum’ embodies ‘historically familiar’ classed anxieties. The grotesque workingclass body, in the figure of the ‘chav mum’ (whether Karen Matthews or Vicky Pollard) works symbolically to vilify young white working-class mothers through the emotion of disgust. The intertwining of classed desire and disgust is also in evidence within contemporary gay male culture where the figure of the chav is an object of a desire   We do not have the space here to address the important issue of the relationship between the figuring of the working-class and the vexed question of whiteness – see Wray and Newitz (1997), Haylett (2001), Ware and Back (2002), Hewitt (2005), Bhopal and Myers (2008) and, from a very different perspective, Collins (2004).

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and fascination. The pornographic video company Triga, with their video titles such as Fuck a Hoodie, Skins and Scallies and Proper Hardcore, reveals the extent to which the authenticity of working-class masculinity is a marketable commodity (see Johnson 2008). Publicity for London’s G-A-Y club’s Chav night encourages its customers to come for night which celebrates ‘The clothes, the attitude, the council estates’ encouraging customers to ‘Dress down as far as possible’ for a night when ‘It’s time for the bad boys to take over G-A-Y or the middle-class roughing it for one night only.’ The spatial imaginary of class is clearly at work in the pornographic imagination where certain places (flats on council estates, building sites) are the locus classicus for erotic cross-lass encounters. As the promotional material for one video Council Scum demonstrates: ‘Soap dodgin, Special Brew and Freeview telly go hand in hand like an horse and cart especially when your a council flat bound piss poor dole robbin cunt! Filmed in Bermondsey South East London, these pillars of chav land UK are out for trouble!’ Crucially, chav hate is expressed in the space of humour. Most of the chav hate books are filed in bookshops and on the website Amazon under ‘humour’; most of the chav hate groups on Facebook are in the ‘Just for Fun’ category. As Tyler (2008) notes, the space of humour enables the expression of violent hatred that would be unacceptable in other spheres. Facebook groups include ‘Petition for the legalization of Chav Hunting!’ (2,928 members), ‘Whack-a-chav-a-day!’ (2,389 members), ‘SPIT ON A CHAV’ (1,415 members), ‘Kill the annoying chav playin loud music from his phone on public transport’ (1,208 members), ‘Save the UK... Kill a Chav’ (1,098 members), ‘I really dislike pikeys’ (764 members), ‘I fuckin’ hate pikeys’ (649 members), and ‘Clean our Streets! Kill a Chav!!!’ (just 172 members). There is a continuity here with the space of humour within which reality TV works, including the dissemination of class conceit through programmes like What Not To Wear. Of these, McRobbie writes that ‘denigration … is now done with a degree of selfconscious irony, both the presenters and the audiences are presumed to know that no harm is intended and that, in post politically-correct times, this is just good fun’ (McRobbie 2004: 100). The etymology of the word ‘chav’ is obscure and complex (Nayak 2003, Haywood and Yar 2006). One possible source is the Romany word ‘chavvy’, an affectionate term for a child (Bhopal and Myers 2008: 94). Closely related to the term ‘chav’ is ‘pikey’, which historically was associated with Gypsy Travellers and especially Irish Travellers. Although many people now use the term ‘pikey’ as a synonym for ‘chav’ (as in the Facebook chav hate groups mentioned above or on the chavscum website), it retains its derogatory racist valency. Thus the use of the term is an even more extreme example of the intense racialisation of the working-class today.

  Membership statistics accurate at September 2008. Most of these groups also appear to be populated mainly by university students, resonating with Tyler’s suggestion (2008) that chav hate is symptomatic of a more general anxiety about the mobility of the working classes, and an attempt to keep them out of middle-class spaces such as the university.

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The fact that the terms ‘pikey’ and ‘chav’ circulate from the space of humour, along with their blurry etymologies which allow their racial content to be easily denied, means that they can be expressed without the censure attached to other racist terms. As Bhopal and Myers write: the use of ‘paki’ and ‘coon’ is hugely restricted within British culture, but the use of ‘chav’ as a near-equivalent post-millennium British marker for ‘white trash’ has become quite commonplace…Similarly, the use of the word ‘pikey’, with just a hint of irony, is considered acceptable despite the obviously derogatory nature of this term…It is not that they will not cause offence, but they will not offend in a way that would bring down any opprobrium upon [those who use them] (ibid: 92–3).

This blurring and ‘irony’ mean that some mainstream users of the terms have received mild reprimand, while others get away with it – as would not be the case with terms like ‘paki’ and ‘coon’.10 Spatialisation: Chav Towns Alongside the racialisation of the working-class, we want to draw attention to the spatialisation of the classed imaginary. The spatial imaginary that led Booth to colour-code London’s streets black to signify the ‘lowest’ classes endures today in the spatial politics of urban regeneration (the ‘zones’ of deprivation and exclusion at which policy instruments are targeted), in moral discourses of ‘sink estates’, in indices of deprivation (Tonkiss 2000). As Lefebvre’s work (1991) demonstrates, space is not a neutral backdrop that political and historical processes unfold upon; space is active in political and historical processes. Today, the politics of entitlement, inclusion and desirability are increasingly discussed and realized in spatial terms. This has been a central theme of Skeggs’ work. As she points out, ‘in contemporary Britain, geographical referencing is one of the contemporary 10  Examples include Jonathan Ross, reprimanded in 2004 for his use of the word ‘pikey’ on BBC Radio 4, which apparently did not hurt his career in any way comparable to his more recent non-racial gaffes; and Martin Brundle, Formula 1 commentator, whose use of the term in June 2008 led to an apology from ITV. While the Daily Mail was at the forefront of the campaign to censure the BBC over the October 2008 Jonathan/Russell Brand use of sexual language on BBC Radio 2, it defended Brundle, describing his censure as a form of humourless political correctness. One commentator, Des Kelly, wrote: ‘To consider pikey a racial slur is as stupid as believing the word “hippy” has racist connotations, or that “hoodie” is offensive. Ban pikey, and then you might as well outlaw chav, townie, trailer trash, Hooray Henry, goth, Sloane, tinker and many more fairly innocuous labels’ (quoted Geoghegan 2008). Crucially, the space of humour allows for a disavowal of the racism of such terms, its users are constructed as the victims of political correctness rather than the perpetrators of hate speech.

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shorthand ways of speaking class’ (2004: 15). In political rhetoric, she writes, ‘the word class is not mentioned, but alternative references such as “council estates”, “projects”, or even specific naming of areas occurs’ (ibid: 112). Interviewing people in Manchester, Skeggs notes that ‘class was rarely articulated, although reference to taste and its lack was ubiquitous; rather, local areas were continually used as shorthand to name those whose presence was seen to be potentially threatening’ (ibid). While working-class people are kept in place through this geographical shorthand, the middle classes are able to move freely from this kind of placing, and fashion themselves through mobility, the ability to move from job to job in the pursuit of a career and better life chances: the middle-class neo-liberal citizen is mobile; the fixity of the working classes signifies how they have been literally left behind by modernity. In this power geometry, mobility – and control over mobility – reflect and reinforce power relationships of life chances. McKenzie’s (2008) research into the experiences of working-class women living in a stigmatized neighbourhood in the East Midlands shows that women were not only aware of the stigma that attaches to them when people are aware of where they are from, but that this awareness has material effects, in stopping them from taking up the very services, such as Sure Start, which are put in place to help them. Relating what we have said about the racialisation of the contemporary workingclass to this emergent literature on spatialisation, we can see how the placing of class also serves to fix working-class people as racial others. When people are located and positioned by reference to place names which are stigmatized in racially inflected ways, these people are themselves rendered racially other without explicit reference to ‘race’. We can see this process in evidence in the chav hate websites and books, which display an obsession with place and place names: endless lists of chav towns, interactive polls on which towns are ‘chaviest’. The Chav Scum website has been defunct since 2006, but its offshoot Chav Towns (chavtowns.co.uk) survives – and flourishes, with new towns being added to its database more than daily. Similarly, alongside the many chav hate groups on Facebook, there are a number of groups which associate particular places with chavs (e.g. ‘Chatham, The arse hole of Kent and home of the Chav...’). More interestingly, there are also several (e.g. ‘I’m from Maidstone but I ain’t no chav!’, ‘Sittingbourne is a chav hole but it’s still home’) which disavow the racializing stigma associated with chav locations while leaving the process of stigmatization and racialisation intact. In these Facebook groups, as in chavtowns.co.uk, we can see how cartographies of abjection are reproduced simultaneously at several different scales. While national discourses of the council estate and the disreputable bodies which populate it circulate, at a local level these discourses attach themselves to particular towns and even streets. The case of Newtown exemplifies the way that locations are classed through the racialized figure of the chav and the pikey. In 2005, a website called ‘Knowhere Guide’ posted that ‘[Newtown] is known as pikeyville…there is nothing in [Newtown] except pikeys!’ This was reported in the local newspaper, the Newtown

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Messenger (7 April 2005), containing responses from the mayor, councillors and residents all praising Newtown and disavowing this negative labelling – but none commenting on the use of the racist word ‘pikey’. A letter sent to the Messenger following the website story (‘Not all areas are so nice to live in’ 14 April 2005) contests the positive account given by the mayor, drawing attention to problems in Orange Grove and Flower Street and the surrounding area, arguing there are problems with ‘fly-tipping, joy riding, riding unlicensed motorcycles, the use of air rifles and catapults, causing damage to property and starting fires’. Later in the month, the Messenger reported that another website, this time www.chavtowns. co.uk, had targeted Newtown, suggesting that ‘In relative terms, [Newtown] is the Manchester United of chav towns. The shops are mostly out of business, but a few places that thrive, apart from Asda, are the kebab shop and Peacocks.’ The article noted that the website mentioned other places in Kent, including Dartford and Bluewater, as ‘chav towns’ (‘Chav Label Unfair to Area’ 14 April 2005). Once again local councillors were quoted defending the area against the comments, describing it as ‘unfair’. Again, the terminology itself was not contested. A similar furore erupted in the Messenger the following year, after the BBC television presenter and media pundit Jeremy Clarkson commented on Travellers in the Times, associating them with nearby Dartford: ‘I’m not sure what we’re supposed to call them now. Travellers seem wrong as they all live in houses in Dartford in Kent.’ These comments are interpreted in the Messenger as a ‘Swipe at the town’ (18 May 2006). Thus the association of towns in Kent with settled Travellers is presented as negative. As with the articles on the website the previous year, the Clarkson story prompted letters overwhelmingly supporting his comments, using highly racialized language (‘Town is full of tramps and pikeys’ 25 May 2006, ‘Jeremy’s right about travellers’ 25 May 2006). The Clarkson comment – and the response to it – hint at a more complex history hidden behind the designation of Newtown as a chav town. Newtown, like the northwest corner of Kent in general, has a long history of association with Gypsy Travellers. The specifics of why so many Travellers live in Newtown are not known but it is possibly linked to the market gardening, fruit and hop picking and other forms of seasonal agricultural work locally (some Traveller residents referenced this activity during the course of the research). Today, Travellers are estimated to be the largest ethnic minority in Newtown. Local residents include first, second and third generations of housed Travellers. It is not uncommon for those of non-Traveller origin to have married into families of Traveller origins and vice versa. The majority of those of Traveller origins are from English Romany Gypsy decent, although the research team located Irish Travellers residing locally, too. The following, concluding, section will show what is at stake in uncovering or holding on to these histories, as a way of producing working-class pride rather than shame.

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Once Upon a Newtown: Alternative Narratives [H]ow to speak against poverty and indignity without speaking against who you are, what you are like and where you come from or having others do so on your behalf? (Haylett 2003: 59).

For Back, ‘working-class people articulate themselves through other means than bourgeois linguistic codes’; these means include tattoos and jewellery, which, as he argues in ‘Inscriptions of Love’ (2007: 71–96), can be extremely expressive if read by other working-class people, while remaining mute when read through the moralistic bourgeois optic. This points to an alternative reading of the abjected bodies presented by What Not To Wear and Jamie’s School Dinners. As Back argues, while the sovereign ring might be a metonym for disrespectability in the bourgeois taxonomy, it is also part of the lived affective fabric of working-class cultural life, a way of linking life histories, marking rights of passage and moments of significance: K [wife]: I mean ‘Pikey’ its quite trendy, what with jewellery, pikey things. S [husband]: But traditionally a Gypsy had an earring, and that’s for the same reason that a merchant seaman had an earring for, which is, if he died, you take the earring, you sell it, you bury him with the money, that’s the culture behind it. The same as the navy in the eighteenth century. You took the gold, you sold it and you buried him, he had a decent burial, you know.

The project of narrating this sort of alternative history, with all this emotional power, was taken up by the Newtown Neighbourhood Project, in a film entitled Once upon a Newtown. A group of young women from Hopefields estate, some of Gypsy Traveller origin, together researched the history of Newtown to produce an alternative, positive narrative which countered the negative stigmas associated with it. They chose to focus on the area’s association with flowers as exemplifying the market gardening, hop picking and other agricultural practices which have flourished locally – and which are aspects of Newtown’s history that tie it to Traveller history. These agricultural practices linger today in the pride local people take in gardening, a common feature of many working-class areas, and the film’s focus on this told a story about pride in this culture. The short film that the young women in Newtown made stands as an alternative to the negative representations of the town which reduce Gypsy Traveller and working-class lives to classed caricatures devoid of dignity, history or complexity. This project was a challenge, albeit in a small way, to the wider cultural and social processes of moralization, stigmatization and racialization described above, which all contribute to what Haylett calls ‘the closing down of spaces of representation for the white working-class, specifically spaces where cultural dignity and political significance can be forged’ (2001: 354). The young women’s film was part of a

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wider project of addressing the ways in which areas and populations associated with pathological lack, showing how terms like ‘deprivation’ and ‘social exclusion’ fail to do justice to complexity of their lives. The Victorian tropes of working-class incivility, bodily excess and disorderly space are, as we have shown here, clearly alive and well in the British bourgeois imaginary. Their persistence in the UK speaks to classed anxieties, and, as we have argued, serve to fix working-class people in space symbolically and socially. These tropes constitute a form of symbolic violence; as they are put to work in the contemporary cultural landscape, they serve to racialize working-class people, and mark them as a ‘race apart’. These representations in middle-class popular culture, which are central to the production of the middle-class self, intertwine desire and disgust. In their use, we can see the intersection of place and identity, as classed identities are pinned to stigmatised, classed locations. However, as the film project suggested, working-class people have the ability to refuse this pinning down, and reclaim narratives that break out of these tropes. Bibliography Anon. 1996. Walter: My Secret Life. London: Wordsworth Classic Erotica. Back, L. 2007. The Art of Listening. London: Berg. Bakhtin, M. 1968. Rabelais and his World. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bhopal, B. and Myers, M. 2008. Insiders, Outsiders and Others: Gypsies and Identity. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Bok, L. 2004. The Little Book of Chavs: The Branded Guide to Britain’s New Elite. Bath: Crombie Jardine Publishing Limited. Booth, C. 1903. Life and Labour of the People in London, Volume 1. London: Macmillan. Central Advisory Council for Education. 1967. Children and their Primary Schools (The Plowden Report). London: HMSO. Charleworth, S.J. 2000. A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, M. 2004. The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class. London: Granta. Crabbe, T. 2006. ‘Going the Distance’: Impact, Journeys and Distance Travelled. Third Interim National Positive Futures Case Study Research Report. London: Home Office. Davey Smith, G., Dorling, D. and Shaw, M. 2001. Poverty, Inequality and Health in Britain 1800–2000: A Reader. Bristol: Policy Press. The Economist 2001. Down-Wind and Out. Poverty has Clung to Some Parts of London for at Least a Hundred Years. Why? The Economist. 13 January 2001, 35.

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McKenzie, L. 2008. Social or Spatial Exclusion: How White Working Class Mothers of ‘Mixed Race’ Children ‘Manage’, Accept or Reject Inequality, Stigma and Stereotype: An Outline of a Study Set in St Ann’s in Nottingham. Manchester: Putting Pierre Bourdieu to Work Conference, CRESC. McRobbie, A. 2004. Notes on ‘What not to Wear’ and Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence, in Feminism After Bourdieu, edited by Adkins, L. and Skeggs, B. Oxford: Blackwell. Morris, L. 1994. Dangerous Classes: The Underclass and Social Citizenship. London: Routledge. Mumford, K. and Power, A. 2004. ‘Abandonment as Opportunity’. Manchester/ Liverpool II. Berlin: Shrinking Cities, 14–16. Munt, S. 2008. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame. Farnham: Ashgate. Nayak, A. 2003. Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World. Oxford: Berg. Nunn, H. and Biressi, A. 2008. Reflections on the ‘Undeserving Poor’. Soundings Class and Culture Debate http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/ class_and_culture/nunnbiressi.html. Piachaud, D. 2002. Capital and the Determinants of Poverty and Social Exclusion. CASEpaper 60. London: Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics. Puwar, N. 2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg. Räthzel, N., Cohen, P., Back, L., Keith, M. and Hieronymus, A. 2008. Finding the Way Home: Young People’s Stories of Gender, Ethnicity, Class, and Places in Hamburg and London. Göttingen: V&R unipress. Reay, D. and Lucey, H. 2000. ‘I Don’t Really Like It Here But I Don’t Want To Be Anywhere Else’: Children And Inner City Council Estates. Antipode, 32 (4), 410–28. Robson, G. 2000. ‘No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care’: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom. Oxford: Berg. Rooke, A., Gidley, B., Shukra, K. and Humphry, D. 2005. No Ball Games Here: The Hyde Sport Inquiry Report. London: Goldsmiths University of London. Sadler, J. 2008. Implementing the Youth ‘Anti-social Behaviour’ Agenda: Policing the Ashton Estate. Youth Justice, 8 (1), 57–73. Scott, J. 1990. A Matter of Record. Cambridge: Polity Press. Simey, T.S. and M.B. 1960. Charles Booth: Social Scientist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self and Culture. London: Routledge. Skeggs, B. 2005. Respectability: Becoming a Proper Person. Inaugural lecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Chapter 6

Betwixt and Between: Managing Marginalised Classed Identities Emma Clavering

Introduction This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of lone mothers’ consumer strategies (Clavering 2004). At the time of the study the women lived in Byker, a working-class community in North East England, which has experienced new challenges from several directions. Like many areas of post-industrial Britain this area has undergone massive social rupture – rupture that has seen its main work-base, typically symbolised by the male breadwinner model, greatly altered through a process of rapid social and economic change, leaving residents to face new challenges and dilemmas in unfamiliar social territory. Ever-shifting social values attached to notions of family, as they relate in this case to the apparently ‘modern’ phenomenon of the lone parent/mother household, are likely to operate in direct conflict to traditionally held working-class ideals associated with ‘keeping a respectable home’ (Silva 1996, Smart and Neale 1999). Lone mothers, particularly those like the women in my study who are reliant on state welfare payments for their main source of regular income, occupy a heavily disputed niche in the current social context. Not only are their financial resources relatively restricted, but their social status is undermined by negative stereotypes associated with ‘underclass’ identity (Edwards and Duncan 1997) marked by a ‘culture of dependency’ (Murray 1990, 1994). Thus welfare-reliant lone mothers are positioned in a somewhat uncomfortable social space reserved for those perceived as social deviants: financially dependent on the state; and, charged with apparently engendering an opting-out from adult norms of responsibility, otherwise associated with good citizenship credentials, in generations to follow (see Armstrong, Parker, this volume). They quite literally risk being condemned as re-producers of underclass immorality and fecklessness. Traditional working-class values, then, are played out against this relatively new disparaging discourse in a contentious and highly contended social and cultural arena, one in which the lone mothers tread a fine line if they are to claim social and moral credibility for themselves and their children.

 The place name is not anonymised. However, in order to protect their identity, names and personal details of the people involved have been either changed or removed.

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The research, which involved working closely with six women and their families, focussed on consumer strategies and ways that respondents described and related to material objects in their lives. These objects – such as clothes, food, home interiors, baby/child buggies and outdoor garden spaces – are understood as material culture: part of the women’s resources to convey social and cultural status. Material objects are imbued with shared and often contested meanings as part of the milieu of social and cultural engagements. We interact with these objects in our everyday lives. This interaction is not simply functional: people connect objects such as clothing or cars to wider relations such as social status. Everyday material objects are, therefore, consumed as forms of social and cultural relations: connected to ways in which we relate to other people and re-present cultural meaning and value in the variety of social contexts (Miller 1998, Dant 1999). In their own individual ways the women drew on a wide range of material artefacts. This engagement was complex, diverse and multifaceted so, for the purposes of this chapter, I have chosen to concentrate on the examples of baby buggies and gardens as conveyed in the fieldwork by two of the women, Belle and Sandy, respectively. These commodities, part of the women’s common place encounters with life on the estate, acted as key symbols of both social status and cultural values for Belle and Sandy. They were, therefore, important props in the women’s daily performance work (cf. Goffman 1963) in which they sought to resituate themselves in closer allegiance to what they understood as preferred status markers while navigating away from negative associations. In this way they consciously sought to re-present themselves in the role of, for example, ‘good mother’ and ‘respectable citizen’. However, there were also times when these ‘ideals’, or normative patterns, might be challenged and even rejected outright by the women. Indeed, Belle and Sandy’s accounts suggest a range of creative responses were available to them, while at the same time they themselves recognised the heavy personal toll associated with insecurity, vulnerability and reduced choice in their everyday lives. Hence much of their day-to-day lives was taken up with the difficult task of working to reposition themselves, and their children, as valuable and active members of their community. This form of social and cultural capital building (Bourdieu 1986, 1989) was managed while they also sought to distance themselves from symbols that could risk association with perceived deviant ‘others’. As such they were often caught somewhere in between – a position of liminality which had to be managed somehow across a variety of risky social contexts. I will use this chapter to focus on some of these times, when the women could be described as being betwixt and between, to explore the personal challenges faced and the role commodities and other forms of consumption played in their expressions of social and cultural identity. Sociological thought has moved from a vision of identity located in distinct, solid markers of a person’s position set within the social hierarchy towards explorations into ways in which gender, class, race, ethnicity, (dis)ability and so on are experienced as fluid, multifaceted and temporal. Selves are in perpetual

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fluid motion, as each individual re-negotiates and re-formulates their identities: in other words, we become rather than be (Butler 1999, Hall 1996). Implications for this re-visioning of selfhood are vast. Pertinent to the analysis presented here are questions raised about how subjects, constantly in flux and in a state of negotiation and re-negotiation, may ever be known or even knowable. This is a question posed by Ibrahim (2008) in exploring the in-between spaces of people’s lives in which identities are expressed, a question with particular resonance for ethnographic work engaging with expressions of identity both performed and discussed in dialogue. The ethnographic approach allows the researcher a degree of access into the very stuff of life through which identity is both shaped and performed, in which the spaces may open up and/or constrict, limit and reduce. It is in these moments that multiple discourses of subjectivity, selfhood, hybridity, difference, and power relationships intersect and intercede in people’s notions and expressions of self. For the six women in this study, connections and sites for their identities lay within a range of cultures including white, Geordie/Northern, mothers, apparently heterosexual, each of which intersect with each other and with what might be described as lower-working-class experience. On top of this web of social allegiance, the lone mothers involved in the study spoke about being caught somewhere in-between two main domains of their social world: old and new forms of family and motherhood; and, tensions between traditional notions of white working-class respectability and contemporary concerns around a growing underclass of welfare-dependent scroungers. The ethnography, which centred on nearly two years of fieldwork at the turn of the new millennium, captured the time when New Labour introduced a raft of incentives under the banner ‘New  Although, in reality, multiple family forms exist, motherhood nevertheless remains closely associated with male/female coupling. However heterosexuality should not be presumed and, indeed, one of the women openly told me her long-term ex-partner was another woman, and the biological ‘fathers’ of her children were anonymous sperm donors. Of the other five women in the study, one had just divorced from her husband of 10 years, one was classed as legally separated from her husband, one had no contact with the father of her child and was living on and off with another man during the time of the fieldwork, and the remaining two were both separated from male ex-partners.   Demographic information includes: all women identified as white British workingclass and were aged from 23 to 44 years. All, apart from one, had at least one pre-school child. They all lived in social (council-owned) housing. Two of the women had lived in Byker all their lives, one woman moved there 10 years earlier and stayed there, two had lived on the estate for several years but moved to a neighbouring area during the course of the fieldwork, and one woman had moved to the area one year earlier when she separated from her partner. Two women spoke about experiencing physical abuse from ex-partners, and one about verbal abuse. They all had some form of extended family either in Byker or in neighbouring communities around Newcastle. Finally, one woman worked in a variety of paid jobs, one had part-time paid employment, two were involved in UK government sponsored back-to-work training, one was registered as disabled, and one woman was hoping to return to work when her youngest child started school.

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Deal’ to encourage people on long term state-provided benefits to find alternative sources of income. Though couched in language offering ‘choice’ and a range of ‘positive’ opportunities, this policy initiative was often received as an attempt by government to discourage people from relying on welfare for their long-term economic stability. The new, underlying emphasis and concern risked further undermining the already heavily stigmatized status of the women attached to their role as parents and carers for their children. The women involved in the study were all aware of an aggressive and pernicious political debate raging on around them. How they responded to this, as explored though their strategic use of or rejection of commodities, challenges many of the negative stereotypes in popular media discourse (Skeggs 2004). In many ways lone mothers, specifically those who are financially reliant on state allocated resources, can be said to be situated on the boundary, or margins, of society. This marginalisation can be experienced in several ways as can been seen, for example, in ways in which debates about issues for lone mothers may take place in the public sphere but rarely include the perspectives of lone mothers themselves (Clavering 2004). Against this backdrop Rowlingson and McKay’s (1998) work and, nearly ten years later, the inclusion of several accounts of lone mothers in Gillies’ book, Marginalised Mothers (2007) help unravel many of the stereotypes attached to lone motherhood to reveal the diverse range of experience otherwise masked by the label. What is clear through these accounts is that women experience lone motherhood in a multitude of ways. However, it is those from what might be broadly described as lower, working-class backgrounds who encounter the highest risk of stigmatisation, including barriers to being heard, while also being confronted by reduced economic, social and cultural capital dictated, on the whole, by current government policy. Set in the North American neo-liberal climate, Power’s (2005) work explores the association of lone mothers’ welfare dependency with a lack of choice, or ‘unfreedom’. She analyses the ways in which lone mothers feel both heavily restricted and monitored through the state-run back to work programmes. If ‘freedom’ is key, how then do people respond to reduced options associated with compromised social and cultural status, further undermined through economic insecurity? Being tarred by the brush of these heavily stigmatised, often deviant associations has multiple, negative consequences: those who Glennester (2006) describes as ‘the capital poor’, and Bauman (1998) ‘the new poor’, experience reduced options, reduced opportunity and reduced social status. While the capital rich are able to tap into the options promised in the exciting dynamic tumultuous social-scape of high status, high flying hyper-real postmodern society, the socially and culturally impoverished are left in the mire of marginality defined by lack of choice, and lack of freedom (Bauman 2000). This scenario of a total schism in society raises many questions about who, if anyone, has absolutely zero choice or, indeed, total freedom and opportunity. But what is clear is that there is real risk involved for those who are left out. Issues around social and cultural capital are of heightened importance when the context of daily life is heavily loaded with negative, stigmatising connotations.

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Bourdieu’s rich analysis in his classic text, Distinction (1984) demonstrates ways in which individuals in French society sought to maximise their status through a variety of forms of consumption, in which they appropriate forms of material culture through purchasing choices and commodity utilisation. However, the notion of material culture encompasses more than any narrow definition around produced goods: people also buy-into promoted forms of lifestyle choices, and it is into this wider experiential context that commodities become incorporated. These ways of being are not simply filtered through neutral, benign interpretations. Rather, they are made meaningful through social and cultural values that in themselves are not solid, but shifting and negotiable. This can be seen in ways artefacts are utilised, rejected or disposed of, displayed or hidden over time and across cultures, and through the infinite ways in which people adopt specific lifestyle choices in their lives. People communicate their social and cultural value or capital, through consumption, to locate their identity within the broader framework of the social world they inhabit. This has immediate concerns for those who are situated at the lower end of the social spectrum as they ultimately have fewer opportunities to control ways in which their social and cultural investiture is played out. This is the case for working-class women (Skeggs 1997, 2004) who do not necessarily have access to legitimised symbolic forms of social and cultural capital to enable their consumption strategies to pay off, and so risk being trapped in a classed world associated with reduced opportunities. For social, cultural and economic capitalpoor lone mothers, the risk is potentially even more troubling. For them the issue may not simply be about maintaining an association with working-class cultural values, but rather the very real possibility of slipping down further towards the margins of society, to those allegorical badlands associated with ‘underclass’ identity. Their efforts are likely to be as much about avoiding this slippage, in the hope of managing just to ‘get-by’ (Armstrong 2006, this volume, Gosling 2008). My study explored ways in which consumption can be understood as being one of the key ways in which culture and identity may be created in the modern world (Miller 1995), but also through a critical framework recognising consumption processes both produce and reproduce class (e.g. Lawler 1999, Savage et al. 2001). By focussing the research gaze onto the lived worlds of people at the raw end of consumer society, the aim was to gain insight into intricate social processes embedded in everyday worlds in which individuals have few material and cultural resources at their disposal. Ethnographic approaches encourage the immersion of the researcher in the everyday lives of those they seek to know more about and many issues arose from the fieldwork. Most relevant for this book are insights offered through an analysis of the key challenges the women faced around ways of managing potentially ‘spoiled identity’ in a community experiencing rapid socio-economic change. This was a particularly thorny issue for the lone mothers as they found themselves somewhere betwixt and between: namely across old and new family forms; and, being recognised as independent adults while dependent upon the state for their main income. Association with stigmatising, polluting identities such as, in this case, lone mother status and welfare dependency, needs to be managed, contained

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and expelled (Douglas 1991). These issues were played out both in the way the women presented themselves and in their discussions of what mattered to them, what troubled them, and how they saw themselves in relation to the social world they inhabited. Belle and Sandy’s words reveal times when these issues came into focus, moments when the spectres of risk, threat and challenge were raised for each woman. Setting the Ethnographic Scene To begin to appreciate the dynamics and concerns expressed by Belle and Sandy, it is first necessary to place them within their wider social context: It’s all either old folk or single mothers in Byker now. You see them with their bairns on Shields Road shoving Greggs’ pasties into their gobs to shut them up [Man in local café, (1)].

Statistics from local authority census data available at the time of the fieldwork show increased numbers of lone parent/mother households in Byker, where numbers trebled over a 25 year period, to a rate of 9 per cent, placing it in the top three Newcastle wards (NUTCC 1996: 25). This is part of a nationwide shift in family patterns; however, the dramatic rise suggests other factors may also be at work. One source, suggested by a representative of the local authority, could have been the ‘unspoken’ policy to move lone parents into Byker for several reasons: there are vacant properties ready for people to move in; the standard of housing is considered comparatively high; and, much of the properties are classed as ‘family’ housing (houses with two or more bedrooms and the ubiquitous garden for children to play in). Local discourse, however, suggested another hidden reason behind this policy. The local authority supplied community heating to all houses on the estate and I was told several times in general conversations that ‘they’, ‘the council’, preferred to house lone mothers because they got additional money, compared to childless individuals or couples, from the government through welfare payments and were, therefore, presumed to be more able to pay the bills for these services. This was, of course, conjecture but it was a point that was raised on a number of occasions by local residents who talked with mixed feelings about the increasing number of lone mother-headed households on the estate. It was often the older residents who seemed more perturbed by this, while younger residents spoke more ambivalently about a growing distinction between the elderly population and lone mothers, which seemed to signify a clear demarcation between images of old Byker and the new. Byker, then, is not a static place and lone mothers are associated with some of the changing demographics and experiences of life in the area. The comment above from the man in the café gives the impression that wherever you turn in Byker, if you see a woman with a child then they are almost certainly a lone mother, and

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that this transition between the young and the old generations is the likely shape of the future Byker. Though this is not necessarily the full picture for the area, Byker has gained local and, to some extent, national notoriety as a place where housing policy directives in the 1970s first recognised (if not entirely met) community demands to change housing on a massive scale without transplanting the original community (Malpass and Murie 1994, Grabham 1997). Sirka-Liisa Kontinnen’s (1985) book of photographs and dialogue from residents at this time of change offers a poignant record of these days and a reminder of life in ‘old’ Byker of the imagination. But 30 years and a new generation on, the general subjects of conversation I was party to mostly centred around a sense of loss of old values. Tensions often swung between pessimism and fears over new residents that never seemed to fit in with Byker’s historical base of respectable (white) working-class traditions (Gallagher et al. 1996), and raised eyebrows at the early signs of the local authority’s regeneration scheme. With many of the traditional sources of mostly male employment disappearing, the blocks of council houses built to hold a ready supply of workers for the rail, coal and shipping industries have become the target of UK government investment under the heading: ‘regeneration’ (NUTCC 2001). This heading is proudly advertised on large billboards as you enter each designated regeneration area around the city. The bold and confident claims conveyed in these signs, funded and erected through local government initiatives, were not necessarily reflected in comments made by the residents themselves. For example: There’s too many problem families being moved in, and they’re all dealing in drugs now, and none of them have worked a day in their lives, so you never find any respect, not for us, and not for the area [Woman on estate, (1)]. People use Byker as a dumping ground for all their rubbish. Either they drive here and dump it, or there are those that live here and just fill their gardens up with bits of old clothes and mattresses and all that sort of junk…Sometimes I look at it and the state the whole place has become, and I’m ashamed to live here [Woman on estate, (2)].

The concerns raised above can also be recognised as an underlying theme in local authority records. For example, one of the reports made around this time in discussion with a range of stakeholders including housing officials and community representatives identifies ‘a number of problems’ deemed to have a negative   Residents’ eyebrows were raised further still about a year into the fieldwork, when plans for regeneration and change came up against a surge of interest from people described as ‘outsiders’ (English Heritage in particular) wanting to preserve the integral structure of the estate as a national treasure regardless of residents’ complaints about parts of the estate that were no-go areas. The area has since been awarded Grade II Heritage Status due to the strong design statement made by Ralph Erskine in the early 1970s.

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affect on quality of life on the estate (Mills et al. 2001). Though this report does acknowledge issues of public and private space, building fabric, security and maintenance, the main emphasis is on an assumption that the problems are principally social, suggesting the problem lies with the people living in Byker. There appears to be a number of tensions around what Byker apparently used to be, what it was at the time of the fieldwork, and may yet become in the future. Although accounts of these times included a collective memory of hardship associated with the past, this is tempered by a pride in so-called working-classvalues-of-old. This powerful image, or myth, echoes down the streets of Byker: ‘in the old days’ things were better, people helped each other, and people pulled together to lift themselves out of poverty. Descriptions of present day Byker, and concerns for its future are made all the more problematic against this backdrop of remembered community pride and high social morality. The lone mothers’ dilemma was very much caught up in these imaginings. They were closely identified with the new, negative image of the social decline of the area, and the threat to ‘decent folk’ from the apparently relentless shift towards apathetic underclass immorality. For the lone mothers, the challenge was now to navigate a course away from further stigma, towards a more positively imbued set of signifiers through which their (and by implication, their children’s) social and cultural capital and classed identity may be shored up against threat. Navigating Spaces Between Social Statuses It quickly became apparent that objects could signify social values, and that the women had a relationship to and invested concern in presenting their values through material forms, while also comparing themselves to other people’s visible expression of self. There was a dialogue, made vocal in the discussions I had with the women, that both informed them of their place and presented a cultural acknowledgement of the social status others might allocate them. They were very aware that, as they were measuring and situating, they were also being measured and situated. Material artefacts thus became part of the visible portrayal of culture for the women within the context of the estate where they spent most of their time in and around. The fieldwork drew on a massive array of artefacts which held significance in the lone mothers’ lives in terms of displaying, but also masking, personally embodied forms of expression according to perceptions of promoted or deviant symbols. For example, presentations on the body (their own and their children’s) such as clothes, shoes, hair, jewellery, and tattoos; around the body including the two examples explored here of baby buggies and gardens, but also houses, décor, shopping bags, mobile phones, and also children; and, in the body, shaping the body itself, including food and drink, medication, emotional investiture, pressures and stresses, accent, words chosen, tone of voice, body language, skin tone, and general healthiness. Through the analysis below – focusing on Belle’s excitement over being able to have a new buggy, and the resources Sandy invests

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in her garden – many of the issues and pressures faced by each woman can be explored to appreciate ways that people respond to processes of marginalisation. Belle was in her early forties, and had spent much of her younger adulthood trying, unsuccessfully and with a great deal of trauma and heartache, to have a child. When she started to think motherhood was not going to be possible for her, she fell pregnant and carried the baby to full term. She then had a second child shortly after, and it was at this point that things changed in her relationship. In her words, she felt her partner changed and she saw another, more domineering side to him, something she neither wanted in her life nor her children’s. This was a massive and unplanned life-changing moment. Belle decided the best place to raise her two children was somewhere relatively near to her own parents. When I first met Belle she was still coming to terms with the break-up of her longterm relationship, and finding her way in the community. She increased her social prestige by utilising a network of friends and family around Newcastle and the rest of the country for certain ‘luxury’ items such as smart coats and toys for her children, which were ‘handed on’ to her and then on to others in the network. One thing she mentioned early on, was that she was very unhappy about the buggy she had for her youngest child, Josey. Belle felt it was flimsy and unwieldy, but it had been the only one she could afford and was not the sort of item available to her through her personal support network at the time. It therefore represented a compromise-too-far, and she started to look very actively for an alternative. This finally came, about six months later, in the shape of a very smart new buggy, which she proudly placed her daughter in and went around the estate and shops to show them both off: Belle: I was really pleased that she [Josey] could have a lovely, comfortable, good quality buggy so cheaply. I was dead pleased that it was accessible to everybody who needed one. Emma: What does it mean to you to be able to use this service? Belle: Em, it w’, it was good because it meant she could have a warm, safe comfortable pram through the winter, and A could never’ve got her one without, without the loan service…I think Byker’s one of those places where no matter how poor you are you have a lovely pram fo’ your bab…It was nice to have a nice pram where everybody’s got nice prams generally speakin’, even though it’s quite a poor, financially poor area. Emma: Yeah. Why d’you think people go for a nice pram? Is it the safety aspect, or is it for show? Belle: I think it’s, it’s about valuing your baby. It’s like, ‘this is my baby, this child is precious, and it’s got a lovely bloody pram to go in because I want everybody to know that this is really, really important.’ I think it’s that. Even

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Part of Belle’s expression of identification with the community in Byker came through the buggy she hired from the local baby equipment loan service, Byker Baby Equipment Loan Service. Not only was the buggy itself something she felt helped her match certain expectations within the estate, but also she was pleased to tap into a service that was run by members of the community, and recognised residents’ concerns. There was a communal aspect to the very act of acquiring the buggy, and Belle rarely missed an opportunity to let others know about where she had got the buggy from, and advertise its merits. For her there was no stigma attached to receiving what amounted to a charitable donation. What was important was that the buggy was almost like a gift from the community, who recognised and valued matters of concern to her, therefore reinforcing Belle’s connectedness to their shared values. Having a good quality, high-priced buggy, from a recognised brand to put your child in as you walk around the streets meant a great deal in Byker according to Belle. Her existing budget meant she could not justify such an expensive individual item via the normal purchasing routes. However, this community service opened up the opportunity for Belle to participate in something she recognised to be a defining symbol of community membership. Through this resource Belle was able to ally herself to all the other families with young children in Byker. It also fitted in with her desire to display to others that she was a ‘good’ mother by demonstrating her children were her priority, something that was morally loaded (May 2008): Belle: It made us feel like I could show how valuable she [Josey] was, you know. We would’a managed, but it’s nice to be able to put her in some like posh thing you know…[it] just made day to day life pleasanter, and nicer, and easier.

One specific commodity, then, can mean so much for a person’s expression of her self, her values and her status. The buggy was a visible symbol of status and values that, once again, matched Belle’s mother-identity. It looked sturdy, and strong. It was padded and comfortable. It was a modern design, and it looked expensive. All these ‘qualities’ matched facets of the mothering identity that Belle connected with, and helped her visibly display this to those around her. This mothering culture tapped into symbols associated with values of caring, nurturing, protection, providing, and supporting. Hence the buggy, for Belle, was one of the key symbols for demonstrating both the emotional investiture connected to motherhood and, with this, a recognition of the value of social responsibility. Belle

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showed she was committed to each of these aspects of mothering, and raised her social and cultural capital in so doing. However, that is not the full picture, as Belle’s words testify. Belle acknowledged that part of what she chose to connect to also connected her to ‘poor people’s’ consumption styles and performed identity. Belle was aware that, in what might be seen as an idiosyncratic social order, attaining relatively high-priced goods such as expensive fancy buggies, frilly canopies and blankets, and gold jewellery was associated with low status consumer-choices. Her visible embrace of connectedness to marginalised cultural practices connected her with the values she recognised of importance in the Byker community, and as such insulated her to some extent from what might otherwise be the patronising, cynical middle-class gaze beyond. Belle’s preferred point of reference was inwards; that was where she increasingly drew her strength from, and she expressed her allegiance at least in some way through the new buggy. She was, therefore, able to strategically re-situate herself in closer connectedness to values of a traditional caring role, away from potential stigma attached to notions of irresponsible lone mothers, while shoring up her status within the wider community context in her process of becoming embedded within it. As well as material artefacts that relate specifically to the body (on, around, or in), the women also spoke about, and displayed concerns over objects and spaces which surrounded them such as interior and exterior areas. As with the corporeal, these areas held social and cultural significance both in terms of presentation and perception. Internal spaces particularly around living rooms, dining areas, kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms were places that were crucial sites for presenting social prestige, in which daily efforts were made to display each woman’s ‘socially worthy’ representation of ‘good mother’, ‘responsible citizen’, and through the maintenance of preferred standards and routines in a variety of ways. External space, such as windows, doorways and gardens, was also significant to the women. Each of these areas of significance mark spatially located boundaries or territories (between inside and out, private and public, visible and hidden, and personal and communal). These bounded areas between the public and private spheres of people’s lives were often the most contested zones. Windows, porches, and gardens are all places that are available to others’ scrutiny, where private values can be promoted and/or where individuals may have difficulty in masking any negative associations. As such they raised particular concerns for the women, highlighting these spaces as culturally and socially charged, laden with multiple complex meanings. I will now concentrate on the territory of the garden, something already raised in the earlier comment above from the woman on the estate (2) who spoke about the mess, dirt, and slovenliness of some people as exhibited in their use of these outdoor spaces. Sandy was one of the lone mothers who spoke the most vociferously about the tensions she recognised between the way certain residents behaved, and her concerns to place herself away from them. The time she spent managing her garden and presenting it in a very particular way was a very important part of her

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workload. Sandy was 33 at the start of the fieldwork and had three children. Her youngest child was just about to start nursery and Sandy saw the garden as one of the main spaces around the home for him to play in. Sandy had lived in Byker all of her life, but had moved when she divorced just over a year before I met her. Since moving in to her new place at this time, one of Sandy’s priorities was to design the garden with a high, sturdy fence around it and a lockable gate. This made the garden very secure and Sandy felt reassured that her children would be able to play there safely. The fence had been built by her ex-husband who Sandy encouraged to be involved in family activities as much as possible. He had also paved half of the space, and laid a new lawn. Sandy had divided the space roughly in two halves so that she could use the garden for barbeques and other events when friends and family members were invited. She also took great delight in planting flowers to make the space look attractive, and spent time encouraging her children to learn about the plants and how to look after them. The garden, in effect, became a place for demonstrating her nurturing abilities and concerns, and for creating a social space for entertaining chosen individuals, while undesirables were kept away: Sandy: The garden is me pride and joy, I designed it myself and even grew from seed many of these plants.

For Sandy, the garden symbolises an individual’s values and position in the community. The term ‘community’ is used here to recognise how meaning and interpretation occurs through cultural and social identities at the individual, family, local, regional and global level. An individual’s community, then, is context dependent. For the women in this study, ‘community’ generally meant the immediate neighbourhood, but they also operated in response to much more personal, and global, constructs. Sandy’s emphasis was generally on the appearance, or performance, of respectability through cleanliness and organisation. Gardens were critical to this performance because, amongst other things, as territorial domains they operate at the boundaries, at the margins of the home, and are the visible staging of the occupier’s values. As such they are important signifiers of social and cultural capital. There was also a tension here for Sandy as the garden represented a major investment of time, energy, emotions, finances and so on. She was both its designer and its guardian. One way of managing this tension was to see the garden as a skin, stretched over the local authority-owned footprint: You can do a garden up anywhere. If I moved I would strip me garden, I would take all me bits an’ pieces, like. I mean I’d take me flagstones up and everything, I would, because at the end the day I could move away from here an’ leave me garden and somebody else could come in and just completely have no respect for it, you know.

Her garden, as well as being an important way to communicate social and cultural value, was also a layer, or veneer, with which Sandy covered the outside

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of the property. It was, therefore, a territorial marker that could be removed and transplanted elsewhere. Signs of long-term neglect of gardens around the estate and surrounding area signified, for Sandy, that the occupants were lazy, slovenly, and dirty, not the sort of people she wanted to risk getting their hands on her cherished plants. These were the sort of people Sandy described on many occasions during the fieldwork as ‘tats’ and ‘scruffs’, who she saw as the dregs of Byker’s population, adopting a coded language that clearly defined herself in opposition to what she saw as the worst element of Byker residents. Sandy defined ‘tats’ and ‘scruffs’ as new residents in the area, seeing them mostly as ‘outsiders’: young, boisterous, irresponsible, and disrespectful and involved in criminal activities such as drugs, stealing, and violence. All of these are traits that match closely with the ‘charvers’ described in Nayak’s (2003) research. Though this was not a term used by Sandy herself, ‘charvers’ are described by Nayak as being young people in their teens and early twenties, who tend to wear sports/leisure clothing and are associated with social decay and reduced moral values. For Sandy, they are, ‘The ones that leave all the junk in the garden… they’re dirty, they’re rotten, they’re scruffy, they’re slovenly…’ A common thread in her perception was the suggestion of threat incurred to the area by this group of people. Hence their capacity to spread a corrosive social and cultural pollution and ‘lower the tone’ of the entire estate was a great source of worry for Sandy. Not only could external territory signify the levels of dirt within an individual household, but also the polluting nature of this could seep out to other houses in a neighbourhood. Ultimately, according to Sandy, a whole area could be both polluted and polluting, demarcating the residents with the stain of filth. Just living in a street, or wider area of Byker associated with ‘tats’, ran the risk of being associated with their dirt. Her use of these dirt-laden labels (‘tats’ and ‘scruffs’) both symbolised for her the sub-human, polluting nature of this societal group, and helped her shore up the dividing line between those to be labelled ‘scruffs’ and Sandy and her family (‘them’ and ‘us’). Sandy’s garden provided both a place of safety from polluting elements on the estate, and a visible statement to demonstrate Sandy and her family were not to be tarred with the same brush. Sandy always emphasised her other social attributes that removed and, to some extent, protected her from the stigmatised stereotypes associated with negligible citizenship related to her definition of underclass, deviant ‘tats’. These attributes were demonstrated in the work commitment she had for house and garden. According to Sandy, although she was a lone mother and therefore at high risk of others associating her with amoral, deviant identity, she worked hard to deflect this through the visible presentation and maintenance of high-status and generally non-negotiable standards. She therefore felt justified to continue her mantra of ‘them’ versus ‘us’, ‘tats and scruffs’ versus ‘nice, normal, respectable’ people. Sandy deliberately and clearly removed herself away from undesirable association. As Goffman (1963: 164) notes, people who are themselves stigmatised in wider society may themselves attach stigmatising labels to others, while Skeggs (1997) recognises well the ways in which white, working-class women sought

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allegiance with promoted status markers such as marriage. Sandy resisted being lumped in with one ‘feckless’ social group, and used symbols of dominant culture to re-situate herself and her family more closely with preferred identities. She was different, and her children were different: they looked different and their garden broadcast connectedness with values associated with social worth. This helped remove her and her family from the anti-social and undesirable element in Byker and allied her to middle-class values and aspirations of modernity and quality. At the same time, it rooted her firmly in traditional working-class values of respectability, community and long-term investiture. For Sandy the garden was a place where she could reap the rewards of her investiture. It was visibly attractive, and presented to others her status in the community as a valued member upholding the standards associated with a good citizen and respectable resident. Having a neat and tidy garden placed her apart from the ‘tats’ and ‘scruffs’, and growing her own plants demonstrated her gardening skills and long-term commitment to the garden project. The garden space communicated her social values to friends and family, neighbours and any passers by, but it was also a stage on which Sandy could play out her roles of mother and hostess. Sandy spoke of her love of ‘entertaining’ and, although the garden at this particular house was a bit smaller than she was used to, it was still an important focal point when she had guests around. The scale of entertaining had reduced along with her new lifestyle as a lone parent, ‘it’s just not the same now’, and having a smaller garden space was part of Sandy’s compromised situation. The garden was also the place where she could allow her youngest child, Ben, outside to play, while she could get on with her domestic work, keeping up the standards required in the house, while being a responsible parent. Hence, the garden also played a part in her security and protection because it operated as a safe space for Ben to play in. In essence, Sandy’s garden displayed her preferred social identities for others to see. Through it she conveyed her mothering role, her role as an active participant with family and friends, and her role in the community. In many ways her ability to reach those goals in this physical space gave her a sense of personal achievement on which she capitalised in the rest of her domain of influence. Concluding Discussion: Space for Freedom? The analysis presented here explores ways in which the women tried to respond in creative ways to reposition themselves, and shore-up their identity in this contested, in-between space. With identity understood as being located across multiple intersections, allowing a range of possibilities (potentially loaded with negative as well as positive connotations), the women are able to bolster otherwise fragile links to values associated with the ‘past’ and with preferred positive status, away from risky short-term and marginalised associations. This strategic re-positioning occurs in a highly charged context in which, should they ‘get it wrong’, they are on display and subject to others’ judgement, which may have

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negative consequences for the women and their children. The emergent themes from Belle around the importance of baby buggies, and Sandy on gardens, engage with separate yet related concerns: the morality of motherhood and the threats of eroding working-class values by the socio-economic changes affecting the fabric of the local community. Within these dialogues the women both judge and are judged. They cast their gaze on others around them to assess their social worth, while remaining aware they too occupy contested social territory in which they must position themselves, according to their own and others’ definitions of visible status markers. Between these tensions, the women attempt to carve out a place for themselves in society. As such they are actively engaged with staking their claim to status within existing social structures. Their classed lives are not straightforward. Discourse around the lived experience of class in post-industrial communities has tended to focus on the apparent crisis of masculinity (Nayak 2003). However, feminist revisionings remind us how crucial women’s accounts are for a balanced understanding of ways in which lives are classed (e.g. McRobbie 1991, 1993, Skeggs 1997). Women of marginal status, such as lone mothers, are all the more likely to be invisible in academic imaginings. For lone mothers, without the usual trappings of credible status markers available to other women (for example, paid income in the formal domain for themselves and/or partners), efforts to (dis)engage with class are heavily loaded with both risk and difficulty. Although experiencing high levels of stress and pressure – often felt in very real and tangible ways due to their familial roles and obligations, restricted finances, tenuous social and cultural position, worries for the future, and so on – both Belle’s and Sandy’s accounts demonstrate ways in which they sought to adopt strategies that would both repel stigma and shore up positive status. In part their strategies were to cherry-pick forms of consumption associated with their preferred allegiances. As such material artefacts became part of the arsenal of material culture, symbols of their preferred identity, while also being visible forms of resistance against negative, threatening identities. Both lone mothers, and indeed all six women in the study, worked hard to be seen to be active and engaged members of their communities. Sandy chose to reject outright forms of deviant behaviours, while Belle connected herself more closely with an expression of working-class culture that may be seen as negative in wider social contexts. Both, in different ways, drew on forms of consumption that communicated their preferred statement of social worth through the moral role of motherhood, a role that connected them to values of nurturing, protection and responsibility. As such these strategies deflected some of the condemnation that may come with lone motherhood status and welfare dependence. Hence it was risky but at the same time crucial to their display of social values. In some ways it can be said the lone mothers utilised a range of commodities and consumption strategies to express themselves at times as being both at odds with certain notions of working-class identity, while often taking on the mantel of defender of such values depending on the specific context or situations they were in at the time. The women, then, are active producers and re-producers of social and

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cultural values, investing in their class identity and community. Rather than being either asocial, feckless individuals or passive victims in an increasingly aggressive and alien world, the women’s accounts demonstrate how they employ a diverse and sophisticated set of strategies to reinforce their preferred social status. Often this means careful balancing of the (social, cultural, material) resources available to them, and the strategic acquisition and display of high-value commodities and/ or high-value lifestyles. But it also often entails the self-conscious management of symbols of material and social capital that may compromise status. Through the ethnographic approach offered here, the lone mothers are recognised as actively challenging social norms and subverting roles that might otherwise be prescribed to them. I have looked at the intimate details of different consuming choices and styles made by Belle and Sandy. This has allowed the opportunity to focus on two heavily contended and contentious intersecting areas of the women’s lives and social identities: as mothers and as classed women. The ethnographic detail raises questions about moments in the women’s lives when both these identities are at stake; put at risk in a pervasive context in which resource-poor lone motherhood is commonly viewed as negative and morally lacking. These areas are not the full picture of any one individual’s social and cultural self. Age, sexuality, health, ethnicity, personal history and so on all shape a person, and each stage for identity intersects with the other (see McDermott this volume). The analysis offered here is inevitably simplified as the examples chosen tend to place the women outside their social networks, which is somewhat misleading for the reader. The broader research, from which these accounts have been taken, situates the women within their wider relationships and, in so doing, introduces a more dynamic account of the women’s lives as they work to negotiate their position with people around them. However, by choosing to concentrate on these two specific examples from Belle and Sandy’s lived worlds, examples that very much encapsulate their experiences as mothers, a space has been provided in which the gendered, lived experience of class can be recognised, understood and critically re-viewed. The women are recognised as creative forces in their own lives and destinies. This is not an unfettered freedom, but an experience in life in which even the smallest, apparently insignificant decision may be crucial to a long-term strategy to raise status and deflect negative association. Though caught up in these tensions, the women were in no way passive victims, or bystanders to debates around them in ways in which class and identity affected their lives. As women, Belle and Sandy were both faced with dilemmas of being lone mothers, while working to accrue positive symbolic capital attached to nurturing and caring mothering values. As such they were caught betwixt and between. Being mothers, especially the ‘wrong’ sort of mothers, presented the women with something of a loaded chalice, one that could be both a site for celebration and for derision. By re-situating themselves within the dialogue of responsible and respectable parenting they sought to deflect any negative undercurrent from attaching itself to them or their children. They worked to bolster their class status against the risk of slipping further down into

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the mired world associated with underclass identity. These were women working to re-produce the ‘right’ sort of class identity in society, a society which (they hope) recognises and values their caring and nurturing selves, as well as valuing their children’s potential contribution in the future. As such, they used consumption strategies as part of their work to re-produce social class and maximise status; strategies not always successful but nevertheless engaged with. Bibliography Armstrong, J. 2006. Beyond ‘Juggling’ and ‘Flexibility’: Classed and Gendered Experiences of Combining Employment and Motherhood. Sociological Research [Online] 11(2). Available at: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/11/2/ armstrong.html [accessed: 10 March 2009]. Bauman, Z. 1998. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open University Press. Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. London: Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. 1986. The Forms of Capital. New York: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, P. 1989. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. Butler, J. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Clavering, E.K. 2004. Singled Out? An Ethnographic Study of Lone Parents’ Consumer Strategies in East End Newcastle. Newcastle University: Unpublished PhD Thesis. Douglas, M. 1991. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Edwards, R. and Duncan, S. 1997. Supporting the Family: Lone Mothers, Paid Work and the Underclass. Critical Social Policy, 14(4), 29–49. Gallagher, P., Woods-Waters, A. and Doherty, N. 1996. Newcastle East End Partnership: Information Pack. Newcastle upon Tyne: East End Regeneration Team. Gillies, V. 2007. Marginalised Mothers: Exploring Working-Class Experiences of Parenting. London: Routledge. Glennester, H. 2006. Capital Poor. Benefits: A Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 14(1), 27–32. Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Penguin Books. Gosling, V.K. 2008. ‘I’ve Always Managed, That’s What We Do’: Social Capital and Women’s Experiences of Social Exclusion. Sociological Research [Online], 13(1). Available at: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/1/1.html [accessed: 10 March 2009].

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Grabham, L. 1997. A Community Appraisal for Byker, Monkchester and Walker: Progressing Community Economic Development. Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle upon Tyne City Council. Hall, S. 1996. Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?, in Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by S. Hall and P. du Gay. London: Sage, 1–17. Howe, L. 1998. Scrounger, Worker, Beggarman, Cheat: The Dynamics of Unemployment and the Politics of Resistance in Belfast. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 4, 531–50. Ibrahim, A. 2008. The New Flaneur: Subaltern Cultural Studies, African Youth in Canada and the Semiology of In-Betweenness. Cultural Studies, 22(2), 234–53. Konttinen, S.L. 1985. Byker. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books Ltd. Lawler, S. 1999. Getting Out and Getting Away: Women’s Narratives of Class Mobility. Feminist Review, 63, 3–24. Malpass, P. and Murie, A. 1994. Housing Policy and Practice. 4th Edition. Basingstoke: Macmillan. May, V. 2008. On Being a ‘Good’ Mother: The Moral Presentation of Self in Written Life Stories. Sociology, 42(3), 470–86. McRobbie, A. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’. Basingstoke: Macmillan. McRobbie, A. 1993. Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity. Cultural Studies, 7(3), 406–26. Miller, D. (ed.) 1995. Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies. London: Routledge. Miller, D. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mills, C., Wyatt, T., Wise, R., Roberts, M. and Bell, G. 2001. The Byker Way Forward: A Report for Newcastle City Council. Available at: http://www. newcastle.gov.uk/deldec.nsf/LE/Appendix.doc [accessed: 30 September 2003]. Murray, C. 1990. The Emerging British Underclass. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Murray, C. 1994. Underclass: The Crisis Deepens. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Nayak, A. 2003. Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World. Oxford: Berg. NUTCC 1996. Census Report. Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle upon Tyne City Council. NUTCC 2001. Regeneration Plan, East End: Delivering and Urban Renaissance for Newcastle. Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle upon Tyne City Council. Power, E.M. 2005. The Unfreedom of Being Other: Canadian Lone Mothers’ Experiences of Poverty and Life on the Cheque. Sociology, 39(4), 643–60. Rowlingson, K. and McKay, S. 1998. The Growth of Lone Parenthood: Diversity and Dynamics. London: Policy Studies Institute.

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Savage, M., Bagnall, G. and Longhurst, B. 2001. Ordinary, Ambivalent and Defensive: Class Identities in the Northwest of England. Sociology, 35(4), 875–92. Silva, E.B. 1996. Good Enough Mothering? Feminist Perspectives on Lone Motherhood. London: Routledge. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge. Smart, C. and Neale, B. 1999. Family Fragments? Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Chapter 7

Making Working-Class Neighbourhoods Posh? Exploring the Effects of Gentrification Strategies on Working-Class Communities Kirsteen Paton

Introduction This chapter explores the effects of gentrification processes on working-class communities. Gentrification has proven to be the leading government strategy in urban restructuring, most often levelled at former sites of industry and, by extension, former industrial working-class communities. These deindustrialised places and populations are depicted within policy and media discourses as degenerated, surplus, and the abject limit to modernisation and regeneration (Haylett, 2001). Conversely gentrification and, by extension, middle-class residents, are conceived as the antidote – the epitome of the post-industrial city. Recent policy based research postulates that local states use gentrification not only to restructure the local economy but to manage the effects of deindustrialisation by managing ‘unruly populations’ (Uitermark et al., 2007). Yet there is little research into the full impacts of contemporary gentrification processes on working-class communities. This, what Slater (2006) calls the eviction of critical perspectives in gentrification research, means that consequences of this process are discounted. There is much to be gained from providing representations of contemporary working-class lives in the context of structural change at the neighbourhood level to understand how they receive, negotiate and resist processes of restructuring. Sociological, class-based accounts of gentrification frequently attend to the lifestyles of the middle-class (Butler, 2003, 2007; Hamnett, 2003, 2003a; Savage et al., 2005). Meaningful place-based attachment, and ontological security via ‘elective belonging’ (Savage et al., 2005), is deemed a middle-class concession, foreclosing the possibility of a similar working-class association. This obscures the complex relationship and reconstituted place-based identity of workingclass residents in deindustrialised areas (Nayak, 2006). It is important to explore this further in relation to work by class theorists who examine the increasing disassociation with working-class identity (Skeggs, 1997; Savage et al., 2001, 2005). They suggest that this is a class based process whereby cultural distanciation and pathologisation contributes to working-class groups rejecting this identity.

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However, this approach is criticised for focusing too much on cultural hierarchies over material inequities (Bottero, 2004). This chapter presents a research trajectory, which combines recent trends in gentrification literature and class analysis. This is a crucial and prescient but surprisingly neglected intersection. Gentrification is a hegemonic process that seeks to realign class identities to be more congruent with neoliberal postindustrial economy: it is implemented to make working-class neighbourhoods ‘posh’ by realigning the dispositions and social practices of residents rather than merely altering the neighbourhood demographics. Delegitimation of workingclass identities is crucial to the successful ratification of policies that promote gentrification. This accounts for dis-identification with working-class identity and reaffirmation of place-based attachment as a covert way of expressing class. This has a clear material basis related to neoliberal policies and urban restructuring rather than to cultural distanciation alone. The first part of the chapter explores some pertinent debates within recent gentrification and class analysis. It demonstrates how a hegemonic framework and an approach akin to New Working-Class Studies (Russo and Linkon, 2005), which seeks to represent contemporary working-class lives, can strengthen both class and gentrification research trajectories. The second part explores these issues drawing from an empirical research project in the working-class, but gentrifying neighbourhood of Partick in Glasgow. Gentrification has been a major part of Glasgow City Council’s regeneration policy expressed in the Glasgow Harbour regeneration project, which turns the former shipyard district into luxury residences. Data from ethnographic interviews reveals that residents dis-identify with being working-class. This is the disjuncture between class position and (traditional) class identities. This dis-identification relates to residents’ use of place-based identity as a proxy for expressing class. Whilst policy discourse depicts workingclassness as the abject limit to regeneration, the residents interviewed displayed similar practices and values to those associated with their valorised middle-class counterparts. The effects of this ideology extend beyond the psychic landscape of class (Reay, 2005), and increase material hardships, as people are encouraged to be better consumer citizens but are denied the means to participate in the changes heralded by regeneration. This uncovers a paradoxical situation whereby residents do not resist gentrification because doing so would reveal them to be working-class. It concludes by discussing the effects of gentrification on working-class lives and the merits of using hegemony as a framework, which powerfully intersects class and gentrification research. By demonstrating the material basis of culture and   My empirical research was subject to rigorous ethical practice. Informed written consent was agreed throughout the research and anonymity has been ensured. Only pseudonyms are used to refer to respondents. However there are ethical complexities when naming a locality. Naming the area avoids disembedding the locality from the wider material realties of uneven development. Extra care has been taken to ensure that respondents cannot be identified through local associations.

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identity and the complex relationship between structure and agency in processes of capital and class restructuring, a contemporary, nuanced and more politically engaged analysis can be advanced. Gentrification: Cultural and Economic Impasse One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes, upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages... have been taken over when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses … have been upgraded once again … Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed (Glass, 1964: xviii–xix).

It could be regarded as now quite clichéd to begin with the original definition of gentrification from the sociologist who coined the phrase, given the proliferation of arguments over definitions of this process. Nonetheless Glass’s definition is still a resonant description of gentrification as a process of neighbourhood based class change. Since then, the literature on gentrification has been splintered by polemical and animated debates (for example, see IJURR, March 2008). Theoretical understandings of the process have long been dominated by an impasse between production and consumption/economic and cultural led explanations of how and why gentrification continues to thrive. For Smith (1996, 2002) the ‘rent gap’ is the necessary centrepiece. This is the disparity between the inner city and suburban land prices, when the price is low enough to be purchased cheaply and redeveloped for a sizable profit. It signifies the point at which productive capital switches to the built environment and the second circuit (Harvey, 1985). Gentrification here is conceived as a fundamentally capitalist process for accumulation and profit. Ley (1996) is a key figure in cultural accounts, which focus on the agency of the developing ‘new middle-classes’ in the post-industrial economy. This literature theorizes the social meaning of residential settlement for middle-class gentrifiers (Butler, 2003; Ley, 1996). Research from this perspective gives more explanatory importance to the role of new consumption practices. This separation is unhelpful and its futility is made apparent by more recent incarnations of gentrification, which are more actively planned and publicly funded as part of regeneration strategies. Local governments use gentrification to intervene in the effects of uneven development from deindustrialisation by restructuring places to make them more attractive for investment and to elicit a correspondence between production and reproduction (Allen and Massey, 1988; Harvey, 1985). Therefore gentrification is very appealing as it supports middle-class settlement (the ‘ideal’ workers in a post-industrial economy), land redevelopment, increased marketisation of housing and city re-branding, including, for example, international

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sporting events. Gentrification has been recently redefined by Hackworth (2002) as the reconstruction of space transformed for more affluent users. However, the institutionalisation of gentrification may hold further implications than has been previously conceived. The New Urban Politics or New Urban Social Moment? Deindustrialisation and the management of uneven development is said to involve a reconfiguration of urban politics, particularly in relation to the role of the local state (Mayer, 1994; Jessop, 1994; Harvey, 1985). Defined as the ‘new urban politics’ (Cox, 1993), power is decentralised towards local states with an emphasis on the economic development of local areas and accompanying subordination of social welfare provision (Mayer, 1994). Gentrification processes are thought to be indicative of neoliberalism: Gentrification has been woven more tightly together with capital market processes, public sector privatisation, globalised city competition, welfare and workfare policies, and all other parts of neo-liberal urban governance. More than ever before gentrification is incorporated into public policy (Wyly and Hammel, 2005: 35–6).

Gentrification processes are also used to support ‘social mix’ (see Evans, Gidley and Rooke, Taylor, this volume). The philosophy of ‘social mix’ is that capital is filtered down to the rest of the city. Policy thinking holds that socially mixed areas can attract and support a higher level of local services, leisure activities and higher than average levels of disposable income, which may create additional employment opportunities for local residents (Bailey et al., 2007). ‘Mixing’ also has social and cultural imperatives, believed to mitigate potential negative ‘area affects’, such as low aspirations, low educational attainment and low-level crime (Bailey et al., 2007). Middle-class settlement is seen to provide a means of managing situated populations, notably through improving supposedly deficient stocks of cultural values. Support for ‘social mixing’ indicates that the state intervenes into social reproduction rather than being hollowed-out or assuming a solely marketized approach. Cochrane (2001, 2003) notes that theories of urban policy have neglected what he identifies as ‘new social policy’ approach, which rejects the idea that people are victims of their circumstances, arguing that problems are systemic. This is echoed by Haylett, (2003: 56), who asserts that regeneration is indicative of a ‘new urban social moment’ whereby issues of poverty are considered almost exclusively in relation to place rather than structure: … policies designed to bring about changes in economically disadvantaged lives constitute a cultural process through which class positions and identities are

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partly created. That process signals inextricable relations between cultural and economic aspects of the way society works, expressed in the daily practices of social life and in observable social differences and inequalities.

Policy promotes middle-class culture as a signifying system through which social order is communicated and hopefully reproduced. State-led gentrification typifies this process. It is partly pitched to intervene at the point of identity, promoting the middle-class as role models: … gentrification is a means through which governmental organisations and their partners lure the middle classes into disadvantaged areas with the purpose of civilising and controlling these neighbourhoods (Uitermark et al., 2007: 127).

In this way, gentrification is more than creating a space for the progressively more affluent user. Rather, it seeks to create the more affluent user within a moral, as well as financial, economy. It attempts, then, to gentrify the working-class subject. The Gentrification Hegemony This is an important trajectory, which requires further empirical investigation. From this perspective gentrification is hegemonic (Gramsci, 1971); it is implemented as an organizing principle to shape and regulate behaviours in neighbourhoods and create a new mode of living that matches the particular regime of accumulation, in this case, a neoliberal and post-industrial economy. Gentrification is used to endorse homeownership whilst destabilising formerly fixed positions, like working-class support for social housing. It is then used to attach this group to the ‘new’ set of ideas on increased privatisation of housing and neighbourhood space in general. Bourdieu’s (1986) framework of ‘capital’ is useful in this context as it provides an analytic guide to help elucidate how the outcomes of gentrification relate to class, along both economic and cultural hierarchies. The reported positive and negative effects of gentrification, which Atkinson (2004) compiled as a systematic review of all English-language literature on gentrification from 1964 to 2002, correlates with the different forms of capital as explicated by Bourdieu. Exploring the effects of gentrification using Bourdieu’s conceptual model of capital reveals how this process is promoted by local and national governments to raise the population to a particular cultural and moral level, which corresponds to the needs of productive forces of post-industrial development. However, in Bourdieu’s model, the forms of capital are rather static concepts, which may not articulate change over time, which hegemony intrinsically expresses. Nor can Bourdieu’s model explain how this change is achieved, as it does not provide a deep discussion of the transformation of social, cultural or political spheres. This would account for how ‘habitus’ – acquired, durable dispositions which differentiate – can be devalued over time and space. Accounts of hegemony explore how people’s

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Table 7.1

Positive and Negative Outcomes of Gentrification Defined by Metaphors of Capital

Metaphors of Capital Economic

Positive New jobs in service/post industrial economy Increased property values Upgraded properties Upgraded environment and facilities Increased local fiscal revenues Increased choice of services and shops Participation in homeownership

Social

Increased social mix and diversity Improved facilities and services Decreased crime Change of behaviours and practices Role models

Cultural

Symbolic

Shared technical and bureaucratic knowledge with middle-class groups Sense of ownership

Negative No apprenticeships, training or more robust changes to the job market Loss of affordable housing Displacement through rent/ price increases Homelessness Under-occupancy and population loss Commercial/industrial displacement Increased cost and changes to local services Increased debt and financial risk Breaking up embedded social networks Loss of social spaces and facilitates Increased crime Interruption of practices and traditions Denigration of situated practices and traditions Greater draw on local spending through lobbying by middle-class groups Secondary psychological costs of displacement and marginalisation

Source: Adapted from Atkinson (2004) and Bordieu (1985)

structures of feeling, which were once dominant, can become residual through hegemonic shifts (Williams, 1977). Hegemony involves negotiation and consent, reached ideologically, rather than through coercion or physical force. It is not a totality; rather, there is room to resist and negotiate. Thus, deindustrialisation and subsequent restructuring are managed within the current social formations, without challenging the existing order (Morton, 2006): … subordinated groups accept the ideas, values and leadership of the dominant group not because they are physically or mentally induced to do so, nor because they are ideologically indoctrinated, but because they have reasons of their own (Strinati, 1995: 166).

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A hegemonic model accords agency and therefore, analytically, it facilitates an exploration of the working-class actor. Applying this framework to a study of gentrification enables an exploration of the both how and why this process is received, negotiated, and resisted by the working-class subject. Importantly this foregrounds the complex contemporary relationship between class position and identity in a post-industrial context; in other words, how working-class identities are restructured. Whatever Happened to the Working-Class? There has been a muted response to class within gentrification research and vice versa. The study of gentrification has arguably been gentrified whereby the studies of the effects on working-class residents have been displaced by a focus on the middle-classes: It seems that there is something of an obsession with the formation of middle-class metropolitan ‘habituses’, using Bourdieu’s Distinction as a theoretical guide, and if the working-class are mentioned at all, it is usually in the form of how the middle classes feel about ‘others’, or neighbours not like them (Slater, 2006: 743).

The studies to which Slater is referring assume that place-based attachment is the preserve of middle-class groups who are searching for ontological security or trying to ensure successful social reproduction (Butler, 2003, 2007). For Butler, place-based attachment of middle-class groups actually signifies a decline in the meaning of class identity: As occupation has receded as the primary determinant of cultural preference, where you live has become an increasingly important source of identity construction for individuals … The process is, if anything, more extreme, as a greater spread of people feel obliged to express who they are by where they live and with whom they share their neighbourhood. I argue that these behaviours are essentially those of ‘class clustering’ … on the basis of choice rather than force of circumstance (Butler, 2007: 163).

Similarly, Savage et al. (2005), identify a process of elective belonging; a powerful reorientation to place from the well-educated and affluent middle-classes. The relationship between local attachment and belonging is either stratified or disembedded from capitalism and historical development, namely deindustrialisation and subsequent restructuring. Indeed Butler suggests the contrary: In particular, gentrification needs to decouple itself from its original association with the deindustrialisation of metropolitan centres … and from its associations with working-class displacement (Butler, 2007: 162).

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The bias towards investigating the making of the new middle-class is echoed by Hamnett (2003, 2003a) who, using an employment aggregate approach, argues that the working-class population in London has become professionalised rather than polarised. Watt (2008) points out the omission of the economically inactive from Hammett’s measurement, which effectively de-classes many single parents (plus their dependent children), the chronically sick and disabled, as well as the elderly. This conveniently avoids an intellectual confrontation with the ravages of neoliberalism experienced daily by these groups and how it effects both their class position and identity. The representations of the middle-class that are offered in this literature perpetuate notions of traditional static class categories and notions of difference by essentialising behaviours like place-based attachment. Watt points out that the middle-class is not the only class in town. This can be taken further to suggest they are not the only power in town or the only actors who initiate gentrification. Middle-class (or working-class) practices are not considered critically enough or as materially related to hegemonic processes. Likewise, the divisive and material nature of cultural differentiation is overlooked. This, of course, is influenced by wider debates on the continued significance of class. The relationship between class position and identity is at the heart of communitybased studies that characterised the golden age of stratification research from the 1940s through to the 1970s, which focused on industrial towns reliant on coalmines, shipyards and factories (Denis et al., 1956). These studies based their understanding of class on the structure, consciousness, action model (S-C-A), where consciousness of your class position is an intermediary between structure, developing a class in itself to a class for itself. Pakulski and Waters (1996: 90) claim, ‘Class is most apparent and salient when it occurs in complete, bounded communities based on a few industries’ where ‘patterns of exploitation and domination can be easily apprehended and class interests can easily become recognised and shared’. They conclude that the end of industry and subsequent expansion of the service sector signifies the end of the traditional working-class. Deindustrialisation is said to undermine the raison d’être of these communities, indeed it is claimed that such communities have progressively disappeared (Pakluski and Waters, 1996). This so called ‘death of class thesis’ is compounded by work of Giddens (1991), Beck (1998), and Bauman (1998), who hold that class is neither materially nor ontologically relevant in a society of cultural fragmentation linked to individualisation. The relationship between class position and identity is said to have unravelled. Cultural class theorists have sought to counter this by taking the lack of class identity as a crucial and illuminating starting point, constituting a welcomed reinvigoration of class analysis (Strangleman, 2008). Cultural class theorists’ (for example Reay, 1998, 2005; Savage, 2000, 2001; Skeggs, 1997, 2004) view of class as an inequality resulting from wider social structures reflecting inequalities in the distribution of power and resources, is not essentially dissimilar to the definition of class used in the traditional community studies. Where they differ is on rejecting the view that identity is an essential reflex of class position. Cultural class theorists are interested in the changing subjective meaning of class and class identity and try to incorporate culture into their analysis

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without collapsing into debates of individualism. Dis-identification foregrounds the paradox of class whereby the structural significance of class is not actually named by those people most effected by it. Savage et al. (2001) found that respondents often sought, for example, to establish their own ‘ordinariness’ rather than recognising class. This class dis-identification reveals how people have a sense of their place, and the social and cultural distanciation that exists between different groups which, in turn, can create greater inequalities or opportunities, even as ‘class’ is not named. This cultural hierarchy reflects the pathologization of working-class culture by middle-class groups whereby middle-class is the standard and working-class is point zero (Skeggs, 1997). Yet studies of disassociation are criticised for assuming this oppositional account of class which places emphasis on difference, rather than exploitation, and the realities of the hierarchal nature of class and inequalities. Such a preoccupation with the inequities of class activities, conflict or exclusion, obscures a vital point about the processes which generate them. Bottero (2004) questions why, if hierarchy is so decisive in shaping opportunities, lifestyles, and ontology, is there not a more a reflexive awareness of it? The challenge within contemporary class analysis is, then, to explore whether or not there is a reflexive awareness of class, whilst maintaining a cultural perspective alongside a structural account. That is, to seek a material and cultural explanation of contemporary class positions. I suggest that studies of gentrification have much to gain from coalescence with research from cultural class theorists, particularly on dis-identification. Such coalescence can reveal the nuanced effects of gentrification on contemporary working-class lives, culture and peoples’ sense of place. This poses more interesting and relevant questions: for example, given the associated negative effects, why is gentrification not resisted by more local communities? Qualitative research, which looks at people’s motivations and practices, highlights the fact that resisting gentrification automatically identifies people as being working-class. This kind of research can explore the diffuse nature of the gentrification ethic throughout society and how it is reached consensually as much as it is enforced coercively. Adopting a hegemonic framework can also strengthen cultural class research. Dis-identification has a material basis that relates to productive forces not just borne out of people’s sense of place. This is evident when looking at deindustrialisation and the changing regime of capitalist accumulation and how populations are managed to be more congruent with the neoliberal post-industrial economy (Harvey, 1990). The hegemonic framework helps cross this intersection between class and policy. It is compatible with the approach advocated by New Working-Class Studies (Russo and Linkon, 2005). Writers in this broad group are interested in lived experience of class and the intersections between gender, age, ethnicity, geography and politics. In addition to being an interdisciplinary space, New Working-Class Studies offers a model for a more creative critical engagement with working-class life. It complements the hegemonic framework as it portrays working-class as agents and not passive victims. Strangleman (2008: 18) extols its value:

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This approach would show the working-class and middle-class are not intrinsically different with oppositional or disparate sets of values. Rather, cultural distanciation might be directly related to changes in the economy. It would also reveal the high levels of social and cultural capital that exists in working-class neighbourhoods as opposed to being the abject limit to modernisation and regeneration. The following section explores these issues empirically, by considering some of the process of restructuring and gentrification in Glasgow. Gentrification Processes in Glasgow Glasgow is a former industrial city, with a history of class politics and municipal socialism. Yet in more recent years it is presented in the media as a place of blight and obsolescence, home to many of the most deprived wards in the UK. Powerful statistics and images repel investment, which in their own right provide a powerful justification for altering that representation and legitimising the use of gentrification. Glasgow City Council (GCC), Glasgow City Marketing Bureau, and Scottish Enterprise endeavour to rid the city of its gritty, violent reputation (Mooney, 2004). They use marketing campaigns and strategic spatial planning to try and revitalise the central city and entice people and capital back (GCC, 2003). Urban cultural policy is often represented through prestige projects or cultural festivals that celebrate the city in a positive way. Glasgow has led the way in rebranding initiatives, famous for its aggressive place-based marketing which utilises the cultural spectacle as a means of reimagining the city, including the Garden Festival 1988, European City of Culture 1990, and UK City of Design and Architecture 1999. Glasgow was recently named as one of the top ten world cities where Glasgow ‘… has shaken off its shroud of industrial soot and shimmied into a sparkling new designer gown’ (Lonely Planet, 2009). The positioning of Glasgow as a cosmopolitan city (GCC, 2006) has a clear material basis, creating value by stimulating consumption, investment, and distinct middle-class social reproduction and labour in the emerging ‘professionalised’, post-industrial economy. GCC’s preoccupation with this group is also evident in their housing strategies: The city needs to offer more attractive family houses with gardens – ‘middle market’ as well as ‘starter’ homes – to persuade people to stay who would otherwise move beyond the city boundary (GCC, 2003).

However, culture is also used to govern as well as promote. The local state’s quest for ‘liveability’, by virtue of the fact that this is based on attracting and retaining

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the middle-class, implies that working-class city dwellers somehow make the city uninhabitable. Implicitly then working-class residents are devalued and cast as the source of Glasgow’s problems. Clydeside is a critical site. An old local proverb goes that ‘Glasgow made the Clyde and the Clyde made Glasgow’, referring to how the river was dredged to enable industry. By 2011, 120 acres once given over to shipbuilding will create a new billion pound district, Glasgow Harbour, incorporating residential, commercial, retail and leisure space. Partick is a traditionally working-class area of approximately 5,000 residents, previously home to shipyard workers, which sits adjacent to the Harbour site. It has some pockets of deprivation, with two data zones in the 10 per cent most deprived measurement. Against this, luxury private housing is also being developed within the neighbourhood. Partick’s distinct working-class composition has been retained, for the most part, by social housing provisions managed by a local community housing association. This is subject to change with the Right-to-Buy scheme and the recent Housing Stock Transfer and related affordability schemes, which encourage and extend owner-occupation. This is not merely privatisation of the social housing sector; these policies are aimed at reshaping behaviours. The desired tenant is not to be just a good consumer; they are to be active and responsible as the local housing association mission statement implies: We believe in people’s potential to improve their circumstances in partnership with us. Together we will ensure that Partick and other areas in which we work become vibrant sustainable city neighbourhoods. We will ensure that all who can and should contribute to this vision do so.

As the statement suggests, residents have a responsibility to be active citizens, but the existence of ‘those who can’ infers that some cannot or are incapable: residents were implicated in their own decline and therefore responsible for their own regeneration. Like underclass discourse this pathologises the poor as feckless, beyond help, and at odds with the desired citizen. The following section examines residents’ lived experiences of these policies. This is based on 50 ethnographic interviews with local residents between 2006–2007. Disassociation with Class Many residents were reluctant to identify themselves as being working-class yet nearly all shared an objective class position in the NS-SeC measurement and most had relatively low incomes which were supplemented with benefits like   The NS-SeC, National Statistics Socio-economic Classification is an occupationally based classification used for official statistics and surveys. It replaces Social Class based on Occupation (SC, formerly Registrar General’s Social Class) and Socio-economic Groups (SEG).

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working tax credit and income support while others were ‘economically inactive’. All the men interviewed who had previously been engaged in, or grew up around traditional forms of work where the wage packet is a prize for a masculinist confrontation with the world (Willis, 1977), rejected their class position, like Pete, 38, and unemployed: Pete: No, not anymore. Used to be working-class but now I say socialist. Kirsteen: Why’s that? Pete: Because there’s no such thing as working-class anymore now is there? Kirsteen: Why would you say that? Pete: Too many unemployed and on benefits but they still come from the background so I would say that because most of us aren’t working, not legit anyway now.

Pete had grown up under Thatcherism. He had Youth Training Scheme (YTS) schemes rather than apprenticeships and little prospect of secure, well-paid skilled employment. He gets by doing ‘buckshee’ work like scaffolding and odd jobs that he describes as illegitimate, like his claims to being working-class. Tim recalled how he lost his job in printing: Tim: It was because of the trade union, the papers decided they were going to get rid of the unions and that changed everything. That meant there was no jobs catering for what I wanted to do, so basically that’s how I got into photography. And that’s what I’ve been into since I went to the College for Printing, did that, so that’s what I’m into. Being a bouncer doing wedding photography … it’s just a sign of the times you have to modernise or you get left behind in the past basically [my emphasis].

Posturing around modernisation helps reposition identity in a masculine way providing men with some sense of control over their lives, saving pride by exhibiting a capacity for adaptability. Women responded rather differently, and echoing Skeggs’ (1997) findings, they disassociated with class because of the pathologisation of the working-class female subject as amoral. Kathleen, 33, described the people she still knew in Partick from her childhood: Kathleen: Most are junkies. One guy, a friend, had done well. He has a business round the corner. Some others have done well for themselves, I don’t mean a business as well, I mean they’re respectable. They fit in nicely, they’re not jumping about streets, reliving their youth, think that drugs matter. Unfortunately

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that’s what a lot of my friends from school think. And it’s heartbreaking seeing them … [my emphasis].

Success in life is not a measurement of material achievements. Rather the desired and worthy accolades are moral ones. Gaining respectability means you have done well and have broken the cycle from your teenage years: Kathleen: … I remember all these people saying to me when I was pregnant at 17, not to my face but they were saying it; ‘what a wee slapper. She’ll amount to nothing good, she’s a right wee cow.’ Well, I tell you what, not blowing my trumpet, not looking at all of them but some of them; I could be living in a cardboard box with my kids and I’ve still done better than them, some of them. I really have because I’m not letting my kids make the same mistakes that I have. I’m really not and they can’t say that.

However, contrary to Skeggs’s account, women who cultivated a caring self directly identified with working-class as they were able to reconcile negative connotations by being ‘respectable’. Natasha, 39, saw herself as working-class and described her transition from benefits to becoming a drugs worker as ‘going legit’. Being a community worker, rather than single mum and benefit claimant, gave her legitimacy. This could be empowering for women as they substituted this social capital for economic capital by creating employment. Natasha became a drugs worker, Janey, 44, and Louise, 41, set up after-school clubs, while Norma, 38, set up a community group, Kathleen became a junior football coach and Rosa, 54, a community worker, all created employment by extending their caring role. They were able to make a virtue and venture out of this necessity. Yet this social capital only yields limited economic returns and can compound social exclusion (Gosling, 2008, Armstrong, this volume), running concurrently with a decline in welfare spending. These women found that there was demand as previous public sector social care jobs were outsourced to the third and private sector. This created employment opportunities, but the necessity for their unpaid labour also increased as social welfare services declined overall. Arguably then, modernisation heralded by neoliberalism intensifies gender roles of femininity and respectability. Those younger residents (aged 18 to 26) were more inclined to extol the virtues of meritocracy and individualism rather than identify with being working-class. This is against a backdrop where working-class youths are vilified as ‘yobs’, ‘chavs’ and ‘neds’. Respondents were keen to disassociate with this, as seen in Gordon’s, 24, recollection of school: Gordon: My year was a brilliant year because it was mixed, you had your chavvies and the neds and then the norms, like us. There was always the real intelligent ones and they moved away and actually done something because they are off studying, doing their degrees.

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He positions himself as distinct from the ‘chavvies’ and ‘neds’, as a ‘norm’ (normal) and not above the ‘intelligent ones’. Similarly, Darren, 25, explicitly rejects class. Darren is from a working-class family and upbringing, did well at school, got a degree and obtained a Masters qualification. I met him through snowball-sampling, when his friend recommended that I speak to Darren. I felt Darren was annoyed that he had been implicated as being working-class and was slightly hostile: Darren: I don’t think I could say I was any specific class. Everyone normally says they’re working-class, when there are so many different versions of what that is. I mean they thought it was defined by your attitude or job and from where you are but I mean it’s something that’s not very relevant in today’s society … I wouldn’t say I’m someone who goes about thinking if they are a different class. I know I’m friends with people who are from the bottom all the way to the top and similar to people who don’t earn any money at all. As I said it’s not something I go out and do, and it’s not something I’d think about. I think it’s illogical to use in today’s society … why should we be labelling ourselves all the time? It’s crazy trying to categorise it.

For Darren, the traditional subjectivity related to being working-class is extraneous. He sees a mismatch between occupational position and social and cultural practices. He resents being labelled and challenges the usefulness of such classification and interprets their shortcomings as signifying the end of class. In gaining degrees, Darren felt that class was not a restriction and the usefulness of such a classification was deactivated: Darren: For ma sins, I went to Paisley University do my undergraduate degree and when I graduated from there I went down to the University of Manchester, to do a Masters. Me: Why Manchester? Darren: Well looking on websites I looked at what universities I could go to and what was the best university for what I was interested in and Manchester was in the top five.

Darren’s use of this idiom ‘for ma sins’ implies that attending Paisley University, a former polytechnic, is punishment for being bad. This is a reference back to his working-class upbringing. While Darren disassociates with class, it was palpable through how he negotiated his own class position. He endeavours to make sure that class does not control him, by taking control of his own destiny by choosing a Masters at the University of Manchester. Yet Darren is presently living back in Partick and is working in a low wage job in a social security call centre, demonstrating the limited career opportunities of working-class graduates.

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Darren’s narrative and experience negotiates structured life chances, responded to in a highly individual way (Furlong and Cartmel, 2005). While traditional class collectivities have weakened, class still endures as meaningful experience. Complexly, residents were conscious of the vagaries of capitalism and neoliberal policies, but did not fully relate this to class identification and instead often disassociated with class. However, there was coherence in this action: residents sought to calculate control through individualised responses, acting in a self-motivated and ‘responsible’ way. It is no coincidence that the individualised values of the self support neoliberal politics and urban restructuring and while the connection between class location and cultural identity appears to have unravelled (Bottero, 2004) it is reconstituted through residents’ relationship with place. ‘I Belong tae Partick’ Place becomes a powerful proxy for expressing class position in a covert way. It reveals the importance of residents’ ontological and material attachment to the neighbourhood. Class was not something Leona, 37, was comfortable expressing; there was dissatisfaction in her tone in what seemed like an admission of being working-class when I asked her what living in Partick meant to her: Leona: … everywhere I go I feel that someone knows me, I’m old Partick. I guess that’s working-class, I go to work and socialise in Partick. Partick’s my life.

Janey, 44, said she made sense of Partick as a worker. She had a strong attachment to the area and spoke passionately about what it represented and meant to her moving here from the United States. This bond and attachment was locally defined, but essentially and implicitly related to class identity: Janey: I belong to Partick and the wider West End in general but definitely Partick. I like it because its regular, it’s not toffy, it’s not up itself, funny … because I am regular, I don’t think I’m all that, I have confidence in myself but I’m not interested in blowing my own horn or being super rich. That doesn’t appeal to me … that is what Glasgow was like, Partick in particular [my emphasis].

Similarly too, Gordon used the phrase ‘I belong tae Partick’. He claimed always to be a ‘Partick boy’, and took comfort from that, saying ‘it’s like a pair of old slippers’. Working-class residents drew some sense of ontological security from their attachment to the neighbourhood, which allowed them to express their class position in a covert way. Doing so meant they had a positive identification rather that positioning themselves with negative associations of class. This is particularly meaningful in a neighbourhood undergoing change.

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With place-attachment as proxy for class, by extension, physical mobility was a referent for social mobility. Being able to move was a positional good which was evident in spatial distinctions drawn within the neighbourhood. This operated horizontally, drawn between East and West Partick. The West side, where the Quarry was located, was known as poorer to the slightly better-off East Partick. Partickhill operated as a residential class hierarchy; the further up the hill you lived the more affluent you were. Some residents in Partick focused their residential career on being able to move ‘up the hill’, with the dream of owning property there. Bea, 62, lived in Partick her whole life but steadily moved up the hill: Bea: You learned Dumbarton Road and Partick Cross was poor, you won’t do anything with your life. So that’s why my granny then made a decision that we would move to the other side to Hyndland Street.

Arguably, working-class residents not only experience elective belonging, they have a meaningful attachment to place in both social and material ways. Making Residents ‘Posh’? Urban-social policies that support gentrification are based on ‘levelling-up’ cultural and moral deficiencies of working-class residents. However, respondents’ values and desires were similar to the valorised middle-class groups. Bea, who considered herself a true working-class Partick resident, scrambled together money in her family to buy a new-build home in the neighbourhood. This was an act of financial security as she did not want her family to be ‘scattered to the wind’. Poignantly she chose a house on the former site of the ‘steamie’ laundry house used by generations of Partick women. She said she looks out of her kitchen window and sees her mother and grandmother doing their chores. In this way she acted like a gentrifier by buying a new-build home in Partick. There was not only a shared desire for homeownership, residents also wanted regenerated facilities but were, at times, denied them. Jimmy, Natasha and their four children lived near the tunnel connecting Partick to the Harbour: Jimmy: … They’ve got those cameras up – specifically because of the Harbour. The tunnel has been redone, all fancy lights, trees at the side. All because they folk have forked out the money for these flats and I think that it’s disgraceful. Disgraceful. We’ve been crying out for stuff for years and have never got it.

They were not the only residents to notice and be annoyed by the provisions of CCTV and makeover of the tunnel: Fi: … See that path and tunnel at the bottom of the road down there to the Harbour? Now six months ago you wouldn’t go down there, you’d be dead.

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Now if you look down its beautiful and its trees with lights and the tunnel is all painted with lovely wee designs. The other tunnel is a mess, smashed bottles and graffiti. And is because of them in these new houses don’t want to look out on to a dirty tunnel. Basically down the road is new regeneration to make everything look nice.

Security is a positional good that can be amassed by residents at the Harbour, which helps secure their settlement in the city next to a working-class neighbourhood. They can be safe and mark out distinction, which further guilds their luxury ghetto. These residents have the material means to buy safety, which people like Natasha and Jimmy cannot – they want security as a public good that can keep their children safe. This came across when I asked what sort of things Jimmy would like to see in the neighbourhood: Jimmy: Aesthetic stuff, parks, trees, but practical stuff. I mean growing up, luckily, the eldest kids are alright but they have grown up with groups of people where there has been fighting and stuff and there needs to be some sort of intervention for young people so they are not labelled and not stigmatised.

Incoming residents to the Harbour development can secure their social reproduction via purchasable and positional goods. Yet local residents want the same things – safety, homeownership, security. Working-class residents act like gentrifiers. However, this is not to say they do so in similar ways as middle-class gentrifiers: it is heavily circumscribed and stratified. They are denied the means to participate and, instead, their physical and material attachment to place is precarious. Physical Attachment to Place Resident’s ability to stay fixed in their neighbourhood, that is, to avoid displacement, is under increasing threat both by house price increases and the reduction in the development of new social housing. After the birth of her third child, Janey needed a bigger house and was at the mercy of the housing allocation list. After waiting for many years to no avail, her mother sold them her home in a satellite town at a reduced price. Janey arguably gained in becoming a homeowner but feels dislocated and misses the local resources and support. More commonly, younger residents had difficulty staying in the area, unable to afford to buy and, in some cases, even rent privately. Their only hope was socially rented accommodation. Gordon was living with his parents and could not afford private rent prices in Partick: Gordon: If you get on the waiting list and wait seven years you might get one but I wouldn’t bank on it. I’ve put my name down every year … But I’m putting my name down for Ibrox. Apparently they’re trying to regenerate the area and they have kicked out the junkies and the troublemakers and they’re giving the houses

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out to people. So people who have been working in a job for two or three years have a good chance of getting a house … A few folk who have done it, a couple who come in here [the pub]. Its only £120 a month or £150 for a studio or one bedroom, it is cheap, cheap as fuck, really cheap [my emphasis].

There is a spiral effect of gentrification that displaces people from other neighbourhoods, as Gordon ricochets to another area. Although a ‘Partick boy’, he sees the potential in moving to ‘up and coming’ Ibrox in the Southside of Glasgow, despite it being looked down upon by ‘Partickionians’. Ibrox becomes an acceptable neighbourhood, for ‘respectable’ people, with whom Gordon positions himself – differentiating junkies and troublemakers from ‘people’ in general. His reading of regeneration involves displacing ‘problem’ residents in Ibrox. Gentrification can lead to those in vulnerable positions marginalizing less powerful groups. They can identify Others in cultural terms to bolster their own tenuous cultural and material position and this positioning can result in the physical displacement of these Others. Conclusion These findings challenge conventional wisdom on gentrification, its use in policy, and the outcomes it generates. First, gentrification is used in a novel way. It involves the decimation of public provisions and social welfarism in neighbourhoods, and the creation of space and the persona of a more competent consumer citizen. I suggest that the construction of essential differences between the working and middle-class legitimates the use of ‘social mix’ policy and yet, ironically, gentrification discourse may be part of a working-class subjectivity. Workingclass residents displayed place-based attachment and reconstructed their own identities, which represented policy-desirable attributes such as homeownership, motivation, and (consumer) responsibility. Local residents were not necessarily or outwardly opposed to gentrification, partly relating to how this would position them as working-class, and partly because they got some (limited) benefits from it. The process of differentiating Others is critical in ensuring that working-class groups ratify gentrification. They do not want to be Othered and this is exploited to successfully privatise neighbourhoods. That said, some residents actively engaged in practices of resistance (see Paton, 2009). Using hegemony when examining gentrification helps problematise the complex relationship between structure and agency, arguably demonstrates an important trajectory for class studies. Theories of dis-identification go some way in accounting for the lack (or refashioning) of class identities. Looking at cultural identity within the context of deindustrialisation and gentrification provides a material basis, which does not reduce class identity to mere difference. Rather, it demonstrates the hierarchical nature of class inequality. Residents – working-class and gentrifiers – are not so different in values; the main distinction is that some residents cannot afford to fully participate in gentrification.

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So while working-class residents negotiate gentrification for their own reasons and gains, there is a material barrier, which prohibits participation. Arguably, they are encouraged to support a process that creates material and cultural inequities. This intersection re-invokes a political engagement with class based research that is long overdue. It provides a positive space for resistance by generating faithful and positive images of working-class life, so both the hidden injuries and hidden rewards are revealed (Strangleman, 2008). Bibliography Allen, J. and Massey, D. 1988. Restructuring Britain: The Economy in Question. London: Sage. Atkinson, R. 2004. The Evidence on the Impact of Gentrification: New Lessons for the Urban Renaissance? European Journal of Housing Policy, 4 (1), 107–31. Bailey, N., Haworth, A., Manzi, T. and Robert, M. 2007. Creating and Sustaining Mixed Income Communities in Scotland. Edinburgh/York: Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland/Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Bauman, Z. 1998. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open University Press. Beck, U. 1998. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. 1986. The Forms of Capital, in Handbook for Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J.G. Richardson. New York: Greenwood, 241–58. Bottero, W. 2004. Class Identities and the Identity of Class. Sociology, 38(5), 985–1003. Butler, T. 2007. For Gentrifcation? Environment and Planning A, 39, 162–81. Butler, T. with Robson, G. 2003. London Calling: The Middle Classes and the Remaking of Inner London. Oxford: Berg. Cochrane, A. 2003. The New Urban Policy: Towards Empowerment or Incorporation?’, in Urban Renaissance? New Labour Community and Urban Policy, edited by R. Imrie and M. Raco. Bristol: Policy Press, 223–34. Cochrane, A. 2007. Understanding Urban Policy: A Critical Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Cox, K. 1993. The Local and the Global in the New Urban Politics: A Critical Review. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 11 (4), 433–88. Davidson, M. and Lees, L. 2005. New Build ‘Gentrification’ and London’s Riverside Renaissance. Environment and Planning A, 37 (7), 116–90. Dennis, N., Henriques, F. and Slaughter, C. 1956. Coal is Our Life: An Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Community. London: Tavistock. Furlong, A. and Cartmel, F. 2006. Young People and Social Change: New Perspectives. Buckingham: Open University Press. Glasgow City Council 2003. Metropolitan Glasgow. Glasgow: Glasgow City Council.

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Glasgow City Council 2006. Glasgow: The People, the Place, the Potential– Glasgow’s Cultural Strategy. Glasgow: Glasgow City Council. Glass, R. 1964. Introduction: Aspects of Change, in London: Aspects of Change. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Hackworth, J. 2002. Post-Recession Gentrification in New York City. Urban Affairs Review, 37, 815–43. Hamnett, C. 2003. Unequal City: London in the Global Arena. London: Routledge. Hamnett, C. 2003a. Gentrification and the Middle-Class Remaking of Inner London. Urban Studies, 40 (12), 2401–26. Harvey, D. 1985. The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Harvey, D. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Haylett, C. 2001. Illegitimate Subjects? Abject Whites, Neo-Liberal Modernisation and Middle Class Multiculturalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19 (3), 351–70. Haylett, C. 2003. Culture, Class and Urban Policy: Reconsidering Equality. Antipode, 35 (1), 33–55. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gosling, V.K. 2008. Regenerating Communities: Women’s Experiences of Social Exclusion and Urban Regeneration. Urban Studies, 45(7), 607–26. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Jessop, B. 1994. Post-Fordism and the State, in Post-Fordism: A Reader, edited by A. Amin. Oxford: Blackwell, 251–79. Lambert, C. and Boddy, M. 2002. Transforming the City: Post-Recession Gentrification and Re-Urbanisation. Paper to the Upward Neighbourhood Trajectories Conference, University of Glasgow, 26th–27th September 2002. Available at http://www.bris.ac.uk/sps/ cnrpaperspdf/cnr6pap.pdf. Lees, L. 2003. Visions of ‘Urban Renaissance’: The Urban Task Force Report and the Urban White Paper, in Urban Renaissance? New Labour Community and Urban Policy, edited by R. Imrie and M. Raco. Bristol: Policy Press, 61–82. Ley, D. 1996. The New Middle Class and the Re-Making of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lonely Planet 2009. The Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2009. Australia: Lonely Planet Publications. Mayer, M. 1994. Post Fordist City Politics, in Post-Fordism: A Reader, edited by A. Amin. Oxford: Blackwell, 316–37. Mooney, G. 2004. Cultural Policy as Urban Transformation? Critical Reflections on Glasgow, European City of Culture 1990. Local Economy, 19 (4), 327–40. Morton, A.D. 2006. The Grimly Comic Riddle of Hegemony in IPE: Where is Class Struggle? Politics, 26 (1), 62–72.

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Nayak, A. 2006. Displaced Masculinities: Chavs, Youth and Class in the PostIndustrial City. Sociology, 40 (5), 813–31. Pakulski, J. and Waters, M. 1996. The Death of Class. London: Sage. Paton, K. 2009. Creating the Neo-Liberal City and Citizen: Use of Gentrification as Urban Policy in Glasgow, in Neoliberal Scotland: Class and Society in a Stateless Nation, edited by N. Davidson, P. McCafferty and D. Miller. Newcastle: Cambridge University Press. Reay, D. 1998. Rethinking Social Class: Qualitative Perspectives on Class and Gender. Sociology, 32 (2), 259–275. Reay, D. 2005. Beyond Consciousness?: The Psychic Landscape of Social Class. Sociology, 39 (5), 911–28. Russo, J. and Linkon, S. (eds) 2005. New Working-Class Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Savage, M. 2000. Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Buckingham: Open University Press. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. and Longhurst, B. 2001. Ordinary, Ambivalent and Defensive: Class Identities in the Northwest of England. Sociology, 35 (4), 875–92. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. and Longhurst, B. 2005. Globalization and Belonging. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. Skeggs. B. 2004. Class, Culture, Self. London: Routledge. Slater, T. 2006. The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30 (4), 737–57. Smith, N. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London, New York: Routledge. Smith, N. 2002. New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as a Global Urban Strategy. Antipode, 34 (3), 434–57. Strangleman, T. 2008. Sociology, Social Class and New Working Class Studies. Antipode, 40 (1), 15–19. Strinati, D. 1995. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Uitermark, J., Duyvendak, J.W. and Kleinhans, R. 2007. Gentrification as a Governmental Strategy: Social Control and Social Cohesion in Hoogvliet, Rotterdam. Environment and Planning A, 39 (1), 125–41. Watt, P. 2008. The Only Class in Town? Gentrification and the Middle-Class Colonization of the City and the Urban Imagination. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (1), 206–11. Willis, P. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. London: Saxon House. Wyly, E.K. and Hammel, D.K. 2005. Mapping Neo-Liberal American Urbanism, in Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism, edited by R. Atkinson and G. Bridge. London: Routledge, 18–38.

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Chapter 8

Privileged Locations? Sexuality, Class and Geography Yvette Taylor

Introduction This chapter draws upon data from the British Academy funded research ‘What Would the Parents Say? Lesbian and Gay Parents, Social and Educational Capitals’ a project based upon 60 in-depth interviews in the UK, with working and middle-class lesbian and gay parents (Taylor 2009). It offers an insight into the spatialities of parenting, sexuality and class, hoping to illustrate their linkages and mediation. The relevance of class and sexuality as pertaining to parental (im)mobilities and geographies of choice is provided where perceptions, experiences and materialities of and in place vary by class and sexuality; this interconnection has been somewhat neglected in competing versions of ‘social capital’ formations and actualisations (Bourdieu 1984, Putman 1993, 1995, Weeks et al. 2001). In researching lesbian and gay parents from different class positions, a specifically classed concept of social capital is preferred over relatively benign, overly optimistic or normative versions; the potential for extending this to take account of sexualised reproductions and (dis)advantages in the uptake of social space is demonstrated in relation to empirical data. The theoretical opposition – and merging – of different uses of ‘social capital’ is used to advance class conceptualisations and intersections, exploring too the ways that (middle) classed capitals sometimes do not straightforwardly ‘pay off’, as a result of occupying non-normative sexualities. In exploring the ways that class and sexuality frame   For brevity, methodological information is condensed, given that a more thorough methodological account has been produced elsewhere (Taylor 2009b). Forty-six lesbian mothers and 14 gay dads were interviewed across a range of localities in the UK (including urban, suburban and rural areas), all respondents were white and ranged in age from 18–63 years. Interviewees were asked to self-identify in class terms, with about half of interviewees defining as ‘middle-class’ or ‘lower middle-class’ and half identifying as ‘working-class’. There are gaps in this study; notably a significant absence is the way that ethnicity also structures the participants’ classed experiences. Such an absence is not only in terms of the research cohort but rather in the place of ethnicity in the study as a whole. This is intended as a (limited) acknowledgement of the ways that whiteness, for respondents, is a valued form of ethnicity, where whiteness can also be seen to be lived differently through the modalities of class.

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possibilities and parameters, I ask if middle-class lesbian and gay parents seek to protect their children via greater choice over their residential, educational and social environments: are they able to secure advantage in a context where their sexualities are grounds for dislocation and disaffection? Such an exploration intersects (classed) expectations, entitlements, confidences and resources – ever threatened and rendered insecure by sexual discrimination – even as these are remobilised and re-circulated. In giving attention to dominant spatial orderings, Luzia (2008) suggests that ‘the family’ is often still not situated as a specific focus of geography, where samesex parented families are further marginalised, even as many reference family geographies, including, for example, work on socio-spatialities of home and childhood (see Gabb 2005). The focus here is on residential space, rather than the experience of home space, school space, day care centres or public spaces (e.g. parks, shopping malls), hoping to add a different dimension to the work on same-sex parenting spaces (Taylor 2009). The desire for and construction of ‘good’ parental terrain is explored in the section, ‘Location, Location, Location’ – geographies of choice (or not), investigating notions of a constructive, enhancing, educational ‘mix’, while also looking at the relevance of local amenities and resources in space (Butler and Robson 2001, Byrne 2006, Luzia 2008). While some respondents in this research could move away from ‘lacking’ spaces, others’ strategies consisted of ‘making do’ and ‘getting by’, often negotiating difficult circumstances, which complicates notions of ‘choice’ and the enhancing capitalisation upon ‘community’ space (Weeks et al. 2001). This chapter, like the respondent’s own varied (and unequal) movements in space, attempts to take a tentative step forward in charting complicated maps, intersecting class and sexuality (Knopp 1995). In interrogating the relationship between class and sexuality in the transmission of (dis)advantage, it argues for the worth of a specifically classed concept of social capital, albeit one extended to take account of sexualised reproductions and (dis)advantages in the uptake of social space. Such an intersectional intervention has been neglected in the competing versions of ‘social capital’ deployed (Bourdieu 1984, Putman 1993, 1995, Weeks et al. 2001), where the link between same-sex parenting and residential choice has implications for service provision and the politics of family and community beyond a normative, depoliticised version of ‘social capital’ (see Parker, Mellor, Armstrong this volume). Capitals and Connections For Bourdieu, social capital is understood as a classed resource, working in interaction with economic and cultural capitals, operating in specific ‘fields’. Having the ‘right’ cultural, economic and social capitals produces opportunities and advantages across various social spheres or fields (Forrest and Kearns 2001), useful in thinking about how movements through spaces are constituted, facilitated or impeded. In considering material movements and a subjective ‘sense of place’,

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Bourdieu emphasises that individual movement is not random and free but shaped by structuring forces. These forces include both objective mechanisms such as qualifications, money, etc., and the subjective, embodied, disposition (habitus) of an individual (Bourdieu 1984). Here, class manifests in an everyday sense of place: ‘The sense of one’s place, as a sense of what one can or cannot “permit oneself”, implies a tacit acceptance of one’s place, a sense of limits (“that’s not for the likes of us”, etc.) or, which amounts to the same thing, a sense of distances, to be marked and kept, respected or expected’ (Bourdieu 1985: 728). The sense of limitations, boundaries and movements forces a consideration of the structuring of space, where capitals and connections (or lack of), reproduce (dis)advantages, inclusions and exclusions. The interest in social networks, communities and kinship systems has been revived by social capital theorists, departing from Bourdieu’s framework, in attempts to measure the value of social connectedness (Gillies 2003). Putman (1993, 1995) has generated the most commonly referenced definition of social capital, taken up in UK and US social policies, focusing on trust and networks and explicitly linking these to economic growth and health (Forrest and Kearns 2001), where parents are also held responsible for resourcing the future citizen (Parker, this volume). Indeed, Putman identifies family and neighbourhood as a crucial foundation for social capital: however, there is little sense of how forms of association are materialised and (dis)advantages actualised. Instead there is an expectation upon individuals to establish their own support networks, with some (middle-class) subjects being positioned as agentic, responsible and capable (Butler and Robson 2001), while others are viewed as failing and ultimately responsible for this ‘lack’ in their inability to generate empowering social capital. While everyone may have access to social capital, for some more than others the ‘pay offs’ are greater, the resources are higher and the ways of doing and accumulating these are also valued more (Bourdieu 1984). It is not just a matter of being ‘in place’, of accessing the right network and forms of social supports, rather there is a more complicated story about the journey into such spaces and the respective classed accumulation and transference thereafter. Differently again, new forms of lifestyle and association have been identified in the ‘families of choice’ literature (Weston 1991, Weeks et al. 2001), which evidences lesbian and gay individuals as generating new associations and networks, beyond traditional family structures, actualised in the uptake of space and the realisation of ‘chosen’ communities. In an influential UK-based study, Weeks et al. (2001), explore experiences of self-invention and well-being in ‘non-heterosexual’ families, asserting that such actors are ‘doing things differently’, rather than reinscribing normative formations. Using the idea of a ‘network society’, they see lesbian and gay families of choice as examples of ‘network families’ (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998, Urry 2000, Beck 1992). Yet an absence in charting new familial constructs and choices – and the compounding of social capital through diverse networks – is the processes facilitating and inhibiting choice, in materialising connections. In contrast to the theorisation of capitals as classed there is little

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sense in Weeks et al.’s (2001) account of the intersecting elements (dis)allowing accumulation and transference. While viewing ‘social capital’ as existent – rather than as disappearing in communal decline and familial breakdown (Putman 1995) – the notion of ‘social capital’ deployed here is unclear: the ability to relocate to ‘friendly’, ‘diverse’ residences with ‘sympathetic’ schools and supportive social networks is no doubt affected by material inequalities. So, if social networks are at the base of new, spatialised, elective affinities, as advocated by Weeks et al. (2001) then it is important to establish what groups are affirmed through or denied such agentic capacities. The overt optimism of Weeks’ et al. account glosses over potential exclusion and the classed shaping of inclusions, in the ability to access and experience ‘privileged locations’. Herein lies a contrast between the social capital positioned at the heart of lesbian and gay transformations in intimacy and quite different, classed notions of social capital, which centre the constraints and resources in generating such reserves. Rather than viewing social networks as benign, facilitative and enabling (Putman 1993, 1995), a classed perspective focuses attention on the different types of ‘networks’ where some associations may permit movement and mobility, through ‘bridging ties’. Here instrumental gains are sought and provided in ‘getting ahead’, as opposed to the ‘bonding ties’ in more working-class neighbourhoods and communities, which enable everyday survival in ‘getting by’ in the immediate social space (Gillies 2006). As people strive to maximise their capital, ‘getting ahead’ seemingly just makes good sense, as an accumulation of advantage, yet the persistence of inequality in relation to the family has been related to differences in social capital where ‘… society is witnessing neither the explosion nor the transformation of social capital, but rather its consistent deployment in the reproduction of privilege and inequality’ (Evans 2006: 18). The sense of place and the varied negotiations and navigations through parental territories, enforces a consideration of the mobilisation of capitals, effecting what is (im)possible and (un)desired; what is seen as different, normative, failing or good enough (Gillies 2006). For some parents ‘choice’ of location, and thus residential and educational provision, may be an impossibility, while for others sexuality may be a consequential factor in considerations of (dis)comfort and (dis)location (Weeks et al. 2001, Weston 1991). The Spaces Between: Difference, Diversity and Distinction There are several empirical demonstrations of the role of social capital in enabling – and constraining – geographies of choice, intersecting parental status and class; here ideas of a spatialised, enhancing ‘mix’ are seen as relevant in middle-class residential preferences. Byrne (2006), for example, conducted 35 interviews with white, middle-class mothers living in two areas of south London; in sending children to the ‘right’ school, performance league tables, word of mouth and the school’s general reputation in the local area were fundamental factors in the decision making process. Conscious decisions were often made based on class and

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race, where (‘filtered’) friends were not ‘too similar’ or ‘too different’ from one’s own positioning, thereby adding a value in connection, involving a management of proximity and distance, ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ (see also Weeks et al. 2001). ‘Diversity’ within locale was often valued by middle-class parents as a commodity which could be used to expand children’s understandings, where the ‘other’ is consumable, and the benefits of knowingness accrue to the child (Forrest and Kearns 2001). In accounts of the choice of schooling and residence, middle-class locations with a benefit-able sprinkling of ‘others’ could be tolerated as enhancing, as against those with too many ‘others’, where the difference became too much, an excessive and dangerous ‘undesired difference’ (Goffman 1973, Butler and Robson 2001, Lindsay et al. 2006). Middle-class mothers were often concerned with the acquisition of the ‘right’ social and cultural capitals; a school that was ‘too black’, ‘too white’, ‘too working-class’ could not expose their children to a ‘balanced mix’ of different backgrounds: ‘Openness to difference and multiculturalism fitted into general liberal desires for freedom, creativity, and friendliness, as long as … there was not too much difference’ (Byrne 2006: 1008). Classed distances – and proximities – were negotiated in ways that ultimately served to distinguish and resource middle-class subjects, also confirming ‘good’ parental status. The production of boundaries and inequalities within locations are clearly visible: what can be added to the above research is a consideration of sexuality in terms of what is considered a ‘good mix’ (for whom), and the role of sexuality as it intersects with class in the uptake of space. While much literature has revealed parenting as a classed practice, the heterosexuality of interviewees within many empirical studies is rarely made explicit. Conversely, research on lesbian and gay experiences of neighbourhood, community and space has rarely featured class in their scope, where the evident optimism of accounts of multiple ‘social capitals’ locally deployed by ‘families of choice’ sidelines limitations (Taylor 2009). The combination of often disconnected bodies of work potentially reveals much about intersectional (dis)advantages in the context of family life and parental practices, situated here in the negotiation and uptake of space. Such an intersectional focus probes too at the varied constructions of ‘middle-classness’, as explored by Butler and Robson (2001), where notions of social ‘mix’ were variously articulated and experienced by differently located middle-class groups. The classed boundaries of (un)acceptability can be expanded – or indeed contracted – by a focus of the relevance of class and sexuality in the constructions of (un)desirable difference and in hegemonic understandings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ places (Luzia 2008). Sexuality intersects with class in residential ‘choices’, potentially affecting the desired ‘diversity’ and ‘right mix’ championed by the middle-classes (Byrne 2006). The conscious decision to raise children in ‘diverse’ settings may vary for differently  These accounts were also, however, bound by a sense of sameness, and were exclusionary to non middle-class subjects, hinting at the ‘… gulf between a widely circulated rhetorical preference for multicultural experience and people’s actual social networks and connections’ (Butler and Robson 2001: 2156).

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classed lesbian and gay parents, highlighting when and where ‘difference’ matters; what is beneficial, allowable or simply too much? Lindsay et al.’s (2006) study of lesbian parented families in Australia throws some light upon such questions. Sexual, class and ethnic diversity in local communities are seen to impact upon school experience, with a ‘good mix’ signifying a cosmopolitan acceptance, while ‘excessively’ working-class areas are viewed as less accommodating to ‘difference’: Those families who live in a generally open minded, inner city suburb that is both cosmopolitan and diverse had a better chance of having positive experiences within the school setting … Working-class suburbs and middle and uppermiddle-class suburbs dominated by people from white Anglo backgrounds seemed less accommodating than inner city suburbs that are dominated by the educated middle-class (Lindsay et al. 2006: 1065).

Diversity, in this example, is coded as liberal middle-class knowingness, spatialised in the specific ‘cosmopolitan’ terrain of the inner city. Bodies and values coalesce in the construction of boundaries of (un)acceptability, where lesbian parents’ concerns for an ‘accommodating’ residence may also be seen as a manifestation of classed – and sexual – desires and constraints (Moran 2000, Perlesz and McNair 2004, Taylor 2007). The consideration of class, sexuality and parental status complicates such negotiations; the ability to occupy ‘diverse’ space, to capitalise on networks, friendships and supports may at once be fractured by inhabiting positions inbetween classed ‘advantage’ and sexual ‘disadvantage’. Where there has been an over-emphasis on the generation of facilitative social capitals through lesbian and gay communities and networks, such a consideration allows for a situation of lesbian and gay parents as also classed subjects, positioned on varied axes of (dis)advantage. The different accounts of the significance of social capital, as it is seen to intersect with – or stand apart from – other capitals and resources, bring into focus the divisions and distinctions between theoretical models and empirical demonstrations, where an analysis of class and sexuality reveals ‘… dominant spatial orderings that produce moments of exclusion for particular social groups’ (Valentine 2007: 19). Location, Location, Location – Geographies of Choice (or Not) In this research, parental and children’s needs were constructed in relation to and mediated by space and place with many pointing to the relevance of resources and amenities in the creation of ‘nice’, ‘safe’, ‘child-friendly’ space where children could go out to play and ‘explore’ in a ‘nice little cul-de-sac’ (Harriet, 38, middleclass): where ‘good areas’ encompassed good schools, good transportation links and networks to other places. Parental identities and responsibilities were

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ever present in the navigation of everyday space with some more than others able to establish and consolidate what they considered to be acceptable, childfriendly spaces. Edward (63, middle-class), for example, spoke of establishing a ‘Golden triangle’ post-divorce, geographically linking his son’s school, paperround and homes, as he sought to prevent any unsettlement. Many experienced a ‘downgrading’ in space following the break-up with partners, where the division between households and the resultant fracturing of responsibilities in one same space, could produce a sense of displacement: Kevin (36, middle-class) resolved such tension in moving closer to his children, even though this was not his preferred location. More complexly, Clare (32, middle-class) and her partner, Lisa (34, middle-class), were compelled to traverse not just regional borders, but international ones, caught between international legalities, residences and respective citizenship status. As Clare and Lisa suggest, the ability to live and be in place is constrained by everyday inclusions and exclusions from discriminatory legislation to hostile attitudes. The decision of where and how to live is seldom as easy as just making a choice and making it be so, yet middle-class parents do have more opportunity for agency in exercising their geographies of choice. Moreover, many middle-class parents articulated a desire for a ‘good mix’ in their immediate localities and neighbourhoods, feeling that diverse settings would sit alongside and enhance their own difference; clearly though, not all spaces or all inhabitants were equally desirable or diverse (Butler and Robson 2001, Byrne 2006). The ability to occupy correctly ‘mixed’ space is a classed, and classing, process where a ‘mixed’ terrain, as opposed to a homogeneous middleclass setting was considered beneficial, even necessary, in accommodating and facilitating belonging, affinity and a sense of affirmation. Such articulations leads to a consideration of ‘difference’ as facilitative or impeditive – sexual difference was often invoked as requiring access to a different space (Weston 1991, 1995, Weeks et al. 2001, Taylor 2004, 2007), yet this structuring sentiment encompassed more than sexual difference. Geographies of choice intersect class, sexuality and parental status in desiring a good residential ‘mix’, where middle-class parents articulated such ‘mix’ as a sometimes obvious marker of the degree of cosmopolitan ‘tolerance’ – as against a working-class ‘backwardness’ (Moran 2000, Weeks et al. 2001). It was middle-class parents who sought to ensure an exposure to a spatialised ‘mix’, which was simultaneously ‘different’ (from the heterosexual norm) and ‘like us’ (as essentially still middle-class), in their attempts to buffer against anticipated homophobia.

 Although not the main focus of this chapter, many interviewees articulated a sense of division within lesbian and gay parental networks, where differences were particularly discussed in relation to class, affecting composition, activities and ultimately networks and supports (Taylor 2009). Issues of location, access and differential availabilities themselves reveal classed inequalities in the creation and compounding of ‘social capitals’, in ‘diverse’, well-‘mixed’ settings. Further, the articulated purpose of such groups also classed accounts,

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In looking for an enhancing ‘mix’ middle-class interviewees can be positioned as not simply ‘getting-by’ but rather as also seeking to capitalise upon and actively uptake good parental space (to ‘get ahead’). This is not a neutral position of simple ‘good sense’, rather it relies upon and actively recreates classed distinctions, spatially, materially and subjectively (Bourdieu 1984). Such ‘moves’ must be resourced and activated, also bound by limitations where, for example, the ‘mix’ of spaces and bodies within them, became threatening rather than enhancing (to the middle-classes): Sexual status was situated ‘in-place’ in such mixed territories, while working-classness was decidedly marked as ‘out of place’, as an excessive threat. Overall, working-class parental experiences contrasted to the extent that ‘mix’ was described as an everyday reality, a ‘mix and match’ of circumstances, compelling an everyday ‘getting on with it’, rather than acting as a measure of ‘diversity’ and a site of sexual/class comfort. Perhaps unsurprisingly, workingclass parents did not speak of accessing ‘diverse’ settings, but rather often spoke of being unable to attain safe spaces, with ‘good enough’ facilities and amenities (Gillies 2006). Pragmatic desire to relocate to more well-resourced areas, for the sake of themselves and their children, were expressed, yet working-class interviewees did not inevitably seek to ‘escape’ existing spaces, finding value and a sense of belonging in self-locating, complicating portrayals of ‘getting ahead’ by getting out and on. Parenting priorities were significant in forming all interviewees sense of space but where ‘green spaces and parks’ may feature on the everyday maps of some parents, for others there was a void of such enhancements: material resources combined with the subjective sense of place, articulated by interviewees in demarcating ‘good’, ‘mixed’, ‘good enough’ or ‘no-go’ parental terrain. The privileged locations inhabited and accessed by some were simply out of reach for others, and while an optimistic reading of ‘community building’ may inspire a congratulatory call of spaces gained and capitals compounded, the realities of those existing on the classed margins of such ‘successful’ spatialisations, points instead to intersecting exclusions in the geographies of ‘choice’. In taking up space, preferences, privileges and notions of parental propriety were apparent, where the entitlement to space contrasted with a classed curtailment to access, belong and be in place. Thus, a specifically classed concept of social capital has more purchase over relatively benign, overly optimistic or normative versions, intersecting classed and sexual (dis)advantages in the uptake of social space (Bourdieu 1984, Putman 1993, 1995, Weeks et al. 2001). Byrne’s (2006) research adds a further dimension to the classing of parental geographies, as related to residential and educational ‘choices’, where middleclass parents seek out just the right ‘mix’: not too different, not too similar. Class and race combine in her interviewees’ narratives of (balanced) cosmopolitanism versus a city excess; this is also mirrored in my interviewees’ accounts, complicated by the desired ‘tolerance’ sought out by (middle-class) lesbian and gay parents. At in highlighting children’s needs for such networks, where middle-class children were spoke of as embodying and requiring a special difference.

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once, parents are situating their need for space and for ‘tolerance’, while also re-circulating notions of ‘intolerant’ others, which complicates the consideration of sexuality as a consequential factor in considerations of (dis)comfort and (dis)location (Weeks et al. 2001, Weston 1991). Carol, for example, tells of her previous, and preferred, ‘culturally diverse’ area, where her child learned and indeed embodied a different value and a ‘strong sense of justice’ in being able to challenge homophobia, albeit in an ‘accepting’ and ‘tolerant’ environment: Hatton Vale … is predominantly Black and Asian and it’s a fantastic place to live. It’s very culturally diverse and you can get all sorts of exotic foods from your corner shop … and people are pretty well accepting and tolerant of each other. Where we lived was a little tree lined street and was pedestrianised and it was lovely, it was a good place for kids to play. When Abby was out playing in the lane she would hear some homophobic abuse … and Abby always tackled it she has a very strong sense of justice … (Carol, 53, middle-class).

The well-resourced, active, even politicised child is placed at the centre of her environment, commanding attention and visibility, against a ‘blended’ background: safe, while ‘exotic’, contained, while open, unjust while just (see Forrest and Kearns 2001). The mixture described in Sarah’s (42, middle-class) area moves from a sense that ‘isn’t totally in an area where just professionals live’ to a numeration of ethnicity (‘It’s about 70 per cent non-white, but very mixed. There’s a lot of Caribbean people, lots of Latin American people and recently lots of Eastern European, quite a few Somali people’), sexuality (‘it is a real mixed bag, and a fair few gays and lesbians as well on the estate’) and poverty (‘It’s a very mixed area, inner-city, sort of lots of poverty’). Both Gemma (50, middleclass) and Paula (48, middle-class) speak of their areas as ‘very mixed’, while going on to say that they are ‘mostly white’ and ‘middle-class’; perhaps diversity is recognisable as positive with such a numerical safety-net that it is, after all, just the same (Butler and Robson 2001, Byrne 2006). Paula’s localised strategies of assessment before ‘coming-out’ are understandable, she does not want to risk telling the wrong people but what is interesting to note is the ways the ‘right people’ are easily aligned, in her account, with professional status to be de-coded at the ‘good’ school gate. The ‘mix’ she references encompasses embodied dispositions (‘broad mindedness’) read off professional status and other ‘clues’: Sandbank was quite a kind of mixed area and you could choose whether you were gonna be friendly with people or not … I just try and figure out where their politics are at and how kind of em ‘right on’, for want of a better description, people are and it’s very hard to say what the clues are. I suppose you just you might start talking about certain … I mean, it is fair to say that people involved in social work you tend to be a little bit more broad minded … so you kind of

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Distinctions are materialised in imagining ‘right on’ parents, also made real through employment positions and credentials; Sarah also describes living in a ‘very middle-class area, it’s full of social workers and teachers’ yet is somewhat more critical, doubting if acceptance exists on a wholesale basis. She is sceptical of middle-class ‘tolerance’ yet at least believes residents will be receiving if not absorbing equalities messages ‘… from their employers about equalities’. At the same time as centring this place as very middle-class, aware of its limitations, Sarah still emphasises the good ‘mix’ of the area, with a range of prices apparently available to a range of people, from public sector workers to those in need of council housing. Her physical and subjective situation in space literally changes in relation to those around her, as she expresses being ‘obviously’ on the lower income bracket, while still seeking a garden, an acceptable level of diversity and, crucially, a good school, as linked to residence: Because we wanted a bigger garden and we lived in a part of Birch Field, again, a very diverse area, but lots of cheaper housing, so it had a lot of lesbians living there, often because we are in a lower income bracket. Lots of large racial mix, sort of African, African Caribbean families there, so we were basically looking for a bigger garden and this is the next price range up and still in this side of the city and near a main road, so easy to get into town and what have you. We also had friends up here who knew the area. We knew that the schools were okay – that’s about it really (Sarah, 42, middle-class).

The ‘knowingness’ Sarah speaks of goes beyond friendship ties, also including a sense of the tone, composition and accessibility of the area as a whole (Weeks et al. 2001; Byrne 2006). Interestingly all lesbians are situated in the same financial boat, if not the very same place. Sarah is also aware that her previous area would be perceived as ‘professional’ and ‘middle-class’, although she experiences her own movement within and between that as quite ‘confusing’ and ‘contradictory’, preferring not to assign via class, still aware, however, of the better choices on offer and the material consequences of such choice: I find it quite confusing or contradictory … I live in an area now where I am surrounded by others who are professionals and would be seen as middle-class and previously we lived in an area where, again, it was big classes of workingclass area and I’m now moving back into an area which is very much on the edge of there, of that community … However, I also very much recognise that living on a lower income and often, therefore, you are living in areas on the outskirts of cities and everything that comes with that, that exclusion from society. It will fundamentally affect your opportunities in life and your children’s opportunities in life and, therefore, those factors then you may start

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trying to attach those to a model around class, etc. … this is very much a mixed area, but it gives us choices (Sarah).

Sarah seemingly more readily identifies with locale than class position but her account then goes on to detail the intersections between class and parenting (im)possibilities, and the opportunity to ‘mix’ with others, noting varying geographies of choice within this. Importantly, Sarah speaks of having real, material choices – with real material consequences, contrasted with those on the social and geographical ‘outskirts’. With such ‘good choices’ available in the everyday negotiation of space, Sarah is more likely to be also recognised as a ‘good parent’, actively uptaking parental responsibility and spatialising such claims, even if she also articulates a ‘confusing’ ‘contradictoriness’ in this inhabitation (Byrne 2006, Gillies 2006). In perhaps challenging normative notions of ‘good’ parental status (and a normative middle-class status), Angie (46, middle-class) speaks of relative safety, danger and shifting notions of risk, re-telling her own childhood spent commuting to school, in contrast to a frequent over-protection in contemporary times. However, the need for a certain freedom and ‘exposure’ is spatially situated (and contained) in the good ‘mixed’ area where she lives, contrasted with suburban isolation and homogeneity, even as she fears ‘pretty rocky’ times ahead symbolised in teenage gangs. While the neighbourhood terrain can be rather ‘rocky’, her son’s difference and the difference around him is almost spoken of as facilitative, enabling resilience and compounding emotional resources. The overall positivity of ‘mix’ is again expressed by Clare and Lisa, who speak of ‘open’, ‘fine’ responses from neighbours in such an ‘in-between’ space, which is contrasted with both homophobic housing estates and unknown ‘wealthy areas’. Clare and Lisa have developed a sense of community, emerging from general diversity and the subsequent ‘non-issue’ of sexual status: Clare: There is a sense of community around here. When we first moved in, the neighbour popped her head out of the window and said ‘Oh, Alice’s got two Mums has she?’ and she was actually quite open and fine about it here. It’s really nice … It’s quite a non-issue around here. Lisa: But I think that goes back … I think this is an area that’s very economically diverse, I think it is quite a mixed area and so I think that means more things go in general. And people are just a bit more comfortable about everything in an area that’s more diverse (Lisa, 34, middle-class and Clare, 32, middle-class).

The difference articulated seems to be in a certain ‘struggling’ comfort as opposed to uncomfortable struggles, where too much poverty (as opposed to ‘economic diversity’) would not be conceptualised as economic – or affective – variety. Susan (50, working-class background) also speaks of being ‘in-between’ the elite and the masses, though her own geographical reach seemingly extends across these two

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spaces, where she is in the ‘midst of everything’ from ‘where the footballers live’ to ‘some of the most deprived areas in the country 5 miles away’. This sense of ‘in-betweenness’ is spoken of as a facilitative gauge, rather than as a fixed measure of placement, of being ‘stuck’ in space. Extending notions of ‘mix’, both Gemma (50, middle-class) and Peter (43, middle-class) spoke of living in ‘bohemian’ areas, with the right politics, values and deviation of difference (‘it was a cheap and kind of Bohemian place to live and you just network, the networks you’re involved in feminist things’, Gemma). For Peter, this ‘bohemian’ atmosphere mostly centred around London, and was lost in his relocation to Scotland where apparently ‘there’s a narrower band of standard deviation in Easter Hill and it’s much more white, it’s much more, the area we’re in, middle-class and just a little more conservative’. This appears a different kind of ‘cosmopolitan’ ‘mix’, centred on political networks and intangible ‘atmospheres’, set against conservative locations and climates. Yet it is interesting to consider how willing Peter is to situate himself on the margins, given that he is still seeking a (‘like-minded’, ‘open-minded’) ‘sameness’ and access to mainstreamed ‘good’ space with a ‘good school’. His fatherhood compounds his networks, rather than negating these, while parental considerations (e.g. schooling) also make it harder to ‘start again’ in a new place: Even before I became a parent, I was already building up a community of likeminded people. Again, not necessarily queer, but just alternative, open-minded, arty, interesting people. That was kind of my peer group. So Cassie was then born into that community so there was a ready-made family, as it were … the people I met were nice but they were much straighter, they seemed to be, and again, I’m using that in a much wider sense, not just sexuality. Just the standard deviation of deviance in Easter Hill, it’s, (laughter), it’s much narrower … which is part of the reason why we’re thinking of moving because Cassie’s now finished school (Peter, 43, middle-class).

The seeking and networking of ‘arty’, ‘alternative’ people – across if not within space – resonates with Weeks et al. (2001) account of social capital building where diverse communities are actively sought out and ‘built up’. Yet, as Peter’s material and subjective (dis)locations in and across space suggest, this requires economic as well social capital, intersecting too with a subjective sense of comfort, even (parental) need, as apparent in the factoring in of school transitions. Peter foregrounds Cassie’s needs in his current location, while still being geographically mobile and able to access networks across spaces. Differently, yet still drawing on thoughts of appropriate ‘mix’ and deviation, Nigel mobilises a classed comparison between the ‘good’ suburban area and the somewhat infamous council house estate (where ‘teenage pregnancies’ and ‘drugs’ are situated by comparison); the lack of human interactions, is replaced by the material resources and amenities in the area, adding to a sense of safety and (parental) ease:

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We’ve worked hard to get this house. Cotton Hill, this area, is a very good area. It makes it easier being a parent. There’s not a drink or drugs problem, there’s not teenage pregnancies, there’s not hooligans etc. The area is quiet … it has made being a parent easier than living somewhere like, say, Windy Rise or somewhere like that. I don’t say that from any point of being elitist, but it has made it easier. There are good schools, there’s good amenities, swimming pool, the shopping centres … it makes it easier being a parent, living round here (Nigel, 43, middle-class).

In contrast, working-class parents spoke often of the ‘buzz’ of human interaction in noisier, differently ‘mixed’ areas where parental fears often involved negotiation of poverty and exclusion. Nina’s (35, working-class) sense of safety in space arises more from her children ‘opting out’ of local ‘gang’ culture, although this remains a possibility and is mediated in sending them to local clubs, where they will also be away from her for some time. This is not intensive 24/7 parenting where activities are carefully selected and a future envisaged; rather this is about staying out of trouble in the here and now (Devine 2004, Gillies 2006): I may be lucky because they don’t generally go out and hang round in gangs and stuff like that, um, like a lot of children do. Sometimes they’ll get on my nerves if they’re round me 24/7… (Nina, 35, working-class).

Jenny’s (29, working-class) sense of place arises from a commonality amongst the many single-mothers on her estate; where some might see such council terrain as a deficient, devoid space, Jenny feels that its particular composition is a ‘bonus’ where two mothers can only be seen as a positive: ‘… we live on a council estate and really, all of the parents around us are single women bringing up children on their own, so two mothers, bonus’. This positive reading is also suggestive of a particularly gendered form of social capital, where it has been pointed out that it is primarily mothers who sustain social networks (Devine 2004), problematically held responsible for their success and failure; parental efforts and strategies are subject to gendered (mis)readings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers, where Jenny’s numeration and commonality with single mothers in her shared space is likely to be read as surplus, rather than as supportive (Gillies 2006). This sense of communality is in marked difference to the safe anonymity described by Nigel (‘…not a drink or drugs problem, there’s not teenage pregnancies…’) but it is Jenny, rather than Nigel, who is likely to be positioned as still unable to grasp the proper social networks; single-motherhood, represented as a category of excess, itself reveals the normative constructions of social capital (Putman 1993, 1995), failing to grasp the intersectional complexity in the spatialities of parenthood, sexuality and class: the ‘two mothers’ as a ‘bonus’ captures, and fractures, the classed, gendered and sexualised dimensions to social capital formations in space. The complexity behind working-class narrations and experiences of place, also points to compromises, gains and losses, where a straightforward entitlement to and

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expectation of a ‘good mix’ is replaced with an uneasy negotiation and a ‘chipping away’ of solid blocks of resistance. Kathy (42, working-class background), for example, articulates a complex geographical positioning, feeling that her specific street is more than acceptable, contrasting somewhat with the area as a whole. She speaks of the changing (dis)investments in space marked, for example, by educational expectations and resources, desires for more space (‘bigger gardens’), local affiliations and allegiances – depending too on ‘what you are used to’. Kathy’s positive reading then partly occurs through a realisation that she is not in the worst of places, describing her location as a bit of a ‘fantasy league’ where lesbian household are in the majority on her particular street. The enclosure of this space allows for a ‘safety’ in terms of parental and sexual identities, which hesitantly, rather than uniformly and wholly optimistically, points to ‘community’ formation (Weeks et al. 2001): And I’m quite comfortable in the West End. There’s some parts I wouldn’t feel comfortable in but I think there’s some parts of everywhere you don’t feel comfortable in. We live in a closed off end of the street, so the kids are allowed out to play certain parts (Kathy, 42, working-class background).

Kathy then goes on to detail the commonalities of parental status in affecting a sense of being in place (‘I’ll just chip away by saying, ‘Hello’ and make them acknowledge me. But that’s not easy for everybody and it’s not safe for everybody’). She has sought to make local connections, based on childcare, seeking to invest in her space, while she also mobilises a classed comparison in situating the West End against the middle-class suburb of Garden Row. Kathy has been able to create a protective zone within the West End, aware that her experience perhaps differs from those who have experienced homophobia, living just a few streets away. The establishment of safe space is, as Kathy suggests, rather difficult when stuck in the ‘middle of nowhere’, in an area which is deemed too working-class and where she would be somewhat out of place: I’m quite happy staying here but I think it’s because of where we are. I might have different opinions if I was stuck in the middle of Low Gate. But I would have different opinions if I was stuck in the middle of Low Gate as a single woman, as well. So I think it very much … I mean, I wouldn’t like to live on Grangefield, where I know there’s at least four lesbians living … So I couldn’t live there and I don’t think that’s safe for anybody who’s walking backwards and forwards, who looks different, acts different. I think a lot of people get abused and I think the lesbians who live there are one of them (Kathy).

In occupying variously classed space, interviewees discussed the composition and contruction of good or bad ‘mixes’, often highlighting their own and children’s ‘needs’ for a protective, protected ‘safe space’; it was middle-class parents who were able to mobilise their geographies of choice and, if necessary, to relocate

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to more lesbian and gay friendly areas, rather than being ‘stuck in the middle of nowhere’. There were disappointments within this; Peter misses a more expansive ‘deviant’, ‘bohemian’ range available in city centre space, while Nigel criticises the suburban ‘frostiness’ of his specific middle-class location. For both, however, such territories are redeemed in being good parental fronts, from where they could also move and travel away from. Relocations were occasionally made to areas with recognisable lesbian and gay spaces, where such movement not only required financial resources but also involved varied subjective (dis)comforts. For example, Ann (38, lower middleclass) spoke of the importance of being somewhere where there were other lesbians and where she could be ‘part of that fabric, it’s all much more common, there’s that support network’ (Weeks et al. 2001). Moreover, Rachel’s (40, middle-class) sense of not being the ‘only gay’ is evident in her thoughts that a ‘little village’ of gay parents may well be forming in her territory. Gemma (50, middle-class) also spoke of relocating to a lesbian friendly space where ‘there are certain areas and certain places that I wouldn’t have entertained going. I thought of the issues with homophobia and things like that.’ Such ‘certain areas’ are constructed as empty and excessive, devoid of the necessary supports and replete with menacing presences. Interviewees spoke of reconciling parental and sexual status across different borders and here the classed aspects of homophobia, as spatially specific, was highlighted. Within this, the community building and networking, evoked by Weeks et al. (2001) is disrupted by the classing of certain ‘no go’ zones, effacing the presence of lesbian and gay parented families within working-class areas, instead foregrounding a middle-class narrative of transformation and agency in the uptake of such space. The sense of comfort, choice and agency, sought and gained from such relocations is mediated by financial resources, where money simply makes possible the movement in and out of space. Differently, Diane (37, working-class) tells of moving from a council estate where she experienced homophobia, to a more ‘family area’ where she keeps herself to herself, not quite integrating into the ‘very strong community’ around her, instead feeling ‘quite isolated’. This is a complex progression to chart, with mis-fitting movements marking the disassociation between support/isolation in both spaces: Diane’s spatialised tension points to different classed movements (embodied in her council house swap), intersecting with sexuality, as space is moved into or away from. Just as Sandra (50, middle-class) ascribes a certain subtle hostility to the conservative nature of the area, others detailed the classed specific forms of homophobia across different areas, where middle-class respondents’ frequently attributed working-class areas and inhabitants with a more obvious homophobia and generally ‘backward’, ‘traditional’ values, while suggesting a likely acceptance in the right kind of middle-class space: not too similar, not too different, just the right ‘mix’. Mandy, for example, describes the vocalisation of homophobia as a result of the spatialised absence of the good ‘few and far between’:

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Because we are not particularly feminine looking, people do shout ‘Fucking dyke!’ or whatever as you’re walking along the street … And if the children have heard it, if they mention it, I just say ‘Well that person is not very well educated and they don’t understand that everybody is different’ … Again, mainly because it’s mostly a lower class and working-class background of people. The professional, educated, are few and far between (Mandy, 44, middle-class).

Just as Mandy equates the lack of education with homophobic attitudes, more existent in ‘lower class’ individuals, others spoke of the varying classed forms of homophobia, aware of its existence among middle-class individuals. Nigel, for example, spoke of suburban frostiness and ‘… the silence, that’s it, lack of interaction’. The classed comparison which Nigel invokes between suburbia and a block of flats in Park Row hints this time at what might be better in working-class areas, though interestingly, Nigel leaves open what exactly would happen if he lived in a block of flats, just describing it as a ‘bit different’: And next-door, they, Fred hasn’t actually said so much, but Philippa his wife has sort of said he finds it difficult. And we went to the supermarket and saw Fred and said ‘Fred, this is Gilbert’ and he walked away … But across the road they just openly ignore me completely… Gilbert says I should be a bit more subtle at times but it’s my home … If we lived in a block of flats or somewhere like Park Row it might be a bit different … As I say, it’s a bit cold and people don’t interact but it’s really public and … I wouldn’t say it was difficult but there’s an element of freezing out a little bit (Nigel, 43, middle-class).

Differently classed locales are placed as variously welcoming, cosmopolitan and ‘mixed’, or ‘cold’, unacceptable and homophobic; these have classing effects interconnecting with parental and sexual status, where the desire to be the ‘right’ person in the ‘right’ place complexly illustrates degrees of privilege and disadvantage. It is the inattention to the degrees of difference, as intersecting class, sexuality and parental status, which is frequently missed out in detailing spatialised forms of ‘social capital’. Where social capital building amongst ‘families of choice’ has pronounced a ‘difference’ in the networking and social capital formation of lesbians and gay men, it has sidelined classed ‘differences’ within this. However, a more normative version of social capital is more problematic, in re-inscribing notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ spaces – and subjects in space – which rest upon specifically classed resources. A version of social capital as specifically classed and sexualised, speaks to the (in)abilities to enact varying geographies of choice. Concluding Thoughts This chapter highlights the relevance of the intersectionality of class and sexuality as pertaining to parental (im)mobilities and geographies of choice,

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where perceptions, experiences and materialities of and in place vary by class and sexuality. It situates this as an intersectional intervention in the literature on ‘social capital’, where the interconnection between class and sexuality has been somewhat neglected in the competing versions of ‘social capital’ deployed (Bourdieu 1984, Putman 1993, 1995, Weeks et al. 2001). In researching lesbian and gay parents from different class positions, a specifically classed concept of social capital is preferred over relatively benign, overly optimistic or normative versions; the potential for extending this to take account of sexualised reproductions and (dis)advantages in the uptake of social space has been grappled with throughout. The theoretical opposition – and merging – of different uses of ‘social capital’ is used to try to advance class conceptualisations and intersections, exploring too the ways that (middle) classed capitals sometimes do not straightforwardly ‘pay off’, as a result of occupying non-normative sexualities. It highlights the limitations and re-circulation of social capital, intersecting with economic capital, where (non-normative) middle-classness could indeed be troubled but also recuperated in enacting spatial entitlements, choices and movements. Bibliography Adkins, L. and Skeggs, B. 2004. (eds) Feminism After Bourdieu. Oxford: Blackwell. Ahmed, S. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Almack, K. 2007. Out and About: Negotiating the Processes of Disclosure of Lesbian Parenthood. Sociological Research Online 12(1) http://www. socresonline.org.uk /12/1/almack.html (accessed Jan 2008). Anthias, F. 2001. New Hybridities, Old Concepts: The Limits of ‘Culture’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24(4): 619–41. Anthias, F. 2002. Beyond Feminism and Multiculturalism: Locating Difference and the Politics of Location. Women’s Studies International Forum 25(3): 275–86. Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. 1983. Contextualizing Feminism: Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions. Feminist Review 15: 62–75. Ball, S. 2003. Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle-Class and Social Advantage. London: Routledge/Flamer. Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society. London: Sage. Binnie, J. and Valentine, G. 1999. Geographies of Sexuality – Review of Progress. Human Geography 23(2): 175–87. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1985. The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups. Theory and Society 14(6): 723–44.

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Luzia, K. 2008. Day Care as Battleground: Using Moral Panic to Locate the Front Lines. Australian Geographer 39: 315–26. McCall, L. 2005. The Complexity of Intersectionality. Signs 30(3): 1771–800. Moran, L. 2000. Homophobic Violence: The Hidden Injuries of Class, in Munt, S.R. (ed.) Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change. London: Cassell, 206–18. Perlesz, A. and McNair, R. 2004. Lesbian Parenting: Insiders’ Voices. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy 25(3): 129–40. Phoenix, A., Woollett, A. and Lloyd, E. (eds) 1991. Motherhood: Meanings, Practices and Ideologies. London: Sage. Putman, R.D. 1993. The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life. American Prospect 4(13). Putman, R.D. 1995. Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy 6(1): 65–78. Skeggs, B. 1999. Matter Out of Place: Visibility and Sexualities in Leisure Spaces. Leisure Studies 18(3): 213–32. Skeggs, B. 2001. The Toilet Paper: Femininity, Class and Mis-Recognition. Women’s Studies International Forum 24(3/4): 295–307. Stacey, J. and Biblarz, T.J. (2001) (How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter? American Sociological Review 66(2): 159–83. Taylor, Y. 2004. Negotiation and Navigation: An Exploration of the Spaces/Places of Working-Class Lesbians. Sociological Research Online 9(1): 1–24. Taylor, Y. 2005. The Gap and How to Mind It: Intersections of Class and Sexuality. Sociological Research Online 10(3) (accessed Jan 2008). Taylor, Y. 2005. Classed in a Classless Climate. Feminism and Psychology 15(4): 491–500. Taylor, Y. 2007. Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Y. 2009. Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capital. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Urry, J. 2000. Sociology Beyond Societies : Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. Valentine, G. 2007. Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography. Professional Geographer 59: 10–21. Weeks, J., Heaphy, B. and Donovan, C. 2001. Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments. New York: Routledge. Weston, K. 1995. Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration. GLQ 2: 253–77. Yuval-Davis, N. 2006. Intersectionality and Feminist Politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3): 193–209.

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Part III Transformations and Intersections

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Chapter 9

Even Poor Gays Travel: Excluding Low Income Gay Men from Understandings of Gay Tourism Mark Casey

Introduction Elite and rich Northern European homosexuals have been documented as pursuing travel to ‘homoerotic havens’ of the Mediterranean in the early twentieth century (Aldrich 1993), but it would not be until the latter part of the twentieth Century that ‘gay travel’ would emerge as a significant phenomenon. The emergence of gay tourism and the gradual growth of the gay travel market could be theorised as an extension of the ‘gay social worlds and gay culture [that developed] during the 1970s in North America’ (Devall 1979), while Clift et al. (2002) have suggested that many gay men able to travel during the late 1970s and 1980s did so while holidaying in destinations perceived to be at least gay tolerant (if not exclusively gay). This ‘second wave’ of gay tourists were often portrayed as primarily white, western and middle-class. During the mid-1990s understandings offered of ‘gay travel’ began to change, with the growth in gay tourism reflecting the growing status and potential economic value of such ‘niche tourism’. In Australia, during the late 1990s, Tourism New South Wales sponsored research into the economic value of the Sydney Mardi Gras (see Marsh and Levy 1998). More recently, Australia’s Northern Territory’s Tourist Commission continued to explore the value of the ‘pink dollar’, undertaking a series of seminars which included ‘Niche Marketing: Targeting Gay and Lesbian Travellers’ (Hocking 2002). Studies from the UK and US have also supported the idea that gay men are a highly geographically mobile group. For example, research on gay men living in London has been used to demonstrate that ‘gay men are a particularly mobile part of the population’, with 77 per cent of gay men questioned not being from the London area originally (see Kelly et al. 1996: 13). However, many of the gay men in Kelly et al.’s study moved to London out of need (i.e. to find work, escape homophobia, etc.) and not because of a high disposable income or levels of mobility. Such movements, although different to touristic mobility, reflect wider discourses around gay men’s distinct and unequal spatial (im)mobilities. For working-class gay men their inclusion within globalised tourist flows may be more restricted to employment within the tourism industry, serving their wealthy

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middle-class counterparts (see Clift et al. 2002, Binnie 2004). As Alder and Brenner (1992) have reminded us, the ‘gay community’ is not homogeneous and not all gay men are affluent. Social class is important for understanding how the structuring of tourism occurrs in different ways, where lack of access can create inequalities in experience, in ways of being and ways of knowing (see Crick 2002, Urry 2002a). Puar (2002) asks what are the costs for those gay men who are unable to make claims to be ‘tourists’, who are ‘fixed’ in space, while white gay masculinity is figured as mobile, agentic and most definitely on the map. ‘Cosmopolitan queerness’ and the identities and knowledges so associated are signalled through the ability to consume, travel and be mobile. Inclusion within such cosmopolitanism is dependent not only upon access to sufficient economic capital, but upon having the relevant knowledge and skills to access touristic experiences (see Puar 2002). As Bourdieu (1984) has demonstrated, class groups wage hegemonic battles to distinguish themselves from the rest of society. Classes, and class fractions, establish distinctions based on occupation, education, commodities and consumption. Further, the preferences of a particular social group provide the basis for class differentiation and inform the struggle between classes to impose their taste as the legitimate taste (see Kontogeorgopoulos 2003). Even if lower income gay men were able to afford to travel, economic access is but one factor in making claims to inclusion within gay tourism. Cultural capital is not something that can be bought but instead relies on the ability of individuals to join in the game of being able to ‘know and appreciate what to eat, drink, wear, watch and what types of holiday to take’ (Mowforth and Munt 1998: 132). As this chapter will show, the inclusion of gay men within the travel and tourism industry is granted or restricted through economics but also through the intersections of social and cultural capital. It is also important to acknowledge that the material realities of inclusion/ exclusion within travel and tourism are both gendered and racialised. Puar (2002), for example, asks ‘why and how is lesbian tourism (in)visible?’ The position of lesbians within tourism studies is likely to reflect their positions as women and sexual others within a patriarchal society, in which both sexism and homophobia limit their economic and spatial claims (see Hennessy 2000, Waitt and Markwell 2006, Taylor 2007a, b, 2009). Imagery used of the typical gay tourist often depicts male, young, professional and white individuals. Gay male travel is racialised in both its packaging and experience, with non-white bodies often only being visible through their invisibility. The packaging of Australia as the ultimate gay male paradise often sidetracks claims surrounding a nation embedded in class politics and characterised by problematic race relations (Waitt and Markwell 2006): Australian gay identity is packaged as white, with Aboriginal Australians missing from tourist websites such as www.gaysydney.com. Economically disadvantaged minority groups, such as indigenous populations tend to be   Research by Kantsa (2002) on the holiday Island of Lesvos clearly shows the mobility and wealth of some lesbians and their inclusion within lesbian tourism.

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overrepresented as workers in the predominantly low paid service sector element of the tourism industry: The advent and development of tourism may not only affect which ethnic identities are asserted, but which ethnic markers are chosen to symbolise group membership and culture. This in turn reflects and shapes the unequal distribution of touristically-relevant knowledge in an ethnic population – what might be called touristic cultural capital – that enables some groups and individuals to take disproportionate advantage of the economic and other benefits of tourism (Wood 1998: 222).

Images portrayed by the travel media have assumed a particular kind of tourist – white, Western, male and heterosexual (Pritchard and Morgan 2000). Urry (2002a) suggests early forms of mass tourism were based around heterosexual couples with this ideal still central to tourism imagery. Holiday-making discourse is predominantly heterosexualised – involving pictures of opposite sex couples with or without children and ‘fun holidays’ consisting of same-sex groups seeking sex with individuals from the opposite sex (Urry 2002a: 139). In spite of this, over the last decade gay male tourism has been one of the fastest growing ‘niche’ markets in the international travel industry (see Ivy 2001, Smith 2003), so much so that the first global chain of gay hotels, Hotel Axel, has opened its third hotel in Berlin. The gay tourist dollar has been central to the re-branding of Sydney as a major world (gay) city. Such branding re-positions the city beyond the limits of its geographical location and wider heterosexualised culture. Its location as one of the most geographically isolated southern hemisphere cities far away from the northern hemisphere countries from which it desires the tourist dollar, has the consequence that most northern hemisphere gay men will never visit the ‘Emerald City’. However, the identity and branding of Sydney as a ‘gay mecca’ since the early 1990s is not lost on those gay men who cannot visit. This successful branding has been witnessed by other cities and their local authorities. For example, Melbourne’s deputy-mayor elect made public his plans to re-brand Melbourne as ‘Australia’s Gay Capital’ (Herald Sun 29 November 2004). This potential development was discussed in terms of creating safe and tolerant spaces for Melbourne’s sexual others and in terms of attracting the ever important pink tourist dollar. There is now a growing body of work which addresses and theorises the holiday and travel experiences of gay men, although as Smith (2003: 150) reminds us, gay tourism is still a much under-researched area. The material realities and quotidian consequences produced through the intersections between travel, sexual identity, gender, race and ethnicity and social class remain significantly undertheorised within the academy. This lack of focus in the academy on ‘gay tourism’ is in contrast to research upon the urban lives of gay men that have been theorised since the late 1970s in the US and Europe (see Bell and Valentine 1995, Skeggs 1999, Bell and Binnie 2000, Browne et al. 2007). The three key concerns of this chapter will contribute and build upon a growing body of research focused

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upon the intersections of sexual identity, social class and travel in three key ways. Initially the chapter addresses the commercialisation of gay male travel. In particular the chapter explores who is included and excluded from the marketing and image-making around ‘gay tourism’. In drawing upon the experiences of the research sample, homogeneous images of gay male bodies, lifestyles and tourist practices will be problematised. Secondly, the chapter addresses the pursuit and/or experience of sexual encounters with other men. In so doing the chapter questions the centrality of mobility and sexual encounters in ‘developing’ a gay male identity, whilst answering calls from Obrador-Pons (2007) to recognise the importance of sex in travel experiences without stigmatising ‘gay sex’. The role of income, as an excluding barrier to travel and tourism for many gay men will be the chapter’s final key focus. Throughout, the chapter will focus upon the spatial realities of limited knowledge and skills in making claims to an inclusion and visibility within ‘global gay travel discourses’. For Graham (2002), lesbian and gay tourists are likely to search for shared culture and identity that is used to build up an image of a world not defined through heteronormative imperatives. Rather than the voyeurism associated with gazing at an otherness (Urry 2002b), the lesbian or gay traveller is likely to search out key lesbian and gay sites, to be presented with an image of oneself, or a self one wishes to become. For a large number of gay men travel can be viewed as important in developing and confirming gay identity: holidays offer the opportunity for gay men to experience a sexual liberation away from their home lives, which may be above and beyond the escapism experienced by heterosexual tourists (see Pritchard et al. 1998, McCabe 2005). But we must be careful not to situate those gay men who do not search out new (sexual) experiences when travelling as ‘the unliberated’. Modes of sexual liberation and repression are culturally and person specific, with both having multiple meanings and values (see Puar 2001). And as this chapter shows, not all gay men do or can travel, but that is not to say that their sexual lives ‘at home’ are any less or more ‘liberated’ than those of the ‘global’ gay traveller. Potential impacts on identities from travel cannot be theorised as being limited to the traveller alone, but rather as also having consequences for local populations. In the interaction between local and tourist bodies, values and identities, it is important to ask what the connections between local ‘indigenous’ and globalised sexual identities may be. Such connections must be theorised as a complex two way process and not just one of ‘global cosmopolitan queers’ entering a place and westernising local sexual cultures and norms. Travel, for example, can bring a heightened awareness of collectivism and political action which has consequences for the sexual identities of travellers, locals and those ‘back home’. On holiday people are known to behave differently, where the strict codes of everyday behaviour are relaxed or even forgotten which in turn allows tourists to seek out the person they wish to be or become (see Gottlieb 1982). For many, tourism can be viewed as a transition/transgression of both personal and social boundaries; such ‘liberation’ can be used to think through sexual practices by tourists that are removed from their norms when ‘at home’. A potential movement between ‘home

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identity’ to ‘holiday identity’ can be useful to understand why some gay men seek out well known travel destinations such as The Castro in San Francisco or ‘beach resorts’ of Sitges in Spain or Mykonos (see Ivy 2001). Holidays can provide the opportunity to develop relationships and experience sexual encounters for closeted gay men or gay men who do not feel safe in being ‘out’ within their daily lives (see Waitt and Markwell 2002). Such ‘liminal experiences’ are positioned as primarily restitutive or compensatory, revitalising the tourists for their return home (Urry 2002b). For Cohen (1988, 2002) this is best exemplified by the recreational mode of tourism in which the tourist requires that their break offers them some escapism and to ‘recharges their batteries’, preparing them for the return to everyday life. Although many tourists may behave differently and hope to develop their identities whilst away from home, others are just as likely to be aware of the inauthenticity of the setting and experiences offered. For the ‘divisionary tourist’ the realities of low paid work mean that holidays do not offer an escapism, but simply a one or two week break that makes everyday life ‘bearable’ (Cohen, 2002). Claims that travel can be understood as liberating the tourist from certain norms whilst developing ‘awareness’ are often based on homogenous samples, that exclude the black, aged, disabled and working-class body (Ivy 2001). Research that has positioned travel and tourism as important facets of contemporary gay and lesbian identity (see Luongo 2002) has not fully engaged with those lesbians and gay men who are excluded from or invisible within tourism and travel. For those gay men who are unable to travel, some world cities (e.g. Berlin, London, Sydney) and key gay tourist sites may still hold a value and importance to them while, in borrowing from Taylor (2007a, b), the reality is that many gay men will have an overwhelming lack of identification with or sense of entitlement to images and lifestyles associated with travel. As some of the men in this chapter demonstrate, they are acutely aware of the ‘boundaries of inclusion and exclusion’ when it comes to travel and in turn their worth as contemporary gay. The imagery involved in marketing gay travel removes the aged, disabled, diseased, ugly or obese body (see www.visitbritain.com). Such ‘purified’ imagery reminds gay travellers that monetary wealth alone is not sufficient for claiming a full inclusion and visibility within global gay tourism imagery. Earlier claims that travel and tourism are important facets of contemporary gay male identity development and worth are echoed by many of the men in this chapter. But as Taylor reminds us, ‘sexuality becomes a pleasure and danger – getting it right can be affirming, but getting it wrong often means you can’t, won’t and don’t fit in’ (2007a: 162). To borrow from Duggan’s (2002) ‘new homonormativity’, to be ‘normative’, gay men must have access to disposable income and partake (as good citizens do) in the economy (Casey 2007). Travel and the ability to consume places and experiences, can be theorised as part of the ‘normalizing of gayness’, where gay men are using both their economic and cultural capital to position themselves against the ‘bad gay’ and/or the poor gay in their claims for the right to be included in this new homonormativity (see Taylor 2009, Puar 2002).

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Gay travel may be understood as the desire to visit and stay within a small handful of ‘safe gay sites’, while still engaging in a form of ‘segregation from the heterosexual world’ (Clift et al. 2002: 3). The economic benefits of gay tourism may be of key interest to city councils, however, they may not be as interested in packaging themselves as being ‘too gay’ in fear of alienating other tourists. Consequently, it is often the gay communities themselves that are central in creating images and positioning sites, resorts and cities as key destinations for gay men. Through creating images of who belongs in such sites, clear indicators of those who don’t belong are also communicated; images used on the website promoting the annual Sydney Mardi Gras are primarily of young, attractive, affluent and white gay men and lesbians. The images used may simply reflect those present at previous events, but nonetheless indicate who is visible and included within the packaging of gay events and the tourism so associated – and who is not. Introducing Sydney and Melbourne The research from which this chapter draws upon was undertaken in the Australian cities of Melbourne and Sydney in 2005. Gay men from each city were included due to shared commonalities between the cities (both cities have significant gay (and lesbian) communities, events and liberal city councils) and differences: Sydney is positioned as a ‘global gay capital’ while Melbourne can be approached via its limited appeal to gay media and gay travel companies. Sydney is no longer a regional port but a cosmopolitan, global capital with an economy driven by consumption, leisure and the tourist dollar. The city is expert in emphasizing and marketing its multicultural diversity to tourists, with its significant lesbian and gay communities, spaces and events functioning as one form of this diversity (Rushbrook 2002). Central to Sydney’s image of an ‘international lesbian and gay mecca’ is the city’s annual Lesbian and Gay Mardi Gras event and the large scale tourism associated with it (Mason and Lo 2009). Consequently, Sydney has become a focus for academics concerned with the metropolitan, gay (male) identities and travel (e.g. Waitt 2001, Markwell 2002). As Sydney and other similar ‘world cities’ have grown in importance, ‘secondary cities’ have engaged in strategies to create marketable identities and attract tourists. Australia’s second largest city, Melbourne has followed such a path, embracing the ‘gay as now’ model – a presence defined in global and cosmopolitan terms, in developing its international status and appeal to gay and lesbian tourists. Melbourne has witnessed hugely successful and extensive gentrification and re-branding. Yet, the previous academic focus   This research was undertaken as part of a one year ESRC funded Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2004–5). Twenty-one interviews were undertaken (10 in Melbourne, 11 in Sydney): respondents ranged in age from 18–60, all identified as white Australian, 11 respondents identified themselves as middle-class, nine as working-class and one as having no socio-economic class.

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upon ‘gay Sydney’ has been at the cost of gay male lives within Melbourne. By including men from both cities the research hoped to contribute to a re-balanced focus away from Sydney alone and to give visibility to diverse gay lifestyles and identities. Its Just the Gay Ghetto … but Overseas As discussed earlier, marketing and image making of tourists sites portray them as white, western and heterosexualised (see Richter 1995, Nixon 1997). Such images portray the typical tourist in a very limited light, excluding all other images of what a tourist may be or look like. Cities and gay businesses promote lesbian and gay events to market their ‘gay friendly’ approach, and to attract the gay euro, pound or dollar. But such events are carefully managed so not to eclipse attractions a city offers to heterosexual couples, families or single heterosexual travellers (see Mason and Lo 2009). Ivy (2001), in discussing gay tourism draws on the problematic term ‘alternative tourism’ to showcase its distance from heteronormalised concepts of tourism and travel. Gay tourism is often ‘niched’ within tourism marketing, mirroring the limited culture and values of the commercial gay scene. Such ‘niche’ marketing was felt by a number of the interviewees as being embedded with limited stereotypical identities of contemporary gay men: When I think of ‘gay tourism’ I think of the gay scene but only abroad. You know? You see those ads for gay cruises in Europe and its all young, hairless, muscle queens, probably pilled off their heads dancing around. Well that’s not me (Paul, 36, working-class, Sydney). Well, gay tourism? Hmmm, it just creates images in my mind of rich, young and beautiful gay men travelling to places where there is not a lot to do other than sunbathe, drink, maybe take drugs and have sex, in essence just to be a gay man. It’s not exactly going to museums or the theatre … and it’s definitely not my thing! Give me an art gallery over the beach any day (Rick, 33, working-class, Melbourne). Here in Sydney, the ads and campaigns all seem to package gay tourism as drink, drugs and sex – without saying that. But the images suggest that. Surely there are gay men who come to Sydney for our museums, galleries and great restaurants, not just for the scene? (Mark, 41, middle-class, Sydney).

Paul, Rick and Mark challenge stereotypical ideas that many gay men will (or are able to) use specialist tour operators designed to meet the needs of gay male tourists, who only desire ‘sun, sea, sand and sex’ (Hughes 2002). The images and experiences that ‘gay tourism’ offers are not discussed as ones which they want to claim an inclusion within. Paul finds it difficult to relate to the images of gay men used in advertising for gay cruises or the experiences such a cruise may offer. Being

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a self identified ‘bear’ Paul is anything but hairless or muscled in his appearance, removing him from the desired target market of such advertising. The advertising communicates clearly which side of the inclusion/exclusion binary he is positioned on, excluded through his income and bear identity. As Taylor (2007a, b) reminds us, scene spaces require that users use and learn ‘dress codes’ so as to be included. Legitimate appearances are produced and regulated by others more dominant within such spaces. However, Paul’s discussion of the gay cruises appears to be one of ‘opting out’, rather than being actively excluded. Although Paul later discusses his limited income (and in turn limited claims to ‘gay world travel’), he is able to claim inclusion within, utilise and resource other forms of identification from the wider bear community of Sydney and globally (through the internet). The prominence of drink, drugs and sex suggests that ‘gay holidays’ may be just an extension of the wider commercial gay scene and its exclusions therein. The imagery of gay tourism discussed exclude the huge variety of cultural experiences that Sydney offers, which Mark believes must surely attract some gay tourists. However, claims to identity, membership and morality are clearly communicated within these men’s accounts (see McCabe and Stokoe 2004). Both Rick and Mark make claims to being tasteful and cultured gay travellers, positioning themselves against the ‘tackiness’ of commercial gay travel that is focused upon the scene (Taylor 2008). Although Rick claims a working-class identity, his occupation as a journalist for a local newspaper positions him as able to make claims to knowledge based around ‘good’ tourism. Rick and Mark’s judgements reflect Bourdieu’s (1984) claim that the preferences of a particular social group provide the basis for class differentiation and inform the struggle between classes. In turn, individuals and groups try to impose their taste as the legitimate taste. Language can be used to construct ‘good’ and ‘bad’ places which are then used to define those who are good or bad members of such sites (McCabe and Stokoe 2004: 607–8), where the gay men who are young, muscled, hairless and ‘pilled off their heads’ are deemed to be bad and uncultured through their consumption of mainstream/‘low brow’ gay experiences. In discussing if there was distinct differences in how gay and heterosexual tourists plan or perceive their holidays, responses reflected the different prioritising of sexual identity within holiday experiences: I would have preferred to have stayed in a gay venue, so the preference is to ‘stay gay’. And it’s probably due to a homely feeling … if it is presented to me then I would definitely choose the gay hotel, whereas for heterosexuals nearly all hotels and tourist places are straight (Ross, 28, middle-class, Sydney).

However, both Troy and TR disagreed: No, I don’t think there is a massive difference between gay and straight tourists and what they want from a holiday, as I don’t think [gay] tourists go to a country simply for the gay scene … but if there is one while they are there then yes they

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may visit the gay scene, but they won’t let that dominate their target location (Troy, 25, working-class, Melbourne). … in terms of choosing where to go for a holiday well, there are so many places that I think I would like to see. Many of these are in countries where, lets just say gays don’t have the best rights. But travelling is not always about being a gay man for me, often it is about being a tourist and wanting to see the world. If I stumble on a gay bar while away and get laid, well that’s just a bonus! (TR, 34, middle-class, Melbourne).

The insights offered here by Troy and TR may suggest that the binaries between heterosexual and gay tourism and tourist practices may be beginning to blur as individuals become more tolerant of ‘sexual others’ (see Valentine 2002). For Troy and TR their sexual identities are not positioned as underpinning their travel plans or the desirability of a place for visiting. However, for Troy his opinions have not developed from experience – he has yet to travel overseas. Instead they have developed from assumptions he is making concerning future travel plans. Although access to economic capital has clear consequences for Troy (reflected in his current lack of an entitlement to global mobility), it is clear that his sexual identity also intersects with the imagined and the material (im)possibilities of his desired travel. TR makes claims upon wanting to ‘see the world’ as a tourist, which is not necessarily about being a ‘gay tourist’ for him. However, TR has the cultural and economic mobility to choose what type of holiday he will undertake, with both types of locations (and the associated identifications) existing freely for him. But in order to make claims to such global mobility, tourists require sufficient economic capital to pay airfares and hotel bills along with knowledge and skills based upon cultural capital which eases movement and inclusion within touristic experiences. The desired result of travel in terms of the social status and the acquisition of cultural capital serves as an axis of differentiation. In contrast to this, Ross’ ideal situation is to ‘stay gay’ when travelling. He believes that the ability to stay within a gay establishment provides a ‘homely feeling’ and security which he associates with this. Such experiences can be theorised through Urry’s (2002a, b) collective gaze, in which tourists wish to be surrounded by other tourists ‘just like them’. Tourists, such as Ross construct identities for themselves in relation to places, where such places have describable features which allow people to be categorized as belonging to them by virtue of the types of behaviour exhibited (see McCabe 2005). Ross’ many travel experiences reflect his economic and cultural advantages as a mobile and relatively affluent young gay man. His career as an air steward gives him an ease of mobility through national borders which few can make claims to. However, it is possible to view his following discussion on sex and travel as indicative of his disadvantage, as a ‘bad gay’ (see Duggan 2002), lacking claims to hetero/homonormative sexual values:

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Ross and Ed both prioritise the search for sexual pleasure as central to their travel plans as gay men. However, Ed’s discussion does reflect the plurality of gay men’s holiday experiences and desires (Uriely 2005). As he indicates he is able to travel with his family (primarily as a son), but also to travel on separate trips as a gay man searching for multiple sexual encounters. Their claims to sexual enjoyment as mobile gay men, and the potential this has for ‘feeling good’, reflects middle-class claims of expectation and entitlement to such experiences. Through such entitlement and experience they are able to mark their distinction (from low income, nonmobile gay men) and make claims to a ‘specialised’ knowledge of how to perform a valid contemporary gay male identity. Holidays for gay men, perhaps especially where sex occurs, can be seen as contributing to the process of establishing an identity (Cox 2002, Hughes 2002), catered for by gay tour operators in the use of sexualised images to sell holidays. Within such marketing, information may be provided on where to find easy casual sex, which is not to suggest that gay travel companies alone make use of sex and/or sexualised imagery in the promotion and selling of holidays – the role of casual sex within holiday experiences is just as likely to be as important to heterosexual travellers. National or International Travel? For gay men the advent of ‘new tourism’, which is flexible and customised to the individual needs of the traveller, could be understood as a welcome development (indicating a shift away from ‘old tourism’ which involved the packaging and marketing of standardised and heteronormalised products) (see Bray and Raitz 2001, Urry 2002b). However, Binnie (2004) is cautious in assuming that such a growth in ‘niche tourism’ can be assumed to be a welcome development for all gay men. If such a position is adopted it assumes that to develop a gay identity or

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even to make claims to be a gay man requires some form of engagement in travel and tourism. In borrowing from Binnie’s (2004: 89) critique of Weston (1995), not all gay men desire mobility or have the urge to ‘get thee to a holiday destination’, irrespective of social class. As data from this project has shown not all gay men are able to partake in the travel industry and take overseas trips. For those gay men wishing to engage with travel and tourism low income and other identity markers position them as ‘undesirable others’ outside of the travel industry. Their movement within and outside of Australia is highly regulated through limited access to resources. The World Tourism Organization’s call for the removal of barriers to travel and in turn the ‘freedom of movement for all people’ crucially omits anything in regard to the barriers posed by most (if not all) travel. For many of the gay men in the research economic barriers limit their ability to undertake overseas travel, such a lack of economic resources does not limit their claims to future travel: I would love to be able to travel overseas, but I just can’t afford it, not on what I earn. I have been to Perth, Brisbane and Sydney quite a few times, but they are not the same really, as you are still in Australia. I would love even to get to Asia to see something different, but it’s just too expensive (Pete, 49, working-class, Melbourne). No, I have never been abroad. I would really like to go to Berlin, London, Madrid – all the really important gay cities in Europe … Especially being single, it would be so much fun and think of all the sex you could have! But it is just not possible as I can’t afford it, and with Australia being so far away from everywhere, well it costs far too much to get out of this country (Norman, 55, working-class, Sydney). I do plan on seeing the US and Europe in the next few years and I am saving for that now. But it is going to take quite some time to save for the trip, as I want to do it properly, and really I think it will be a once in a lifetime trip. I want to make sure I have enough money to impress those New York or London boys! But it is going to be expensive, but I guess it will be worth it (Mike, 27, working-class, Melbourne).

For both Mike and Norman the US or Europe are seen as offering the international gay tourist the chance to consume spaces, sites and symbols which carry emotional, political and sexual opportunities. Both equate a trip to Europe or the US as a chance to meet other men for fun and/or sex (echoing earlier discussions on the importance of casual sex). Norman is aware of the impossibilities of his desires, disallowed through limited economic capital. But he does not reify a right to travel through his gay identity (unlike Ed’s earlier discussion). Norman’s positioning of travel as a desired experience, rather than as a right, problematises the assumption that travel is essential for allowing gay men to develop the ‘right gay male identity’

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or to ‘come out’ (see Clift et al. 2002, Waitt 2001). Mike, Norman and Pete reflect wider discourses around the desire to partake in gay tourism, which is not framed as an entitlement or right. Although they do not understand their inclusion within gay tourism and its potential experiences as a ‘right’, they are still not positioning themselves against values associated with gay tourism and the potential social and cultural capital it can endow. The work of Robson (1997) on the intersecting of class, gender and sexuality is useful here in thinking through Pete’s and Mike’s experiences. The problem here is not that the men in the research are gay men – the problem is that they are the wrong type of gay men. ‘Rightness’ is expressed through the ability to travel and spend freely, ‘wrongness’ is to be poor and in turn not be able to consume all the world (or the travel industry) has to offer. The lack of any entitlement to travel produces an awareness of the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within travel, as found by Taylor (2007a, 2008) in her study of lesbian scene spaces. Pete has travelled many times within Australia however such travel is not viewed by him as having the worth or value of international travel. The packaging and worth given to overseas travel by the travel industry, the media and other gay men, positions travel within ones own country to be inferior to that of overseas travel. Mike, in attempts to make claims upon this ‘valued’ gay male identity, is saving hard financially. As Binnie (2004: 98) argues, ‘the awareness of globalization or a ‘global gay’ community elsewhere may spur people to migrate to some queer promised land’, as Mike goes onto say: Part of the reason I am saving so hard to get to Europe and the US is yes, I want to see these places, but also I want to visit cities like New York and London that are just such important gay centre’s and go to Soho in London and the gay areas of New York. I think seeing these places makes me, well not more of a gay man, but it definitely means something to me as a gay man. I think the trip will change me as a gay man, make me more confident (Mike, 27, working-class, Melbourne).

But will having the economic capital for such a trip be enough for Mike to make his claims? Will those New York or London gay men who he understands as being ‘in the know’ about what to eat, drink, wear, watch, which drugs to take or who to have sex with, wish to share such knowledge? And we can ask – does such knowledge exist? Having the financial ability to travel does not guarantee access to ‘queer cosmopolitanism’, where social class, race, gender and age all impact one’s claims to an inclusion founded upon such tacit knowledge. When discussing exclusion from travel and the potential consequences of this, some respondents felt that there could be a number of consequences regarding how identity can be (un)done: When I am sat with my mates and they are talking about everywhere they have been in the world and … what they have seen, I do feel pretty embarrassed that

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I have not been able to do the same and relate to it as a gay man. I just think its part of gay culture now, to have travelled and to have seen a bit of the world (Norman, 55, working-class, Sydney). I can’t imagine not being able to travel. Seeing the world with my own eyes is so important (Joseph, 39, working-class, Melbourne). I love travelling and being able to see the world, meet all these other gay men and come home and talk about where you have been and what you have been up to. I just think it is now almost expected that as a gay man you would have been to San Francisco, and if you haven’t? Well you better get your arse there quick honey if you want to have any credibility [as a gay man] (Stuart, 31, workingclass, Sydney).

Being able to travel to the right ‘global gay cities’ and consume what is on offer is outlined as a key value for the Joseph and Stuart, and for Norman’s friends. At great financial cost some gay men can gain access to valued elements of gay male identity and make claims upon this in other cultures, cities and gay scenes. Both Stuart and Joseph can be positioned as belonging to a new bourgeoisie – they are in well paid occupations and can afford expensive, exclusive holidays. Their claims to tourism and the experiences so associated are positioned as a right, not one of privilege. In particular Stuart positions himself as the ‘knowing cosmopolitan queer’, through his international mobility, presenting himself as an authority on which experiences and knowledge gay men should partake in. Brown (2007) is critical of the dominance of such consumption within gay male cultures drawing attention to alternative queer economies and alternative knowledge and values. In so doing he reminds us of inclusive queer lives beyond the heavily commercialised gay scene, where claims for inclusion are not dependent on already possessing sufficient economic, social or cultural capital. For many low income gay men, access to such travel is limited through its expense and through their undesirable class position and/or their inability to make claims to cosmopolitan queered knowledge (see Skeggs 1999). Conclusion The quotes drawn upon in this chapter remind us that gay men are not a homogeneous group, instead possessing multiple identities and realities. Undoubtedly a number of men in the research felt excluded from wider global gay mobility due to limited income: economic capital has very real material consequences for inclusion/exclusion within global gay tourism circuits. Due to Australia’s geographical location, significant financial resources are required to move beyond its boundaries and consume gay scenes and experiences in the global north. However, the inclusion/exclusion binary is not only dependent upon

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economic income, but on the ability to make claims to ‘being in the know’ and having an appreciation of where to travel, where to stay, what to wear or what to eat: such cultural capital cannot be bought (Bourdieu 1984). Some of the more affluent men within the research, such as Stuart or Mark can be understood as ‘gatekeepers’ of such knowledge, vocalising their right to deem what is ‘tacky’ or ‘essential’ for making claims to a contemporary gay identity. Their knowledge is positioned as unquestionable. Other men such as Mike, believe that through future travel and contact with gay men ‘in the know’ their identities will develop and change for the better – perhaps allowing them to become the future gatekeepers of such tacit knowledge. This is undoubtedly the case for many gay travellers, however it is essential to acknowledge that many gay men ‘opt-out’ of such global mobility or values associated with the commercial gay scene. As Paul, a young hairy-bear reflects, gay men may be excluded financially from taking part in global mobility, but they are not passively debarred from such experiences altogether. Gay men can and do opt-out of giving value to meanings marketed to represent a limited ‘gay tourist’ image and experience, with future research on gay tourism needing to acknowledge and theorise such diversity in values and experience. Not all middle-class gay men ‘buy into’ the values and lifestyle associated with international gay travel, and not all working-class gay men want in. The complex intersecting of social class, sexuality and travel highlights the diversity within the ‘gay male community’ and the plurality of lifestyles, values and experiences that make up the everyday realities of gay men. Bibliography Alder, S. and Brenner, J. 1992. Gender and Space: Lesbians and Gay Men in the City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 16(1), 24–34. Ateljevic, I. 2000. Circuits of Tourism: Stepping Beyond the ‘Production/ Consumption’ Dichotomy. Tourism Geographies, 2(4), 369–88. Bauer, T. and McKercher, B. (eds) 2003. Sex and Tourism: Journeys of Romance, Love and Lust. New York: Haworth Hospitality Press. Bell, D. and Binnie, J. (eds) 2000. The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (eds) 1995a. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge. Binnie, J. 2004. The Globalization of Sexuality. London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement and Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bray, R. and Raitz, V. 2001. Flight to the Sun: The Story of the Holiday Revolution. London: Continuum. Brown, G. 2007. Autonomy, Affinity and Play in the Spaces of Radical Queer Activism, in Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practice and Politics, edited by K. Browne, J. Lim and G. Brown. Aldershot: Ashgate, 195–206.

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Browne, K., Lim, J. and Brown, G. (eds) 2007. Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practice and Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Buck-Morss, S. 1987. Semiotic Boundaries and the Politics of Meaning: Modernity on Tour – A Village Transition, in New Ways of Knowing: The Sciences, Society and Reconstructive Knowledge, edited by M. Raskin and H. Bernstein. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 200–236. Casey, M. 2004. De-dyking Queer Space: Heterosexual Female Visibility in Gay and Lesbian Spaces. Sexualities, 7(4), 446–61. Casey, M. 2007. The Queer Unwanted and Their Undesirable ‘Otherness’, in Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practice and Politics, edited by K. Browne, J. Lim and G. Brown. Aldershot: Ashgate, 125–36. Castells, M. 1983. The City and Grassroots: A Cross Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chasin, A. 2000. Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Clift, S. and Carter, S. (eds) 2000. Tourism and Sex: Culture, Commerce and Coercion. London: Pinter. Clift, S. and Forrest, S. 1999. Gay Men and Tourism: Destinations and Holiday Motivations. Tourism Management, (20), 615–25. Clift, S., Luongo, M. and Callister, C. (eds) 2002. Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex. London: Continuum. Cohen, E. 1988. Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 15(3), 371–86. Cohen, E. 2002. The Sociology of Tourism: Approaches, Issues and Findings, in The Sociology of Tourism: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, edited by Y. Apostolopoulos, S. Leivadi and A. Yiannakis. London: Routledge, 51–71. Connell, J. (ed.) 2000. Sydney: The Emergence of a World City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cox, M. 2002. The Long Haul of the Closet: The Journey from Small Town to Boys Town, in Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex, edited by S. Clift, M. Luongo and C. Callister. London: Continuum, 151–73. Crick, M. 2002. Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings and Servility, in The Sociology of Tourism: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, edited by Y. Apostolopoulos, S. Leivadi and A. Yiannakis. London: Routledge, 15–50. Dangerous BedFellows (eds) 1996. Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism. Boston: South End Press. Devall, W. 1979. Leisure and Lifestyles Among Gay Men: An Exploratory Essay. International Review of Modern Sociology, 9, 179–95. Duggan, L. 2002. The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism, in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, edited by R. Castronovo and D. Nelson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 174–94. Gottlieb, A. 1982. Americans Vacations. Annals of Tourism Research, 9, 165–87.

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Graham, M. 2002. Challenges from the Margins: Gay Tourism as Cultural Critique, in Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex, edited by S. Clift, M. Luongo and C. Callister. London: Continuum, 17–41. Hocking, L. 2002. Niche Marketing: Targeting Gay and Lesbian Travellers. The 2002 Know How Seminar Series, Northern Territories Tourist Commission. Holcomb, B. and Luongo, M. 1995. Gay Tourism in the United States. Annals of Tourism Research, 23(3) (1996), 711–12. Hughes, H. 1997. Holidays and Homosexual Identity. Tourism Management, 18(1), 3–7. Hughes, H.L. 2002. Gay Men’s Holidays: Identity and Inhibitors, in Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex, edited by S. Clift, M. Luongo and C. Callister. London: Continuum, 174–90. Ivy, R.L. 2001. Geographical Variation in Alternative Tourism and Recreation Management. Tourism Geographies, 3(3), 338–55. Kantsa, V. 2002. Certain Places Have Different Energy: Spatial Transformations in Eresos Lesvos. GLQ, 8(1–2), 35–56. Kelley, P., Pebody, R. and Scott, P. 1996. How Far Will You Go? A Survey of Gay Men’s Migration and Mobility. London: Gay Men Fighting AIDS Ltd (The Research Arm of Gay Men Fighting AIDS). Markwell, K. 2002. Mardi Grass Tourism and the Construction of Sydney as an International Gay and Lesbian City. GLQ, 8(1–2), 81–99. Marsh, I. and Levy, S. 1998. Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Economic Impact Statement. New South Wales: Sydney Tourism. Mason, G. and Lo, G. 2009. Sexual Tourism and the Excitement of the Strange: Heterosexuality and the Sydney Mardi Gras Parade. Sexualities, 12(1), 97– 121. McCabe, S. 2000. Tourism Motivation Process. Annals of Tourism Research, 27(4), 1049–52. McCabe, S. 2005. Who is a Tourist? Tourist Studies, 5(1), 85–106. McCabe, S. and Stokoe, E. H. 2004. Place and Identity in Tourists’ Accounts. Annals of Tourism Research, 31(3), 601–22. McKee, A. 1999. Australian Gay Porn Videos: The National Identity of Despised Cultural Objects. The International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2(3), 179– 200. Mowforth, M. and Munt, I. 2003. Tourism and Sustainability: Development and New Tourism in the Third World. London: Routledge. Nixon, S. 1997. Circulating Culture, in The Production of Culture/Cultures of Production, edited by P. Du Gay. London: Sage, 179–234. Obrador-Pons, P. 2007. A Haptic Geography of the Beach: Naked Bodies, Vision and Touch. Social and Cultural Geography, 8(1), 123–41. O’Connell Davidson, J. and Sanchez Taylor, J. 1999. Fantasy Island: Exploring the Demand for Sex Tourism, in Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean, edited by K. Kempadoo. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 37–54.

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Pritchard, A. and Morgan. N.J. 2000. Constructing Tourism Landscapes – Gender, Sexuality and Space. Tourism Geographies, 2(2), 115–39. Pritchard, A., Morgan, N.J., Sedgely, D. and Jenkins, A. 1998. Reaching Out to the Gay Tourist: Opportunities and the Threats in an Emerging Market Segment. Tourism Management, 19(3), 273–82. Pritchard, A., Morgan. N. J., Sedgely, D., Khan, E. and Jenkins, A. 2000. Sexuality and Holiday Choices: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Tourists. Leisure Studies, 19, 267–82. Puar, J.K. 2001. Global Circuits: Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad. Signs, 26(4), 1039–65. Puar, J.K. 2002. Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization. GLQ, 8(1–2), 1–6. Richter, L.K. 1995. Gender and Race: Neglected Variables in Tourism Research, in Change and Tourism: People, Places, Processes, edited by R. Butler and D. Pearce. London: Routledge, 71–91. Robson, C. 1993. Real World Research: A Resource for Social Scientists and Practitioner-Researchers. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Robson, C. 2002. Real World Research. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Rofes, E. 2001. Imperial New York: Destruction and Disneyfication under Emperor Giuliani. GLQ, 7, 101–09. Sant, W. and Waitt, G. 2000. Sydney: All Day and All Night Long, in Sydney: The Emergence of a World City, edited by J. Connell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 189–221. Selwyn, T. (ed.) 1996. The Tourist Image. Chichester: Wiley. Serlin, D. 1996. The Twilight (Zone) of Commercial Sex, in Policing Public Sex, edited by Dangerous BedFellows. Boston: South End Press, 45–52. Skeggs, B. 1999. Matter Out of Place: Visibility and Sexuality in Leisure Spaces. Leisure Studies, 18(3), 213–32. Smith, M.E. 2003. Issues in Cultural Tourism Studies. London: Routledge. Taylor, Y. 2007a. If Your Face Doesn’t Fit…The Misrecognition of Working-Class Lesbians in Scene Spaces. Leisure Studies, 26(2), 161–78. Taylor, Y. 2007b. Working Class Lesbian Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Taylor, Y. 2008. That’s not My Scene: Working Class Lesbians in (and Out of) Place. Sexualities, 11(5), 523–46. Taylor, Y. 2009. Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capitals. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Turner, L. and Ash, J. 1975. The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery. London: Constable. Valentine, G. 2002. Queer Bodies and the Production of Space, in Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, edited by D. Richardson and S. Seidman. London, Sage, 145–60. Wagner, U. 1997. Out of Time and Place: Mass Tourism and the Charter Trips. Ethnos, 42(1–2), 38–52.

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Waitt, G.R. 2001. The Olympic Spirit and Civic Boosterism: The Sydney 2000 Olympics. Tourism Geographies, 3(3), 249–78. Waitt, G. and Markwell, K. 2006. Gay Tourism: Culture and Context. London: The Haworth Press. Want, P. 2002. Trouble in Paradise: Homophobia and Resistance to Gay Tourism, in Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex, edited by S. Clift, M. Luongo and C. Callister. London: Continuum, 191–213. Wood, R.E 1998. Touristic Ethnicity: A Brief Itinerary. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21(2), 218–41. Uriely, N. 2005. The Tourist Experience: Conceptual Developments. Annals of Tourism Research, 32(1), 199–216. Urry, J. 2002a. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. Urry, J. 2002b. Tourism, Culture and Social Inequality, in The Sociology of Tourism: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, edited by Y. Apostolopoulos, S. Leivadi and A. Yiannakis. London: Routledge, 115–33.

Chapter 10

‘I Wanted to be Totally True to Myself’: Class and the Making of the Sexual Self Elizabeth McDermott

Introduction Although scholars have written of the dangers of ignoring class while researching and theorising sexuality, it remains, with few exceptions, rarely present in contemporary work (McDermott 2004, 2006, Moran 2000, Skeggs 2000, Taylor 2007, 2009). The reluctance to acknowledge the significance of social class to sexual and intimate life has served to hide the inequalities and power differentials in the experiences, practices and meanings of everyday lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) lives (McDermott 2003). I would argue that this has grave consequences for the understandings and knowledges we create, and need, to understand the rapidly changing context in which LGBT people live. For example, the proliferation of legislative changes in the UK (e.g. Civil Partnership Act 2004, Equality Employment Regulations 2003), and growing acceptance of same-sex relations (Parks 2005) is creating, arguably, the possibility for sexual/gender diversity to thrive (Giddens 1992, Weeks 2007). However, simultaneously, there remains a disproportionately high rate of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts amongst young people who are LGBT (King et al. 2008). The frameworks we use to understand the contradictory ways in which LGBT people are experiencing and actively engaging with the transformations in intimate and sexual life must, surely, include a prioritization of the multiplicity of LGBT existence and an adequate theorizing of power (Heaphy 2008). Plummer’s (1998) call for the need to research ‘stratifying homosexualities’ has never been more pertinent: LGBT research and theory which does not take social class and other dimensions of inequality seriously, raises questions about whose experiences are being used to generalise understandings of sexuality in the social. In this chapter I present UK based research which explores both sexual identity and social class within a framework of psychological health. I intend to demonstrate that class positioning, differentiates the lives of LGBT people, highlighting the dangers of the tendency within research and theory to generate a privileged (middle-class) and universal account of LGBT subjectivity, experience and identity. Drawing on empirical data, I will consider the initial sexual identification process (commonly referred to as ‘coming out’) and the ways in which social class is implicated.

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Research and theorising which has sought to understand the preliminary construction of the self as lesbian, gay, pansexual, dyke, queer etc. have, Heaphy (2008: 3) argues, since the 1970s been described in terms of ‘self-making and selfdetermination’. More recently, LGBT accounts have been situated in the reflexive individualisation thesis proposed by social theorists such as Giddens (1991, 1992) and Beck (1992). They argue that late modernity is characterised by attention to the self, where one can make and remake the self. As Giddens (1991: 75) expounds ‘ …we are, not what we are, but what we make of ourselves’. Critics, particularly feminists, have argued that the idea of the reflexive self may be over emphasised, and it is a notion which reflects the experiences of the privileged (Jameison 1998, Skeggs 1997, Adkins 2002, McDermott and Graham 2005, Parker, Wilson-Kovacs this volume). In other words, the idea of the autonomous, biographically-made individual is one which does not acknowledge that the resources and discourses necessary for reflexively making the self are unequally distributed throughout society (Lawler 2008, Skeggs 2004). Furthermore, these theories of the reflexive individualistic self are a historical production which have been institutionalised across a range of sites (for example the psychiatric professions, health policy and the academy), thereby authorising and legitimating this perspective of personhood. As a result, the western bourgeois project of the individualistic self has become the normative base for society (Rose 1989, Skeggs 1997, Walkerdine and Lucey 1989, Parker this volume). Heaphy (2008) argues specifically that Giddens’ reflexive thesis has been overstated in sociological discussions of lesbian and gay lives, suggesting ‘the resources required for self-fashioned and ‘empowered’ sexualities are underestimated’ (2). In this critique, several authors have suggested that LGBT research and theory valorize a reflexivity which affirms an exclusive/privileged experience, thus generating normative assumptions of a universal sexual subjectivity that is self-making, and self-determined (Skeggs 2004, Heaphy 2008, Taylor 2009). It is a version of LGBT life which does not engage adequately with the power-based differentials of, for example, social class, ethnicity or generation. Similarly, Taylor (2007: 184) argues in relation to lesbian research that ‘all too often choice, as reflexivity, is prioritized and isolated from the materiality of different and unequal choices’. It is as if the process of constructing the self as LGBT is not reliant upon access to discourses and resources through which the sexual self can be known and articulated. As a consequence, I would argue that the academy tends to reproduce a middle-class LGBT experience as universal (Skeggs 2004). In this chapter I utilize research findings to explore the ways in which preliminary sexual identity construction, (‘coming out’) is shaped by class resources (social, economic and cultural), and the implications this may have for psychological health. I suggest that the unequal class distribution of resources and discourses makes a difference to the mental health consequences of sexual identification. The following section outlines the details of the study and the subsequent sections explore the influence of class mobility and class subjectivities on the process of ‘coming out’ and the possible consequences for mental health.

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The Study Researching both social class and sexuality presents some complex theoretical negotiation. Bourdieu’s (1984, 1987) work has been at the forefront of refocusing the sociological analyses of social class, but his work does not consistently have gender as a central analytical category (Reay 1997) and leaves the heterosexual/ homosexual dichotomy unproblematised. Queer and feminist theories have done much to unearth the ‘fictions’ of sexuality and gender but too often this remains at the level of discourse and textual analysis (Jackson 1999). Both sets of theories argue that the social world is organized along binaries, and suggest that these dichotomies are embodied by individuals. Bourdieu’s incorporation of the social into the body has similarities to feminist/queer work on gender and sexual identity as individually embodied (Fraser 1999). I draw together insights from queer theories (Butler 1990) and feminist re-workings of Bourdieu’s (1984) conceptualisation of social class (Lawler 2000, Reay 1997, Skeggs 1997) to provide a theoretical frame through which sexuality can be investigated as discursive, material and institutional; viewing class as simultaneously structural and subjective. The study aimed to investigate the effects of sexual identity and social class on psycho-social health and was based on semi-structured interviews with twenty four women who self-identified, for example, as butch, dyke, lesbian and gay (‘lesbian’ will be used as short-hand for the women’s sexual identity throughout the chapter). The participants were aged between 21 and 56 years old and all lived in the North West of England. The sample was generated using purposeful theoretic snowball sampling (Weston 1991) from a diverse range of starting points, using informal lesbian networks. The resulting group of women self-defined as white (17), black or mixed race (5) and Jewish (2). Fifteen lived in cities; the other nine women lived in small towns or villages. The women were from three broad class backgrounds/trajectories: workingclass (10); middle-class (7); and university educated women from a working-class background (7). Social class was attributed using occupation and education. Women were categorised as ‘middle-class’ if they were university educated, professionally employed and one of their parents was the same. Women who had no higher education, were non-professionally employed and whose parents were the same were categorised as ‘working-class’. Women who were university educated and whose parents had no higher education and non-professional jobs were categorised as ‘working-class educated’. This last category aimed to capture the complex dimensions of class mobility and sexual identity. Most mental health research operates within a biomedical paradigm which has a ‘disease’ or illness focus (Rogers and Pilgrim 2003). Thus mental health is defined by the presence or absence of particular psychological problems (such as schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, phobias), as well as by aspects of social dysfunction like worry, difficulty in coping and feelings of incompetence. Much less health research has tried to measure the positive factors involved with mental health which act to make people feel ‘well’. This study sought to investigate

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mental health from the subjective viewpoint of the participants – they were asked what kept them ‘happy, healthy and well’? In the following exploration of the participants coming out stories, I am going to concentrate on two aspects of the data: class mobility and class subjectivities. Class Mobility Power and self-determination over one’s space and place is a major advantage in the negotiation of contemporary society (Reay 2000: 153).

The geographical literature has distinguished between space as a complex web of relations of domination and subordination within which place is a location centred on a specific territory (Massey 1994). The places and spaces in which the women first began to think about their sexual identity had a significant affect on their psychological health. Identifying as a lesbian is an anxious time, and most of the women recalled being fearful of censure and homophobia from the people in their immediate environments such as their family, school or work. Alison and Angela’s accounts of constructing a lesbian identity illustrate how ‘freedom’ from such censure was important to minimising the psychological demands: Well I think the experience of being away in a different country is that nobody knows you, so you’re free to be whatever you want to be…I think that was the biggest thing, erm, I was completely free to be me and there was nobody around who was going to sort of, you know disapprove or if they did, it wasn’t going to have any effect on me (Alison, 46, white, own business, m/c). Liz: Did you leave home because you wanted to or because of your mum and dad? Angela: Yeah, because of pressure as well. Liz: What sort of pressure? Angela: Erm, well me mum and dad didn’t like it, didn’t think I should leave home…so there was loads of tension in the household anyway. Liz: So did you just want to get out? Angela: Yeah, I needed me own space, me own thinking time, so, but I think it was the best thing I ever did... Liz: Why do you think it’s the best thing you ever did?

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Angela: Because I got me own independence. Liz: What about the gay thing? Angela: I grew up a lot as well and erm, also yeah, I started coming out to myself, so I could tell other people (Angela, white, 22, unemployed, w/c).

Alison was abroad, away from people who ‘read’ her as heterosexual, when she began to think of herself as lesbian. Similarly, Angela explains how leaving a tense situation at home allowed her space to become herself. Griffiths (1995) argues that freedom and an absence of fear are necessary to make the self. In the women’s accounts of the identification process there was a palpable feeling of surveillance from proximate relations like family, friends and work colleagues who presume a heterosexual identity. Having time to think, and occupying space where they did not have to be vigilant about their sexual identity, made the process less anxious and stressful. However, access to time and surveillance-free space was not available to all the women in the sample. For example, Mary describes the strain of coming out in the place she was born: I’ve lived here all my life, and I did really struggle, when it all came out and everything, it came out so public because everybody knows me and knows my husband, so it was, there was a lot of curtain twitching…because a lot of people, mainly in villages like this, live relatively small lives and I think, for such a thing to happen, that happened to me, they think wow this is brilliant, this bit of news is…so I think really I’ve been quite brave staying here (Mary, 48, white, admin assistant, w/c).

Regardless of social class positioning, the most stressful site for constructing a lesbian identity was the home, local neighbourhood and place of origin. Home should be a place of emotional and physical wellbeing but, for women who are constructing an identity as lesbian, it is here where identities are performed and come under surveillance. At home, there is a struggle to reconcile conflicting and contradictory performances of self-identity as lesbian, with other ‘marked’ heterosexual identities such as ‘daughter’, ‘mother’, ‘wife’ or ‘sister’. The battle to control how their sexual identity is read and received under the surveillance of vigilant relations and neighbours can divest the home of its meaning as a place of security (Johnston and Valentine 1995). All of the working-class lesbians and some of the working-class educated lesbians came out while living in their place of origin; either in the family of origin’s home, marital home or while living in the same locality. In contrast, the accounts of the middle-class women, and some of the educated women from working-class backgrounds, indicated that they came out in places and spaces away from the home or place of origin. For example, Joanne had the cultural capital to use university as a geographical stepping stone between

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her presumed heterosexual identity at home and her emerging identification as lesbian: Liz. Is there anything about university that you like? Joanne: Moving out of home, that was a good experience, I could bring a girl back whenever I wanted and that was the main reason why I moved out...I could have stayed at me mum’s if I wasn’t gay, so that is a big factor, I know it’s a big factor why I moved out, because it’s just so much easier now, I mean I’m having more fun now… (Joanne, 21, white, student, w/c ed.).

One of the obvious class differences between the women was geographical and social mobility. When I conducted the interviews, all but one of the working-class women (9/10, one woman moved from place of origin to secure better council housing) had been resident in the same place for the majority of their lives. The working-class educated women also showed a limited geographical mobility with most (5/7) remaining resident in their place of origin. In contrast, none of the middle-class women lived in the place where they grew up. They had all (7/7) lived in at least three different cities or towns in Britain or overseas. It was the middle-class women’s mobility through social spaces such as universities and employment, both in Britain and internationally, which was significant to securing the freedom to ‘become’ lesbian. By negotiating different social spaces, they managed to circumnavigate the heterosexual presumption, surveillance and potential hostility of family, friends and neighbours. In other words, they were able to avoid some of the conflict between their newly emerging lesbian identity and their past default heterosexual identity. Where the middleclass women did begin to come out at home (family or marital), they had the capitals and opportunities to negotiate safer spaces and thereby protect themselves from some of the mental distress. The coming out experiences of Catherine, working-class, illustrate the mental health consequences of restricted circumstances. Catherine, who was previously married and has two children, talks in the following extract about how she felt when she was coming out: I felt bad because of me parents, I really thought me parents would neglect me being West Indian, me dad’s Jamaican erm, very family...heterosexual if you like...but meeting all these single women, and nobody having kids, it, I wasn’t happy being a parent...I began resenting the kids...I lived out of the area…if it was up to me, I’d have been there every night, doing things...I wanted my freedom, but I think it was more difficult because all the other women I knew didn’t have kids apart from one or two...and people were also earning good money, and at the time I was erm, when they were little, or about that age, I was a part time worker and erm, getting benefits to supplement it...so I didn’t always have the money... (Catherine, 43, black, cleaner, w/c).

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Catherine had already told me in the interview that her mental health suffered when she first began to identify as lesbian. Her position as a working-class, black, single mother with few legitimated capitals, circumscribed her ability to ‘make’ herself lesbian. Catherine ‘wanted her freedom’ but the combination of childcare responsibilities, low income, few employment opportunities and living at a distance from the lesbian scene (which has financial and social implications), restricted her opportunities to negotiate time and surveillance free spaces which may have alleviated some of her distress. As a result of her limited power and mobility, Catherine’s mental health takes the cumulative strain of constructing herself as lesbian, feeling like a ‘bad mother’ and fearing she will lose the emotional and economical support of her family. Valentine (1993: 243) argues that a common response to lesbian identification is to ‘establish geographical boundaries between past and present identities’ by moving away from places where women have an established heterosexual identity and creating a lesbian identity in a different place. For the women I interviewed, this mobility was only evident with the middle-class women and some of the working-class educated women. It was only these women who created ‘geographical boundaries’ and safer spaces in which to ‘become’ lesbian. For the working-class women like Catherine, they were unable to secure time and space to construct themselves as lesbian because they did not have the resources or opportunities. Consequently, they were least able to buffer their mental health from the fear, anxiety and stress of coming out. In the following section I continue to examine the implications to mental health of class mobility while initially identifying as lesbian. Making Meaning of ‘Lesbian’ A key part of the identification process is an individual’s awareness of the category ‘lesbian’ and the production of acceptable meanings of lesbian which an individual is then willing to apply to themselves: ‘Recognition is a significant moment in the construction of subjectivity’ (Skeggs 1997: 98). This research suggests that class mobility may have influenced the women’s opportunities to produce satisfactory meanings of the label ‘lesbian’, and this affected the degree of psychological distress experienced during the coming out process. The women’s narratives supported the well established argument that in order to identify as lesbian there must be an environment where the social construct ‘lesbian’ exists, regardless of how it is understood (Ettore 1980, Jenness 1992, McIntosh 1968). Michelle and Fiona recall some moments of ‘recognition’: Liz: So can you remember the time when you began to think ‘oh maybe I’m gay’ or something, you know put a name to it? Michelle: Probably at the age of about 15 or 16.

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There were a variety of environments in which the women discovered the existence of the category lesbian. In Michelle’s case, it was knowing lesbians at a sports club, and Fiona remembers, rather negatively, the impact of the church. Both women recognised that it is a sexual category which may be meaningful to them. Jenness (1992: 66) argues that the adoption of a lesbian identity is dependent on a process she calls ‘detypification’. Women will assess themselves through their general understandings of what it means to be a lesbian. The take up of the position lesbian is in the first instance dependent upon the meanings women attach to the social category lesbian/gay. The working-class lesbians in this research ‘became’ lesbians in the places that they were born. The meaning of ‘lesbian’ was carved from interaction with people in their immediate environment – neighbours, gay family members, school teachers, sports teams, school friends, family friends, work colleagues and ‘the scene’ if they lived in, or near a city. For example, Justine and Michelle explain: Liz: Do you have any memory of how you knew what the word lesbian was? Justine: I didn’t know what it was really, I just heard people talking, like our (sister) knew more than me, she was like saying lezzies and all this, and I was thinking ‘well, what do lezzies do?’, sort of thing. Liz: But you associated it with the feelings that you had for? Justine: For the teacher and I just thought that was it (Justine, 32, white, security, w/c). Liz: Were they the first gay people you knew? Michelle: Yeah, yeah I remember this one time in particular they had this like do on the (sports) club and me mum come up to it as well and she was like, and I didn’t know at this time that they were gay...I got on really well with this

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particular group...and er at the end of the night we’re going home and me mum said ‘do you know they’re gay, them girls like?’…and from then I just thought, I dunno I just got on well with them, everything they did I enjoyed (Michelle, 27, white, warehouse worker, w/c).

For the working-class women, an acceptable meaning of lesbian must be produced from the people around them. So, Justine learns, albeit in a limited way, what a ‘lezzie’ is through her sister and Michelle from her mum labelling her friends. Lawler (2008) argues that despite the persuasiveness of individualism, kinship remains a crucial place in which identities are produced. She states (2002: 253) that ‘what people know of the world is not free-floating: it is a product of their specific social location’. Women are actively involved in ordering and interpreting their sexual identity but they are bodies in places, the meanings available to them in their proximate surroundings are dictated by social position, as well as meanings allowed to circulate in wider society. The working-class women’s movement through social space was curtailed by limited resources and opportunities. This circumscribed mobility restricted their experiences of what, in the first instance, ‘lesbian’ could be; they had fewer opportunities to make the category lesbian meaningful and acceptable to themselves. Conversely, the middle-class women had, through the opportunities of education, travel and employment, wider experiences from which they could first create acceptable meanings of lesbian: ...and the third year, I went, I started going to Lesbian Soc. and that was when I’d, when I’d gone to visit [friend] in the States...she introduced me to her friends, she was newly married, involved in (gay group name) and kind of, you know involved in the gay scene (Naomi, 32, Jewish, unemployed, m/c). ...so about three years after that I went to [abroad] and I went out with a woman properly and lived with her and stuff and then I, even after that I slept with men, then I came back to England after another three years, and I went out with this woman who was, you know very comfortable with her sexuality, and then, that sort of made me realise that it’s a bit more of a possibility and that one doesn’t have to pretend you know (Victoria, 38, white, university lecturer, m/c).

Naomi and Victoria’s coming out stories illustrate the ways in which living, studying and working in a variety of places enabled them to come into contact with a broad range of lesbian and gay people, cultures and alternative sexual and political discourses. Their middle-class privileges provided them with the opportunities to move through different social spaces during the identification process. As such, they interacted with diverse and contrasting meanings of the category lesbian, which they could assess, contemplate and perhaps apply to themselves. When discursive constructions of ‘lesbian’ are overwhelmingly negative, then it is the materiality of other lesbians, lesbian bodies in places, which become

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important in shaping our understandings of the kinds of ‘lesbians’ it is possible to be. Social relationships are essential to the creation of sexual identity because they are a source of information and evaluation about the possibilities of the sexual self (Griffiths 1995). This is because there are then opportunities to see that social categories refer to diverse, overlapping networks of constructions, allowing the individual to find acceptable meanings for the self. The middle-class and some of the working-class educated women’s mobility enabled them to experience a variety of multiple constructions of lesbian with which they may identify, and their accounts suggested this tended to reduce their overall confusion and anxiety while coming out. For example, Tracey describes her first impressions of the lesbians she met in her home town and the differences she felt when, after completing her training, she moved abroad to work: …all the lesbians, that I ever met really, were in clubs, they were not my type of women, so I thought that’s what being a lesbian was like, the stereotype that you saw, so I knew better when I got older, and I’d gone to different places and I met these like professional women…different types, not only because they were professional but because they were just like, they didn’t think they had to change their whole demeanour, you know and try and like, you know, copy some kind of man, to be lesbian, they were women who were just women, that happened to be gay, and that was much more normal for me (36, black, unemployed, w/c ed.).

For Tracey, the acquisition of sufficient cultural and economic capital enabled her ‘upward’ mobility to occupy a different social location from her background. She lived and worked abroad and interacted with a variety of lesbians and had access to alternative discourses of sexuality, which gave her a wider experience of the meanings which could be attached to the category lesbian. As a result, she created acceptable meanings of lesbian with which she was willing to positively identify. I am suggesting that while initial identification as ‘lesbian’ is psychologically demanding for all the women I interviewed, class advantages protected the middleclass women and some of the working-class educated women from the mental strain of coming out. Mugglestone’s (1999) research also found that the workingclass women in her study had less access to information about alternatives in life generally and this made lesbian identification more arduous. The coming out narratives of the working-class women indicated that they were more likely, because of limitations, to experience poor mental health during the coming out process than their middle-class counterparts. Class Subjectivities Bourdieu’s concept of habitus enables us to think about the ways in which social class is embodied and influences everyday practice (1984). Habitus is a way of describing the embodiment of social structures and history in individuals. It is a

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result of the internalization of external structures which Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 126) refers to as ‘a socialized subjectivity’. Habitus concerns a set of lasting dispositions, created and reformulated within the individual which reflects the social conditions in which people live, that is, their position in social space. This ‘social made body’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 127), in turn, mediates perception and actions. I want to explore in this section the possible influence of class subjectivities on the women’s psychological health during lesbian identification. The data confirm that class remains a deeply powerful part of subjectivity. This is exemplified by Angela and Catherine’s response to whether they felt they came from a specific social class: Well I think, I’ve come from a good family home erm, we’ve never wanted for anything, do you know what I mean? (Angela, 22, white, unemployed, w/c). I think me dad, has erm, drilled it into us that we are erm, from a good family, you know? (Catherine, 43, black, cleaner, w/c).

When interviewed, neither Angela or Catherine had a clear identification with being working-class, but they understood this is how they could be categorised. They did, however, as their extracts show, both feel the need to assert the moral integrity of their family backgrounds. This is partly as a resistance to being ‘classed’ as working-class which they know is seen as intrinsically inferior. The category working-class is produced and reproduced in terms of its position as ‘other’ to a middle-class ‘self’; it is marked as pathological to middle-class ‘normality’ (Finch 1993, Skeggs 1997, Steedman 1986, Walkerdine and Lucey 1989). Angela and Catherine were attempting to assert value for themselves and their families, while knowing that their class position is one which is judged as deficient. Kuhn (1995: 98) elaborates: Class is something beneath your clothes, under your skin, in your psyche, at the very core of your being. In the all-encompassing English class system, if you know that you are in the ‘wrong’ class, you know that therefore you are a valueless person.

Compare Angela and Catherine’s responses to Alison, who is middle-class: Liz: Do you think coming from your background has affected your life in general? Alison: …I think the positive things that I’ve gained from it is erm, selfconfidence…I think, I had the sort of upbringing which erm, had erm, how can I say it, well you do just get validated really and going to the school that I went to, told you, you are the top 2 per cent, you know, so, the whole kind of middleclass consciousness, the whole kind of thing is, you are growing up to be one of

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Alison speaks from a class position which is legitimated. The narratives of the middle-class lesbians suggested a classed self which is intrinsically valued. They have a habitus, with a ‘self assured relation to the world’ (Bourdieu 1984: 54), with a sense of entitlement, confidence and self-worth which comes from privilege, status and success. Bourdieu (1984) argues that the privilege of the dominant classes is that they posses social legitimation which is based on the power of the dominant to impose, by their very existence, a definition of what is valued and authorised which is nothing other than their own way of existing – they are at ease in the social world because they determine the legitimated way of existing in it – it is a self-affirming power. My interpretation of the coming out narratives suggest that class subjectivities had an influence on the women’s approaches to lesbian identity construction. Furthermore, they potentially affected the degree of psychological strain the women experienced during the process. The more ‘constructionist’ approaches of the middle-class women contrasted with the ‘essentialist’ approaches of the working-class women. Sarah, working-class, demonstrates the essentialist reasoning underlying her lesbian identity: Sarah: Well, he started making noises about getting engaged, and at that point I thought no, you know, I could have gone into that trap, you know where I got married, led a secret life so to speak, I couldn’t have done that. Liz: …can you explain why you felt you couldn’t go into it? Sarah: Well, I wasn’t, I wasn’t sexually turned on by him, and I just thought I could not go through life, like that, I wanted to be totally true to myself (Sarah, 42, white, shop worker w/c).

Sarah’s story is characteristic of the essentialist terms in which the working-class women articulated their coming out narratives. Sarah avoids marriage because she wants to be ‘totally true’ to herself. This essentialist narrative of a fixed latent sexual identity waiting to be discovered is common to published ‘coming out’ stories (Martin 1993, Ussher 1997). It reinterprets feelings and memories from the past as signs of a ‘true’ lesbian self waiting to be unveiled. The working-class women’s coming out stories tended to overlook any active participation in sexual identity formation and relied on ‘apparent transcendent “essences”’ (Martin 1993: 282) which they believed they had limited or no control over. Possibly, the working-class women produce a coming out narrative which appeals to the ‘truth’ of their sexual orientation as a strategy to generate a positive sense of self. Lawler (2008) argues that inauthenticity (not being oneself) and non-

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autonomous (not choosing) are both ‘disapproved’ forms of contemporary identity. Narratives of lesbian identity as a bodily truth (which were not the exclusive preserve of the working-class women) is a creative way with limited resources to resist being positioned as inauthentic and passive (i.e. not exerting choice). As Amanda (36, white, unemployed, w/c) says, ‘You can’t help, I don’t think, how you are’. The idea of a ‘natural’ identity provides an ontological security, certainty and coherency for the sexual self in a world which demonizes the category lesbian. In comparison, the middle-class women’s narratives rarely appealed to an essentialist reasoning and drew strongly on discourses of choice and autonomy. Patricia describes her account of ‘becoming’ a lesbian: It was strange enough the fact that um, life wasn’t very satisfying, marriage was quite nice, to have baby and all that but it really got a bit ‘is this all there is to life?’ and er, because I had been quite bright at school and had wanted to go onto university but hadn’t, been talked out of it, er, and then I started thinking about continuing my education, you know, so these things were all going on, it was all part of a, of a development towards being a different person and living a different life, and I suppose if I look back on it, that’s how I see it, I see it as a beginning of a journey (Patricia, 56, Jewish, own business, m/c).

Patricia pinpoints dissatisfaction with heterosexual life and education as the motivations in her sexual identity formation. Her coming out story is typical of the middle-class women who did not rely on an essentialist lesbian self-narrative. They tended to recognise their active participation in constructing themselves as lesbian. For them, sexual identity is not something to be discovered, a truth of the inner self, but part of a fashioning of their self over which they exerted some control and choice. It is the self-determining reflexivity which critics argue is the preserve of the well-resourced middle classes (Skeggs 2004, Heaphy 2007, Taylor 2009). Consider the following accounts of the middle-class women’s attitudes to their sexuality when they were first coming out: Told them I was gay?…not at all, not at all because I was so into this ‘I will not live by a label’ that I would never have said that, certainly erm, yeah, no it’s only something I’ve said more recently I think, I mean before I used to say things much more sort of roundabout way like ‘do you realise I am having a relationship with a woman?’ (Victoria, 38, white, university lecturer, m/c). Liz: How did that make you feel when that happened? Lucy: Great, wonderful, fantastic but erm, it wasn’t, it didn’t kind of make me think oh right now that’s that now I’ve got to come out, i.e. I’ve got to do anything, i.e. there’s a script and I’ve got to follow it (Lucy, 35, white, solicitor, m/c).

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Lucy and Victoria describe their resistance to being categorised, or labelled; they perceive themselves as individuals. In the words of Alison ‘I was an individual who happened to have had two relationships with women’. Cronin (2002) argues that discourses of choice are key to the Western notion of individuality – an individual is defined by the ability to choose. The middle-class self is produced through choice and self-management (Skeggs 2004). They do not have an ontological need to fit into the category lesbian (or any other category) because their security in the world is attained through their status, education and position – they come from the right class. The middle-class habitus is characterised by having choice and control over themselves and their lives; they have the resources and opportunities for self fashioning and self fulfilment. As Lawler (2008) suggests for a person to be a unique individual they must be in control of their own life. They are able to think about what they would like to be. The legitimation of the middle-class habitus means despite not holding the ‘ace’ of heterosexuality, middle-class selves are intrinsically valued and I would suggest this psychological ease in the world provides a possible protective factor to wellbeing during the coming out process. In contrast, the working-class habitus is characterised by necessity and limited choices. The working-class self is positioned as lacking and inferior. When first experiencing same sex desire, the working-class women asked ‘what am I?’ not ‘what do I want to be?’, there was a limited choice involved. In Angela’s (22, white, unemployed, w/c) terms, ‘well, are you that way or not?’. Sarah and Justine explain: Yeah, well I think I vaguely knew and at that point on, all I did was, all I seemed to be doing was looking up the word lesbian in dictionaries all the time (laughs)…cos erm, I don’t know, where I got that kind of like knowledge from, but, I think, you know I realised that’s very much, that is what I was (Sarah, 42, white, shop worker, w/c). Well I liked her and I wondered why, and one day I was on the bus, with me sister, going to town, and we saw these two girls, erm, linking, and our (sister) was going ‘look at them lezzies’, and then it clicked (Justine, 32, white, security, w/c).

Justine and Sarah’s extracts are looking for a way to answer the question ‘what am I’? Sarah relies on a dictionary to name her desire, Justine on her sister. The experience of same sex desire means, in contrast to the middle-class women, that the working-class women look for a category in which they can ‘fit’. Like the white working-class women in Skeggs’ (1997) research their ‘ontological security’ is created by finding a label; they generate a positive sense of self precisely by not being an individual. Compare the tension, fear and eagerness to ‘fit in’ of Stacey’s account of coming out to Naomi’s view of her sexual identity as part of a journey of self-discovery and self-fulfillment:

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It was frustrating like at first because I was shit scared when I first went out but er, I felt like there was loads of pressure, say like holding someone’s hand or something because it was all new to us at the time, so I was worried what others would think, we were all in the same boat really, everybody was the same, it was alright, everybody made you feel welcome, cos we were all on the same wave length weren’t we? (Stacey, 22, white, classroom assistant, w/c). I’ve had a good ten or twelve years of, basically not really wanting to categorise myself but if I was forced into it I would have to say bisexual...now I definitely identify as lesbian, I don’t think that means that I was kidding myself for twelve years, I think that was where I was at, erm, and the things that made me realise to change it…I mean I went through a stage of okay now that I’ve opened up this whole new world to myself and given myself even more choices...the difficulty of identifying as bisexual or you know being bisexual is kind of, you kind of feel whoever I’m with, I’m missing out, do you know what I mean (Naomi, 32, Jewish, unemployed, m/c).

Stacey’s fear of judgement, of getting ‘it’ wrong and her need for acceptance and reassurance is in stark contrast to Naomi’s narrative which is driven by a self-determining journey of self-fulfilment characterised by choice and control. Nearly all the women described a degree of anxiety during the coming out process, but I am suggesting that the working-class self, which is inherently inscribed as inferior, not only shapes the women’s approaches to their lesbian identity, but is likely to cause more psychological distress during the coming out process. The psychological ease which characterised the middle-class women’s self, as a result of the embodiment of their legitimated class position, tended to protect their mental health while they were coming out. Concluding Comments A body of research, mainly from the US, demonstrates that constructing a positive lesbian identity is important to psychological health because it bolsters self-esteem and self-worth (see McDermott 2003). This is particularly crucial to women who are denied and censured within the hegemonic relations of heterosexuality. Despite the increased liberalization and acceptance of sexual ‘difference’ within the UK, making the sexual self as the ‘other’ still requires some ‘psychological’ work. Most of the women I interviewed, in the main, described taking up the position lesbian as initially a distressing experience. I have attempted to highlight, through a small number of interviews, that sexual identification is not a universal experience. Social class positioning has a significant impact on the ways in which the sexual other is produced and negotiated. As Taylor’s (2007) work has also shown recently, lesbians’ class matters. The argument I present here is that social class mediates the effects of the coming

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out process on wellbeing. I have argued that the advantages of the middle-class women – through access to knowledge, capitals, movement in social spaces and a class habitus of ease and entitlement – acted to protect mental health during lesbian identification. The working-class women, with access to fewer legitimated capitals, restricted mobility and a habitus predicated upon apprehension and necessity, were less able to protect themselves and more likely to suffer psychologically while coming out. This is a small-scale study, which cannot claim too much but at the very least, my argument suggests that researching and theorising about sexuality should include social class as a site of power which differentiates lesbian and gay lives. It must also point to the need for further explorations of sexual identification which allow for the idea that unequal access to resources and discourses make a difference to how the self can be made and articulated. As Skeggs (2004: 173) states ‘Let’s stop theorizing the conditions of possibility of the middle-classes, and think instead of those who cannot make the same investments, who are not flexible or mobile’. Bibliography Adkins, L. 2002. Revisions: Gender & Sexuality in Late Modernity. Buckingham: Open University Press. Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a Modern Modernity. London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. 1987. What Makes Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, XXXII, 1–17. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L.J.D. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cronin, A. 2000. Consumerism and ‘Compulsory Individuality’: Women, Will and Potential, in Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, edited by S. Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil and B. Skeggs. London: Routledge. Ettorre, E. 1980. Lesbians, Women, and Society. London: Routledge. Finch, L. 1993. The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, Class and Surveillance. London: Allen & Unwin. Fraser, M. 1999. Classing Queer. Theory, Culture and Society, 16 (2), 107–31. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Griffiths, M. 1995. Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity. London: Routledge. Heaphy, B. 2007. Late Modernity and Social Change: Reconstructing Social and Personal Life. London: Routledge.

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Heaphy, B. 2008. The Sociology of Lesbian and Gay Reflexivity or Reflexive Sociology? Sociological Research Online, 13 (1). Jackson, S. 1999. Heterosexuality in Question. London: Sage. Jamieson, L. 1998. Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jenness, V. 1992. Coming Out: Lesbian Identities and the Categorization Problem, in Modern Homosexualities: Fragments of Lesbian and Gay Experience, edited by K. Plummer. London: Routledge, 64–74. Johnston, L. and Valentine, G. 1995. Wherever I Lay my Girlfriend, That’s My Home, in Mapping Desire, edited by D. Bell and G. Valentine. Routledge: London, 99–113. King, M., Semlyen, J., See Tai, S., Killaspy, H., Osborn, D. and Nazareth, I. 2008. Mental Disorders, Suicide, and Deliberate Self Harm in Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People: A Systematic Review. London: National Institute for Mental Health England. Kuhn, A. 1995. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso. Lawler, S. 2000. Mothering the Self. London: Routledge. Lawler, S. 2002. Narrative in Social Research, in Qualitative Research in Action, edited by T. May. London: Sage, 242–58. Lawler, S. 2008. Identity: Sociological Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press. Martin, B. 1993. Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference(s), in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by M. Abelove and D. Halperin. London: Routledge, 274–93. Massey, D. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. McDermott, E. 2003. Hidden Injuries, Happy Lives?: The Influence of Lesbian Identity and Social Class on Wellbeing. PhD Thesis, Lancaster: Lancaster University. McDermott, E. 2004. Telling Lesbian Stories: Interviewing and the Class Dynamics of ‘Talk’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 27 (3), 177–87. McDermott, E. 2006. Surviving in Dangerous Places: Lesbian Identity Performances in the Workplace, Social Class and Psychological Health. Feminism and Psychology, 16 (2), 193–211. McDermott, E. and Graham, H. 2005. Resilient Young Mothering: Social Inequalities, Late Modernity and the ‘Problem’ of ‘Teenage’ Motherhood. Journal of Youth Studies, 8 (1), 59–79. McIntosh, M. 1968. The Homosexual Role. Social Problems, 16 (2), 182–92. Moran, L.J. 2000. Homophobic Violence: The Hidden Injuries of Class, in Cultural Studies and the Working Class, edited by S. Munt. London: Cassell, 206–18. Mugglestone, J. 1999. Report of the Bolton and Wigan Lesbian Health Needs Assessment. Bolton: Bolton Specialist Health Promotion Service. Parks, A. 2005. British Social Attitudes: The 22nd Report. London: Sage.

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Plummer, K. 1998. Afterward: The Past, Present and Futures of the Sociology of Same Sex Relations, in Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Reader, edited by P. Nardi and B. Scheider. London: Routledge, 605–14. Reay, D. 1997. Feminist Theory, Habitus, and Social Class: Disrupting Notions of Classlessness. Women’s Studies International Forum, 20 (2), 225–33. Reay, D. 2000. Children’s Urban Landscapes: Configurations of Class and Place, in Cultural Studies and the Working Class, edited by S. Munt. London: Cassell, 151–64. Rogers, A. and Pilgrim, D. 2003. Mental Health and Inequality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, N. 1989. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 2000. The Appearance of Class: Challenges in Gay Space, in Cultural Studies and the Working Class, edited by S. Munt. London: Cassell, 129–50. Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge. Steedman, C. 1986. Landscape of a Good Woman. London: Virago. Taylor, Y. 2007. Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Y. 2009. Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capitals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ussher, J.M. 1997. Framing the Sexual ‘Other’: The Regulation of Lesbian and Gay Sexuality, in Body Talk: The Material and Discursive Regulation of Sexuality, Madness and Reproduction, edited by U.J.M. London: Routledge, 131–58. Valentine, G. 1993. ‘Negotiating and Managing Multiple Sexual Identities: Lesbian Time-Space Strategies’, Institute of British Geographers, 18, 237–48. Walkerdine, V. and Lucey, H. 1989. Democracy in the Kitchen: Regulating Mothers and Socialising Daughters. London: Virago. Weeks, J. 2007. The World We Have Won. London: Routledge. Weston, K. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays and Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chapter 11

Class and Sexual Intimacy: An Everyday Life Perspective Dana Wilson-Kovacs

Introduction Focusing on the de-traditionalisation of the private sphere and the changing nature of intimate relationships, recent sociological writing tends to portray sexuality as free from constraining reproductive concerns, centred increasingly on self, sexual pleasure and life-style choices (Giddens 1992) and open to democratic, if chaotic, negotiations between parties (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). While these views have been criticized for their neglect of structural differences, and economic and social inequalities between men and women (Dunscombe and Marsden 1993, Jamieson 1999), issues of consumption and class have been largely absent from the literature on heterosexual relationships (Johnson and Lawler 2005). Existing studies have advanced our understanding of the difficulties inherent in negotiating sexual experiences (Allen 2003, Braun et al. 2003) and the ways in which discrepancies in the pursuit of pleasure are reproduced (Beck-Gernsheim 2002, Evans 2003). Yet, they obscure the sexual as preference alone, and tell us little about how erotic encounters are navigated in everyday life and made sense of by their protagonists. While writings on lesbian and gay lifestyles, and the politics of the private sphere, has examined in greater detail the processes of sexual self-creation intrinsic to the trajectory of the self in modernity (Richardson 2000, Plummer 1995, Weeks 1998), sociological analyses of heterosexual encounters have systematically ignored the place, role and significance of material and symbolic resources in the articulation of sexual identities. Women have traditionally been identified both as prime consumers who actively maintain and invest in their class identity and as producers and re-producers of social and cultural values (Nava 1997). Although recent feminist work theorises investments in heterosexual femininity through class dis-identifications (i.e. the desire not to be read as distasteful, failing or simply wrong) (Skeggs 1997), discussions of heterosexual lifestyles remain few and far between (Storr 2002, Wilson-Kovacs 2007). The present chapter addresses this gap through a focus on the material resources employed by a group of women in their construction of erotic selves. The analysis draws on ethnographic work involving semi-structured interviews with a self-selected sample of 34 British women between 18 and 67 years of age, who reflect on their personal experiences in the organisation of

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intimate practices. My argument explores sexual intimacy as a cultivated choice expressed through lifestyle preferences, identifies the interconnections between class, sexuality and gender, and highlights the contextual (re)creation of class and inequality in relation to the practices of consumption that accompany the maintenance of intimate events. In doing so, it relies on an understanding of class as embedded in everyday life, reproduced within specific economic parameters, through social practices and with the help of distinct cultural resources (Bourdieu 1984): an on-going process of negotiating individual positions and maintaining distinctions between social groups. This line of inquiry will inform discussions on class and heterosexuality (Storr 2003, Skeggs 1997) by highlighting the delineation of class boundaries at a micro-level of interaction and illustrating the reproduction of moral and social hierarchies through erotic agency and the mobilization of distinct cultural resources. It further contributes to debates on the commercialization of sexual desire (Arthurs 2003, Attwood 2006) and the sexualization of culture (Evans 2003, Holmberg 1998, McNair 1996) through an illustration of the ways in which specific strategies of action are circumscribed by aesthetic dispositions in the creation of heterosexual lifestyles. The chapter introduces the themes in the literature on class and heterosexuality, before presenting the data on which the present analysis is based. The argument traces perceptions of class and morality, outlines the re-enforcement and reenactment of such understandings in an intimate context and examines the ways in which the (trans)formation of class is both embodied and spatially located in everyday constructions of passion, desire and attraction. In exploring the classing and worth of differing ‘femininities’ it aims to capture the (re)making of class and sexual identities through cultural representations, with particular reference to the material devices used to configure sexually intimate episodes. The conclusion reflects on how this particular instance of the mediation of desire can contribute to the wider debates on formations of class, identity and heterosexuality. Class, Gender and Sexuality in the Staging of Intimate Events Analyses of classed and gendered heterosexual identities are somewhat absent from mainstream sociology, which traditionally conceptualised social class in connection to socio-economic indicators, and lately has favoured instead examinations of fluid, unconstrained identities which undergo an extensive process of self-fashioning through consumption in late modernity (Beck 2000, Bauman 1990, Giddens 1992). Consequently, not only do the social-structural dimensions of class inequality become understood as embedded entirely in the subjectivities of social actors (Johnson 2005) but that ‘building the self’ presumes unquestionably a particularly resourced, middle-class subject (Skeggs 2004, McDermott, this volume). In pointing out the endurance and visibility of class, sexuality and gender in contemporary society feminist commentators have scrutinised the processes

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through which class and gendered identities are produced (Skeggs 1997, Taylor 2007). Such processes frequently reference the pathological gendered othering of the working classes in discourses and representations (Adkins and Skeggs 2004, Skeggs 1997, Gidley and Rooke, this volume) and result in the widening of class divisions between women (McRobbie 2004, Lawler 2005). In this sense, middle-class gendered identities are constituted in relation to the lack of cultural competency, aesthetic and reflexive capital of the working classes. Evidence suggests that working-class women are represented as ‘over-sexual and overfertile…embracing archaic and overly rigid gender relations’ (Lawler 2005: 437) and as potentially disrupting middle-class respectability (Skeggs 2004). Workingclass femininities, heterosexual or otherwise, are seen to distance and dis-identify themselves from their working-class roots and align themselves to ‘emerging classed elements of the respectful, consuming citizens, who can be “just like you”, if not heterosexual then definitely middle-class’ (Taylor 2005: 485). As such sexual identities are seen as mutually constructed through, with and against class (Johnson and Lawler 2005, Taylor 2007). In turn, the literature on class and material culture (Halnon 2002, Clarke 2001) examines the ways in which identities are articulated through consumption but pays little attention to the construction of sexual selves in the private realm. Authors see consumption not simply as a means of constructing conventional social statuses and simple lifestyle choices but as an ideological act through which dominant members of society reproduce inequality. For instance, in her discussion on the appropriation of poverty symbols in fashion, Halnon (2002) examines how the consumption of ‘Poor Chic’ functions as a distortion of the reality of poverty, where consumption is still firmly related to social status and social hierarchy. Nonetheless, examinations of the ways in which erotic merchandise is made sense of by its consumers are rare. Storr’s (2003) research on Ann Summers parties, their organisers, clientele and merchandise is a notable attempt to open this micro-universe of practices to sociological scrutiny. Storr uses the concept of female homosociality to document contexts of purchase and capture the complex connection between the artefacts, symbolic meanings and the collective, normative erotic conduct code of the Party Plan. The type of female homosociality proposed by Storr neither challenges nor resists patriarchal order; more mundanely, it provides an illustration of everyday negotiations of heterosexual practice. The social space created at Ann Summers gatherings endorses the established order in a way that reiterates the right to sexual pleasure for everyone involved.

 Ann Summers parties are organised events that promote erotic merchandise. They are usually held by an organiser who is an Ann Summers employer, in the home of one potential client who invites friends around. Typically, during an evening a range of products will be presented and the audience will be encouraged to familiarise themselves with the products before purchasing them.

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Through their social setting, games and paraphernalia, Ann Summers parties provide an extraordinary facet of everyday sexuality, and Storr advances a model of heterosexual gender identification with class specific connotations. However, although her documentation of conventional constructions of femininity enlightens their collective production, it tells us little about how sexuality is organised at an individual level; what happens after the purchase, how and with what effect is merchandise integrated into erotic episodes? As I discuss below, an examination of this post-purchase stage is essential to understanding the class tensions present in the embodiment of sexual practice. Although authors have focused on how working-class women use the concept of reputation to self-regulate and maintain a respectable status (Kitzinger 1995, Skeggs 1997, Stewart 1999) little attention has been given to the process by which women make sense of respectability and reproduce it in the bedroom in classed practices and interactions. Yet, we need to present a comprehensive view of both class and sexuality, where class and sexuality include not only traditionally pathologised groups and behaviours, but also those that are largely overlooked by researchers, such as self-defined middle-class, middle aged women talking about routine intimate interactions. This is necessary in order to advance a grounded and more comprehensive understanding of the tensions and dynamics of class as a lived social category, reproduced, maintained and/or resisted in everyday practices. Class identities are to be found in accounts and practices (Savage 2000) as well as in the ways in which ‘individuals think and feel about those practices’ (Reay 2005: 912). Here I document how alongside the intimate ‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ (Featherstone 1992) and the mobilization of material culture, ideas of respectability and sexual assertiveness are negotiated, and how perceptions of an all-invasive working-class amorality are made sense of in interaction. Methods This chapter is based on research examining the role of material culture in embodied erotic practice, aiming to address the gap in the sociological literature on women, material culture and intimacy. Its findings, along with a discussion of the methodology and research questions, are reported more substantially elsewhere (Wilson-Kovacs 2007). A comprehensive analysis of class needs to consider the multiple gender, sexual and ethnic intersections (McRobbie 2004). The purpose of the present analysis is to explore how such intersections may become visible in the construction of sexual intimacy and alert us to the somewhat taken-for-granted manner in which middle-class sexual identities have been so far conceptualised. An indication of the complexity of capturing class in interaction is illustrated by the ways in which participants position themselves in relation to this category. The study employed qualitative interviewing with 34 self-selected British women between 18 and 67 years of age. The extracts presented here are part of their biographical stories of sexual closeness collected over a period of 18 months.

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Participants were shop assistants, shop owners, students, teachers, librarians, academics, and one landscape gardener. More than half of those interviewed came from the ‘caring’ professions, that is medical and social services, and most of those identified a link between their occupation and the research project, still situating this nonetheless as ‘personal’ rather than ‘professional’. ‘Care’ work has been shown to demarcate clearly class and gender boundaries (Skeggs 1997), and its symbolic currency was also present in some of the ways in which the participants introduced themselves. The women described themselves as middle-class although, based on the information volunteered by some of the participants, there appeared to be sharp income differences generated by educational background, actual occupation, and whether or not they were working full or part-time. These visible slippages in my participants’ views of themselves as classed are not uncommon: Skeggs (1997) discusses (gendered) dis-identifications as a move away from a ‘valueless’ position and self, understanding women’s investment in heterosexual femininity, via appearance, as an enactment of such dis-identifications and a desire to conceal what is perceived as disreputable class origins. Likewise, my interviewees sought to separate themselves carefully from a working-class background. As I discuss below, a significant distancing strategy takes place in relation to the organisation of sexual intimacy, where the persona of the ‘tart’ is used by some to separate themselves from disreputable associations, while also skilfully employed by others as an occasional alternative to a ‘safe’ yet somehow humdrum sexual persona. Regardless of these (dis)associations which illustrate the complexity of making sense of the interplay of gender, class and sexuality in everyday intimate encounters (see Johnson and Lawler 2005), my participants identified class in terms of a set of naturalised personal properties: their conceptualisations of class did regard it as a system of inequality but one through which the ‘personal characteristics’ of knowledge and taste are seen as expressions of moral worth (Skeggs 2004). Fieldwork was based on ‘working the hyphen’ (Fine 1994) – that is situating oneself in relation to one’s participants and examining the multiplicity of positions and relationships to each other. In practical terms this meant not only an awareness of how my own position, subjectivity and input into the research situation would affect its outcome, but also reflexivity over the research settings. As such I followed ‘feeling’ rules during the interview sessions by trying to be consistent with the emotional unloading of the participants, and by bringing into discussion, when required and available, similar personal experiences (Gorden 1987, Hochschild 1983). I was also aware of other constraints, such as the partner’s influence in women’s decision to participate in the research. Although no partners were present during the production of data, their position as gatekeepers and regulators was apparent in the ways in which women envisaged their partners’ reactions to their critique of intimate paraphernalia. Issues of passivity, resistance and accommodation became apparent in the participants’ changes of registers, more visible for instance, when drawing comparisons between different partners. As their roles as mothers, daughters, lovers, partners, breadwinners and homemakers became contextualised, overlapping

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identities and shifts in power or powerlessness became visible. Most participants addressed these concerns by talking about their lives in everyday, immediate contexts. While their accounts did not offer a critique of either the structures of inequality or practices of domination it became apparent that it is at this level of micro-interaction that class is made and emerges as a ‘structuring force’ in the enactment of both personal relationships and intimate encounters (Johnson and Lawler 2005, Yodanis 2005). The production of data gave interviewees the liberty to (re)fashion themselves in view of both their sexual past and the moment of the interview (McDermott 2003). The transcripts were given back to the participants to allow for revision, to explore the aesthetics of performance in their own words and to emphasise issues they considered significant to erotic stagings. Inevitably in this process several aspects of intimate engagement have been overlooked or deliberately ignored: the accounts speak less of the corporeal, unruly body, of worries and failed pursuits and more of what ‘works’ for each participant and what the women themselves felt more comfortable revealing. This lack is not surprising as commentators highlight the ‘missing’ body in academic discourse (Jackson and Scott 2001) and in women’s stories on sexual practice (Holland et al. 1998) and dress (Tseëlon 1995). In light of writing on (re)fashioning and the carefully drawn boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable appearances (Skeggs 1997, McRobbie 2004), I examine below the ways in which social class is an ongoing process of distinction and re-inscriptions of the erotic body. The Construction of Intimate Personas and Practices With a couple of exceptions, attributed by participants themselves to ‘old age’ and ‘widowhood’, the organisation of sexual encounters displayed similarities in the need to mobilise material resources in the creation of erotic personas and the performative manner in which such resources are deployed. Differences appear in the range of materials used and the ways in which women negotiate, engage in or resist the creation and consumption of stereotypical erotic personas. Visions of intimacy are actualised via distinct cultural repertoires which are deployed to sustain the erotic-self aesthetically. The first step in this creation is a movement from sex as a predictable and monotonous act towards one of intimacy as a prepared, rehearsed and anticipated event: Ok, so we have the humdrum of early morning sex, late night duty or the quickie, but equally, there are special occasions, when I put some time aside to prepare, choose something nice or something I have not worn a while, buy something new, put some thought into it (Laura, 43).

In according an intimate episode the epithet ‘special’, other participants further acknowledge the ‘thought put into it’ and allude to the aesthetic effort invested in

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each occasion. Creating intimacy is framed by time constraints and one’s readiness to embark on this transformation, whose purpose goes beyond sensual pleasure: [All the preparation] is exciting and puts another layer on the sex, for me it’s a way of connecting you know, recognizing one another, what we like and appreciate, it’s like another layer, we’re not simply just having it off, there’s more to it than that and it’s nothing to do with sex, if you see what I mean, but more with who you are (Kate, 40).

Developing the ‘right kind of self’ (Skeggs 2004) for sexual encounters evidences the self-reflexive work typically undertaken by participants, arguably a suggestive marker of middle-class subjectivity (Lawler 2005). This process, which captures the largely unacknowledged expressive work accompanying the ritual organization of sexual closeness (Wilson-Kovacs 2007), is seen as an indication of one’s commitment to a relationship and a partner, as well as a mirror to one’s identity. It is symptomatic of a gendered, emotional and verbal middle-class habitus through which women sustain and reproduce dominant configurations of intimacy (Ilouz 1997, Reay 2005). Alongside such affective elements, all intimate histories share a procedural order that involves the mobilisation of various resources: What do I do when I have sex on my mind? Depends on what mood I’m in… Start tarting myself up, as my friends joke about it, put some make up on and my nails. I love my falsies, they make such a difference after a week’s work outdoors, umm…choose some nice underwear, shoes and a dress…Having said this, I do not always have time for it…then everything goes, uh, just a bath and a skimpy dress would do (Beth, 37).

Specific strategies of cultural mobilization are revealed when participants discuss presentation and appearance and comment on the use of material resources in intimate encounters. Although such resources (e.g. lingerie, make-up, shoes) vary according to the financial affluence and cultural capital of my participants (i.e. cultural knowledge conferring both power and status), they are uniformly valued for their role in marking the transition to an intimate state, and for displaying and maintaining the body as desirable. Some are more powerful than others: items of lingerie for instance are recognised as essential aids that are classified by colour, age and often by the type of experience had when first used: ‘If things go well, I always think of it as a good luck charm, and then use it when I feel low’ (Ashley, 26). While not everyone has always the time to stage intimacy, what matters to most participants are the occasions when ‘one made an effort’. Highlighting a purchase is important but not essential as ensembles can and should be created without new items. Not only are some items recognised as more effective than others in fuelling erotic fantasies, but taste is identified as the skill with which various props are combined for the appropriateness of each occasion. Aesthetic deliberations are at work not only in choosing appropriate articles of lingerie but

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also in integrating them in intimate scenarios. Keeping unwritten logs of occasions and items is typical for the ways that respondents use lingerie and distinguish between ‘routine’ undertakings and ‘special’ episodes. Here the context indicates the suitability of items – a first date preparation is usually different from an attempt to re-ignite dormant passions: I find different things suitable at different times – it’s always nice to buy something new to mark an occasion, even more so when I was dating – never wanted to give the wrong impression, even more so when we got to that stage. It’s so important to set the right tone (Morwenna, 51).

Such embodied investments are situated at the intersection of class, gender and sexuality: giving ‘the wrong impression’ and setting ‘the right tone’ are indicative of processes of distinction at work (McRobbie 2004). This is further evidenced by the ways in which the selection of intimate resources connects to a deliberate aesthetics of everyday erotic practice: ‘We all make lingerie mistakes, but you learn to match, to go for quality’ (Morwenna, 51). A ‘less is more’ practical philosophy – in the sense of ‘fewer items’ of ‘better quality’ and ‘thoughtfully chosen’ is what most participants recognised as desirable intimate aesthetics. Elsewhere, I discuss the strategies participants deploy to ‘suggest’ what tasteful erotic merchandise is to less attuned partners, showing how the negotiation of distasteful gifts occurs, and the ways that such items may change their status to prized possessions (Wilson-Kovacs 2007). Here I focus on what women buy themselves and how they reflect on their own and other women’s purchases and stagings. Not only do interviewees learn to identify what is unsuitable for them but they also have strong views on certain merchandise: I hate cheap lingerie and all this business of buying black or red gear at every Christmas and Valentine, whether it is suited or not – I’m sick and tired of it (Beatrice, 29). It’s tasteless, usually the wrong size and looks awful – whenever it was given to me, I’d seriously considered splitting up, because obviously they didn’t get me (Trish, 49). It’s what people with no taste buy, just because they can afford it – a bit like the peak of culinary sophistication would be a pre-packed meal (Jemima, 27). I would never buy it – it’s too common, too seaside postcard for me (Sara, 49).

This sentiment extended to others in the sample who in their description of some brands as ‘decidedly working-class’, ‘cheap’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘too accessible’, sought to distance themselves from these products. The extracts above illustrate how

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desirable intimate aesthetics are grounded in a broader, dynamic understanding of class where hierarchies are established according to a practical demonstration of taste. As Yourdis argues: Tastes and behaviors do not merely emerge from structural positions; instead, individuals ascribe different tastes, values, and behaviours to socioeconomic positions and then act according to these tastes, values, and behaviors during interaction to group themselves with people who are similar and to distance themselves from those who are different. Class categories are created and continually reinforced during these ongoing interactions (2007: 344).

According to several participants’ accounts taste involves a certain type of scholarship, alluded to by Jemima as the one lacking from a pre-packed meal. Taste is seen here as the ability to exercise judgment in, select and combine, intimate merchandise. Alongside a desire to improve self-appearance and performance, and the financial ability to do so, it represents the key element in distinguishing acceptable against non-acceptable performances in the creation and transformation of erotic selves. Interestingly however, while such distinctions are reinforced in many of the accounts a parallel counter-discourse emerges in relation to the place and role of intimate displays that lack taste. Alternating ‘quality’ items with ‘cheap’, ‘notaste’, ‘seaside postcard’ buys is seen as creating a mosaic of moods (romantic, exotic, lustful) and personas (ingénue, goddess, slut). There is a distinct toying with sexual stereotypes in an attempt to depart from tired displays of desirability: I like this ‘cheap and cheerful’ look, it’s like license to kill really, I don’t know, to me wearing something like Ann Summers means I’m up to no good, which is a good thing I suppose (laughs) (Moira, 44).

Yet, as lingerie is seen here as a powerful tool, and certain brands, colours, shapes and materials are associated with types of unrestrained sexual behaviour, they require careful navigation in order to maintain one’s reputation: Generally, I would wear something probably not too tight, as I put on quite a bit of weight, something quite low over my breasts but not tarty…umm, I think because I’m not comfortable with being tarty, because I can’t handle what happens, what’s the word, I am too repressed really to deal with tarty…but I like the idea, I wish I could do it (Ellie, 38). Yeah, sometimes I like being playful – wearing something different, something that would show a fair amount of flesh I suppose, something that made me feel sparkly and vivacious, something glittery, I wear a lot of black, I’m thinking because of my work I wear a lot of trousers and Wellington boots, so I’m thinking something different, in contrast, something that is quite glamorous, as

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The interviewees switch expertly between different cultural repertoires – defined here as arrays of skills and capacities held by individuals and communities alike, which offer people a range of meanings to draw indiscriminately upon in their actions (Swidler 2001). This idea follows closely Goffman’s (1959) argument on the shifting of cultural frames where individuals mobilise different resources in their understanding of situations. Yet these shifting frames are differently materialised and embodied in participants’ accounts. Alongside codes, discourses and ideologies, in the field of intimacy, materials too are deployed to support interactions and facilitate the shift between various statuses, states and contexts. In this process middle-class sexual identities are configured both with and against working-class stereotypes and sustained in relation to powerful signifiers. While the presented self is not necessarily an improved self, but a vacant, visible, flexible image (Goffman 1959), it is nevertheless one displaying the internalisation of norms, reflexivity and aesthetic agency. The practice itself, rather than the final result, is sought to bring an additional dimension to subjecthood. In the long-term, the interplay of selves acquires skill, and a sense of what is expected and acceptable develops in parallel to an aesthetic register through which resources are used to suggest, according to occasion, simplicity, ingenuousness, sexual sophistication and/or expertise. All these qualities are expressed through body display and ornamentation. While such procedures may reference the role of sexual partners in the presentation of the body as sexually intimate, they also emphasise a mobilization of the affective and the tasteful that is directed towards the self in everyday interaction. In this sense, consumer practices reflect the aestheticisation of everyday erotic episodes, and materials and knowledge are appropriated, contextualised and filtered through one’s understandings and previous experiences. In this endeavour class, sexuality and gender intersect: the use of intimate resources reflects and re-circulates class inequalities where ‘processes of class differentiation are projected onto and inseparable from the female body’ (McRobbie 2004: 102). The extracts above repeatedly show what Tseëlon identified in her study on dress behaviour as ‘an almost paradoxical mixture of a desire for display and a fear of display, both indicating internalisations of cultural expectations’ (1997: 29). ‘Doing tart’ where ‘I feel I can leave out any inhibitions’, ‘be a bit wild’ and ‘not accountable’, suggest disguises that some of those interviewed deliberately chose and use, as part of erotic sexual repertoires. As Rachael claims above, it is a safe way of stepping out of the ‘dull’ and ‘ordinary’ middle-class routine

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and of escaping everyday constraints, arguably while preserving some of its other markers, such the privilege to choose when to slip in/out of ‘doing tart’. Flexible patterns of intimate consumption point further to competent deployment where contexts and partners can be catered for in different ways by the same participant, an aspect that moves the emphasis from the act of consumption to the ability to engage with culture selectively and reflexively. As one interviewee put it, the ‘I can do slut’ ability indicates a confident consumer self whose appropriation of specific registers seeks to transgress class divides. We can also read this resourced performance as middle-class in that participants are not ‘fixed’ by it (Skeggs 1997), and can easily slip in/out of this impersonation. Furthermore, ‘doing tart’ is linked to a view of sex as ‘tremendous fun’ that participants navigate with extreme caution. On the one hand such a view is titillating and inviting, and offers the opportunity to explore things sexually that are otherwise seen by some of the participants as beyond the boundaries of middle-class respectability. On the other hand this view is strongly associated with working-class ideas of sexuality and sexual license, and an all-invading low class amorality from which these self-identified middle-class participants want to distance themselves (Gurney 1997, Skeggs 1997). The ability to maintain the balance between the two, which some of the participants relish, is contemplated with reserve by others. ‘Doing Tart’ Versus ‘Being a Tart’ My story about class is one often told in absence, although sometimes in their accounts the women I interviewed, describe class in terms of what is ‘sophisticated’ as well as ‘respectable’ in the field of intimate consumption (as opposed to what is not seen as such). The absent character is the ‘tart’– cheap in her appearance and strident in her choices of apparel, promiscuous in her actions and excessive in her sexual advances. A ‘tart’ lacks the ability to instruct herself in (and unwilling to follow) the finer points of social etiquette. She is predatory and ignores the unwritten intimate ethic by which attached men are unavailable. Equally, she has little ability to reflect on personal intimate practice and its wider consequences, to respect and protect the everyday reproduction of middle-class respectability. She is a classed ‘sexual other’, whose representations need to be rendered with ironic distance and counterbalanced with a demonstrable understanding of respectability and affluent consumption, employed by participants in signaling their middle-class status. Yet, accounts also suggest that the tart is the perfect mistress, as she has little purpose other than to please in a basic sense, but makes a disastrous, unreliable, capricious wife. She is often seen as neither professional nor educated, and her behaviour is attributed to uneducated choices and poor guidance. One does not want to be taken as a tart unless, in an attempt to show her flair, one is pretending to be a tart. For it is the tart that is often taken to have the most fun, who looses her inhibitions others cannot surpass and unleashes desires and passion. The ability

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to ‘do tart’, to reflect upon one’s doing and repeat, refine and adjust performances is a sign of erotic virtuosity, a combination of confident practice and exquisite connoisseurship. ‘Doing tart’ is not simply aping manners and attire but a shrewd assessment of an otherwise all too-distanced persona, an artificial display designed for heightened sensual pleasure, a variation from a set routine. In this process representations are performatively mobilised to re-circulate class, gender, sexual inequalities through particular performances and the mobilization of specific material resources. Such performances aim to negotiate the ways in which working-class women become constituted ‘as physically repulsive and therefore lacking any moral worth or intellectual ability’ (Johnson and Lawler 2005: 5.7). They are seen as middle-class in that they assume the ability to move between sites and personas without carrying the disrepute of the tart. ‘Doing tart’ embraces stereotypes only to resist them – the subjects’ ability to move between different sites, registers and resources, to immerse themselves into the role as well as depart from it after the performance, renders one’s erotic skill and establishes distance from those who might be trapped in this character and unable to escape it. If aesthetic disposition is a class-privileged temperament, established as a result of middle-class origins and/or high levels of education and dependent on the considerable cultural capital of its creative workers through which everyday life is reproduced and transformed, ‘doing tart’ is an illustration of how such a disposition is reflected in quotidian intimate routines, an example of a ‘stylisation of life’ (Bourdieu 1984). This performance is best understood as an attempt to create a different erotic self whose social efficacy is overcome by a temporal suspension of responsibility, and by its power to please. The tart is unable to command respectability; she is a dangerous and potentially fatal creature that carries the stigma of social, moral and aesthetic inferiority. In portraying such a character, women acknowledge their awareness of its presence and power, come to terms with it, and push safely at the boundaries to experiment with sexual wantonness. Their actions illustrate judgment, calculation and careful preparation. Their testimonies present skilful actors and reveal erotic agency at work – selecting resources, incorporating scenarios, and fine-tuning individual performances. They also provide an illustration of how social distinctions and moral hierarchies are negotiated in the bedroom. The tart is not simply ‘the exotic’, another character in a long list of French maids, Amazonian warriors, Catholic nuns and librarian impersonations (to name but a few). In this sense it becomes a signifier of class, where class itself becomes an outcome of performance and a product of interaction involving efforts to situate one’s own class higher than that of others in any resulting system of inequality (Yodanis 2006). As such, ‘doing tart’ is not simply an illustration of a widening range of erotic skill or post-modern intimate ironies, but also an example of how class differences are reproduced and maintained in the bedroom. As Johnson and Lawler observe intimate relationships ‘do not simply take place “within” class but that they, to some extent, rely upon the differences which social class makes available’ (2005:1.5). The findings reinforce Hennessy’s (2000) argument that class dynamics

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are always present, in an explicit or latent form in the antagonisms and conflicts of daily experience, in this case in the tension between being sexually desirable and knowledgeable and the imperative of respectability. While my participants’ distance from the danger of being termed a ‘tart’ is unanimously acknowledged, ‘doing a tart’ is perceived, selectively as an aesthetic ability, as long as slipping out is as easily accomplished as slipping into it. Power and authority are confined to this act in relation to an imagined working-class sexuality and the sexuality of other (working-class women) who cannot escape such a positioning. In this sense not only do working-class women position themselves and are positioned by dominant conceptions of femininity (Skeggs 1997) but such dominant conceptions are continuously reworked, re-produced and maintained in everyday actions, in both public and private sites (Lawler 2005). This stance reflects Bourdieu’s insistence that ‘there are as many ways of realising femininity as there are classes and class fractions’ (1984: 107–8), but goes beyond it to show that a far more detailed analysis of gender and sexuality in relation to class needs to be undertaken (Adkins and Skeggs 2004). It also encourages a view of self-reflexivity as linked to social differentiation in the same way in which Bourdieu’s argument sees the emergence of the former as related to the tensions and conflicts constitutive of a particular field of social action. Rather than being an automatic attribute, reflexivity is thus understood as irregular and discontinuous, depending on the particulars of a power configuration. This perspective allows for an analysis of the production and development of gender identity as an uneven process, and is particularly important for its ability to overcome conceptual dichotomies in feminist theory and to develop an overlaying, comprehensive perspective of the tensions within (Adkins 2002, McNay 2000). This view emphasises that gender relations are not uniformly reproduced. It further helps us recognise the distinctiveness of fields such as the intimate and the domestic, and explains the relation between the intimate and more general forms of social action. It also sheds light on the irregular ways in which power operates in everyday lives and allows for an exploration of the reflexive nature of gender, class and sexual identity as embodied existence and lived relation (McNay 2004), in the context of specific power configurations. Conclusion The ways in which sexuality has been theorised largely overlook issues of class (McRobbie 2004, Skeggs 1997); equally, the ‘new’ sociology of social class has rarely approached heterosexuality as an everyday practice, where class is reproduced and appropriated (but see Johnson and Lawler 2005) nor has it paid attention to the contexts in which heterosexual conduct, gender and class intersect. Situated at the intersection of class, sexuality and consumption as they surface in the staging of intimate episodes and of the erotic body, the analysis provided here reinforces the need to document more comprehensively the connections between

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class and heterosexuality in the construction of sexual identities and the staging of intimate events. Creating intimacy represents a fleeting moment in time, but one in which mundane material and symbolic resources are increasingly intentionally invested. Access to such resources, the cultural competencies mobilised in their use and, more generally, the ways in which intimacy is put together by its actors, remain largely under-researched sociological topics. This chapter has highlighted the strategies through which some women legitimise their erotic persona. The in-depth ethnographic approach in the research reveals that these strategies operate contingently and contiguously, across intersections of women’s daily lives and in doing so deploy moral hierarchies and a classed, and classing, view of sexuality and intimacy. There are several factors that make the approach to intimacy adopted here particularly appropriate. First, it highlights the situated character of erotic episodes and permits the documentation of under the radar practices through which various resources are mobilised. Second, the approach allows observation of both the concrete and symbolic place held by resources within routine erotic practices, and the ways in which their use is justified in the creation of a moral and social hierarchy of taste. Third, it facilitates a better understanding of women’s role in creating, maintaining and reproducing sexual intimacy, situating more theoretical discussions on ‘plastic sexuality’ and the commercialization of sexuality, in a classed context. Similar to other contributions in this collection, the accounts presented above show that issues of social worth and class identity are negotiated through the deployment of a diverse and sophisticated set of strategies. This involves a careful balancing of the available (social and cultural) resources, the calculated acquisition and display of commodities and lifestyles, and a selfconscious management of symbolic social and material capital. Arguably a necessary process in the creation of assertive sexual agents, this is a largely autodidact procedure where, through an increased emphasis on consumer skill, women can explore sensuality through domestic intimate creation. My argument has illustrated how the use of various material and symbolic resources in the intimate realm is often a planned, complex process that involves the creators’ judgment of the occasion and ideas of appropriateness. The data showed that empowerment is present in the substance, occasion and settings of women’s consumption, and given by the power to consume reflexively a particular type of classed sexuality. These testimonies illustrate the practical aspects of a ‘doit-yourself’ erotic biography and the dynamics of the self in an on-going process of becoming (Adkins 2002). However, it is not only intimacy that is rendered in this transformation. This process is also circumscribed by visions of imagined class and sexualities supported by a choice of apparel which seeks to highlight cultivated selves and complex strategies of self-distancing from a less affluent, attentive and educated female other. In this process various items of lingerie become emblematic in the choreography of intimacy that involves the drawing of class boundaries and reveals gendered heterosexual taxonomies centred on appropriate versus inappropriate sexual

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display. Within distinct class confines, my interviewees exercise personal agency, articulate erotic subjectivities and aim to disrupt set and classed gender roles. Yet in doing so they reproduce class inequalities, through the consumption of a workingclass sexual stereotype of the ‘tart’, which is used to boost the interviewees array of erotic impersonations, and employed to signify a rawer and more daring type of sexual conduct. However, these displays are carefully judged and framed; real life as opposed to imagined sexual identities are skillfully distanced from permanent disreputable class associations. The symbolic value of the resources employed here is accompanied by a moral economy of use, which dictates both the framework and the discursive registers within which they are to be deployed. This moral economy of use advances and supports a normative model that contains the ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ of creating intimacy, while at the same time maintains and reinforces specific social hierarchies around sexuality, class and gender. These insights render the need to connect better the analysis of social structures of oppression to the lived realities of gendered and class identities and point to the need for a more comprehensive conceptualization of their intersections. Bibliography Adkins, L. 2002. Sexuality and Economy: Historicisation vs. Deconstruction. Australian Feminist Studies, 17(37), 31–41. Adkins, L and Skeggs, B. 2004. Feminism After Bourdieu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review. Allen, L. 2003. Girls Want Sex, Boys Want Love: Resisting Dominant Discourses of (Hetero)exuality. Sexualities, 6(2), 215–39. Arthurs, J. 2003. Sex and The City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama. Feminist Media Studies, 3(1), 83–98. Attwood, F. 2006. Sexed Up: Theorizing the Sexualization of Culture. Sexualities, 9(1), 99–116. Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. 1995. The Normal Chaos of Love. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck-Gernsheim, E. 2002. Reinventing the Family: In Search of New Life-Styles. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boden, S. and Williams, S. 2002. Consumption and Emotion: The Romantic Ethic Revisited. Sociology, 36(3), 493–512. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Braun, V., Gavey, N. and McPhillips, K. 2003. The ‘Fair Deal’? Unpacking Accounts of Reciprocity in Heterosex. Sexualities, 6(2), 237–61. Clarke, A. 2001. The Aesthetic of Social Aspiration, in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Close Doors, edited by D. Miller. Oxford: Berg, 23–46.

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Dunscombe, J. and Marsden, D. 1993. Love and Intimacy: The Gender Division of Emotion and Emotion Work. Sociology, 27(2), 221–42. Evans, M. 2003. Love: An Unromantic Discussion. Cambridge: Polity Press. Featherstone, M. 1992. Postmodernism and the Aestheticisation of Everyday Life, in Modernity and Identity, edited by S. Lash and J. Friedman. Oxford: Blackwell, 265–90. Fine, M. 1994. Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research, in Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 70–82. Gavey, N., McPhillips, K. and Braun, V. 1999. Interruptus Coitus: Heterosexuals Accounting for Intercourse. Sexualities, 2(1), 35–68. Giddens, A. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, London: Anchor Books, Doubleday. Gorden, R.L. 1987. Interviewing: Strategy, Techniques, and Tactics. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press. Gurney, P. 1997. ‘Intersex’ and ‘Dirty Girls’: Mass Observation and Working Class Sexuality in England in the 1930s. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 8(2), 256–90. Halnon, B.K. 2002. Poor Chic: The Rational Consumption of Poverty. Current Sociology, 50(4), 501–16. Hennessy, R. 2000. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. London: Routledge. Hochschild, A.R. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feelings. London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Holland, J., Ramazanoglu, C., Sharpe, S. and Thomson, R. 1998. The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power. London: Tufnell Press. Holmberg, C.B. 1998. Sexualities and Popular Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Ilouz, E. 1997. Who Will Care for the Caretaker’s Daughter? Towards a Sociology of Happiness in the Era of Reflexive Modernity. Theory, Culture and Society, 14(4), 31–66. Jackson, S. and Scott, S. 2001. Putting the Body’s Feet on the Ground: Towards a Sociological Reconceptualization of Gendered and Sexual Embodiment, in Constructing Gendered Bodies, edited by K. Backett-Milburn and L. McKie. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 9–25. Jamieson, L. 1999. Intimacy Transformed? A Critical Look at the Pure Relationship. Sociology, 33(3), 477–94. Johnson, P. 2005. Love, Heterosexuality and Society. London: Routledge. Johnson, P. and Lawler, S. 2005. Coming Home to Love and Class. Sociological Research Online, 10(3). Available at http://www.socresonline.org.uk/10/3/ johnson.html [accessed: 10 December 2008].

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Kitzinger, J. 1995. ‘I’m Sexually Attractive but I’m Powerful’: Young Women Negotiating Sexual Reputation. Women’s Studies International Forum, 18, 187–96. Lawler, S. 2005. Class, Culture and Identity. Sociology, 39(5), 797–806. Lees, S. 1993. Sugar and Spice: Sexuality and Adolescent Girls. London: Penguin. McDermott, E. 2004. Telling Lesbian Stories: Interviewing and the Class Dynamics of ‘Talk’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 27 (3), 177–87. McNair, B. 1996. Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture. London: Arnold. McNay, L. 2000. Gender and Agency. Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. McNay, L. 2004. Agency and Experience: Gender as a Lived Relation, in Feminism After Bourdieu, edited by L. Adkins and B. Skeggs. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review, 175–90. McRobbie, A. 2004. Notes on ‘What Not to Wear’ and Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence, in Feminism After Bourdieu, edited by L. Adkins and B. Skeggs. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review, 99–109. Miller, D. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nava, M. 1997. Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store, in The Shopping Experience, edited by P. Falk and C. Campbell. London: Sage Publications, 56–91. Plummer, K. 1995. Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds. London: Routledge. Reay, D. 1998. Rethinking Social Class: Qualitative Perspectives on Gender and Social Class. Sociology, 32(2), 259–75. Reay, D. 2005. Beyond Consciousness? The Psychic Landscape of Social Class. Sociology, 39(5), 911–28. Richardson, D. 2000. Rethinking Sexuality. London: Sage. Savage, M. 2000. Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sayer, A. 2005. The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism. London: Routledge. Stewart, F. 1999. ‘Once You Get a Reputation Your Life’s Like…Wrecked’: The Implications of Reputation for Young Women’s Sexual Health. Women’s Studies International Forum, 22(3), 373–83. Storr, M. 2003. Latex and Lingerie: Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers Parties. Oxford/New York: Berg. Swidler, A. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

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Taylor, Y. 2005. Real Politik or Real Politics? Working Class Lesbians’ Political ‘Awareness’ and Activism. Women’s Studies International Forum, 28, 484–94. Taylor, Y. 2007. Working Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tseëlon, E. 1995. The Masque of Femininity: The Presentation of Woman in Everyday Life. London: Sage Publications. Weeks, J. 1998. The Sexual Citizen. Theory, Culture and Society, 15(3–4), 35–52. Wilson-Kovacs, D. 2007. Agency, Consumption and Sexual Intimacy: Understanding the Importance of Material Culture in Everyday Life, in Gender and Consumption: Material Culture and the Commercialisation of Everyday Life, edited by L. Marten and E. Casey. Aldershot: Ashgate, 181–95. Yodanis, C. 2006. A Place in Town: Doing Class in a Coffee Shop. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(3), 341–66.

Chapter 12

Class and Gender at the Intersection: Working-Class Women’s Dispositions Towards Employment and Motherhood Jo Armstrong

Introduction Over the past two decades, a growing body of research has addressed workingclass women’s experiences across employment and motherhood (e.g. Skeggs 1997, Reay 1998, Gillies 2007). However, there is a lack of work with a simultaneous focus on paid work and mothering which attends to the interconnectedness of these spheres in the lives of working-class women. This chapter sets out to address this gap, asking: what are working-class women’s experiences of combining paid and unpaid work and how do we explain their dispositions toward work? I use a feminist and Bourdieuian theoretical framework and draw on material from in-depth interviews with working-class women in the UK. I suggest that these women’s dispositions can be described as pragmatic and relational, where life was approached in a matter-of-fact manner and paid work was seen as interconnected with mothering work. It is proposed that the concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1990, 2000), conceived as a process that extends across the life-course and as a meeting point for classed and gendered influences, offers a valuable way to understand women’s dispositions towards employment and motherhood. Existing work on employment and motherhood highlights the gendered and classed character of patterns of combining paid and unpaid work across the lifecourse (e.g. Dex et al. 1996, Bottero 2000, Olsen and Walby 2004, Warren 2004). Such research is important in drawing attention to the way in which mothers continue to perform the large proportion of childcare work, taking periods of time out of the labour market for child-rearing and combining part-time employment with motherhood. However, there is little existing research in the contemporary UK context exploring how women understand and experience their work, which is the focus of my research. During the early 2000s, I used in-depth interviews with 27 mothers aged between 28 and 43 years living in the UK to explore how these women went about their everyday lives, how they felt about their work, and to examine the shape of the paths leading to their current situations. My sample consisted of women who were employed in a variety of jobs, including women from different social class

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positions (Armstrong 2005, 2006). In this chapter I discuss the accounts of the 12 working-class women I interviewed. Eleven of these women were White and one Black, and all were from working-class family backgrounds. At the time of the interviews, 11 were living in couple households with male partners and one woman was separated and single. Inspired by the work of Ferree (1985, 1987) and Kuhn (1995) which has suggested the importance of attending to the practices of working-class women as a potential source of knowledge, I aim to illustrate that lessons may be learned from the working-class interviewees’ orientations to their work. In particular, the way these women approached their paid work and caring labour with a matterof-fact attitude, and as intimately connected and taken-for-granted parts of their role as a mother, seems to provide a timely and useful counterpoint to popular discourses which continue to position mothers’ employment as problematic. I adopt a critical gaze, using a feminist-Bourdieuian influenced framework to take into account and explain both the gendered and classed dimensions of these women’s lives. Following Bourdieu (1987), class is understood in terms of access to different forms of capital: economic (income, wealth, financial inheritances), cultural (e.g. educational qualifications, social taste, language) and social capitals (resources based on networks and group membership). Gender is conceptualised primarily in terms of dependencies, drawing on a diversity of feminist work which has highlighted the ways the self is necessarily connected to others and dependent upon the labour of others, frequently women: the emotional labour (Hochschild 1983, Reay 2000), the work performed ‘back stage’ by wives, mothers, partners, secretaries, researchers (Reay 2004), and the work of those who are fixed by the mobility of privileged others (Skeggs 2004). This body of feminist writings has been crucial in making visible such labour, which is often hidden and neglected as well as underpaid and undervalued, and in showing the ways it underpins the (illusory) ‘independent’ masculine self that has been central to much social theory. Class and gender are viewed as always in interaction, becoming embodied in the habitus (Skeggs 1997). I use the concept of habitus to refer to an individual’s way of being, acting and approaching the world, as the ‘incorporation of the social into the body’ (McNay 1999: 95). This theoretical framework allows attention to both the objective and subjective dimensions of the women’s positioning in social space, to consider the way access to resources influences not only the capacity to follow particular courses of action but also shapes an individual’s horizons or ‘plausibility structures’ (Skeggs 2004: 139). Here, I trace the 12 working-class interviewees’ trajectories through childhood, into employment and motherhood, and consider their future expectations in relation to work and family life. I show how their lives, in terms of the positions they could occupy, were shaped by their limited access to economic, cultural and social capital. At the same time, I illustrate that while these women’s accounts do point to circumstances of lack (of money, of opportunity) we can perhaps learn from their pragmatic and relational orientation since it serves to highlight the degree to which all individuals are necessarily dependent on others and it makes explicit the

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interdependence of paid and unpaid labour in the public and private spheres. This interdependence is frequently obscured in current discourses around ‘women’s work’ in which the concepts of ‘choice’ and ‘flexibility’ tend to take precedence. In focusing on dimensions of these women’s lives I attempt to engage with and do justice to a number of tensions. These include valuing the paid and unpaid work undertaken by these women and recognising the satisfaction associated with this work, at the same time as adopting a critical position and recognising the way in which an investment in a caring self can lead to self-abnegation and the reproduction of class and gender inequalities. I also attempt to look at the way inequalities circumscribe the lives of these women at the same time as working against dominant representations which position working-class women as lacking, deficient, unrefined and traditional. I undertake an exploration and analysis of these women’s lives because their experiences are important (though too frequently neglected in academic research), but I share Bettie’s (2003: 205) concern that: ‘In embarking on a project that foregrounded class, and aware that an author’s words continue to signify in spite of and sometimes against her own intentions, I feared and still fear unwittingly providing ammunition to those who would chose to employ it in ways with which I disagree.’ If we are not to allow this fear of misrepresentation to paralyse us into saying nothing (Skeggs 2004), we need to recognise the limits to our control over research processes (Bourdieu 1999). While there are inevitable difficulties in writing about research participants, particularly when these participants do not have access to channels to voice their perspectives using their own words to ‘write back’, I follow Skeggs (2004: 130) in her belief that: We need to ask, if the subaltern speaks, how is it that we can hear her? Can the subaltern authorise herself if she cannot speak or only be heard through the self/words of others? Gayatri Spivak (2000) argues no. But unless researchers … make subaltern stories available how would most people know about the subaltern at all? If subaltern groups have no access to the mechanisms and circuits for telling and distributing their knowledge, how do others even know they exist? It is surely a matter of how we do the research rather than abdicate responsibility entirely.

I thus attempted the task of writing about my interviewees with caution, being alert to potential points of ambiguity but acknowledging the limits of my control over how the research could be used and interpreted by others. In the following section therefore, I wish to convey that these women did grow up ‘without’ particular experiences and material things which meant they were disadvantaged in certain respects compared with children from wealthier families. This means that to state their experiences were merely ‘different’ is incorrect since  Examples of such discourses can be found across a range of sites, including academic texts (e.g. Hakim 2000, 2002).

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it fails to recognise the very real inequalities that shaped their upbringings. But, as will be seen, nor can their experiences of growing up be wholly conceptualised in terms of lack or deficiency since this simply reproduces inaccurate negative stereotypes of working-class ways of being. Awareness of this constant tension is crucial to an adequate understanding of the lives of these women. Growing Up: Experiences of Being Without In their recollections of growing up, my interviewees referred to the ways in which money was frequently in short supply. Judith recalled: We used to have to go to school with holes in the bottom of our shoes, walking in the snow, we used to put cardboard in to stop the cold and the snow getting through, things like that … we never had things that we needed, silly things like sanitary towels … (Judith, 37, working-class, white).

Even those interviewees whose parents had relatively more financial resources had grown up with a sharp awareness of the cost of their upbringing: My mum, I know she paid for my piano lessons, but I know that was a real financial burden on the family (Sandra, 41, working-class, white).

Music lessons did not form a normal part of the working-class interviewees’ childhoods. Sandra’s experience was unusual in that she passed the elevenplus examination to gain entry into grammar school. Attendance at a grammar school had placed pressure upon Sandra to ‘fit in’. She recalled lying about her father’s occupation (as a manual labourer) to her peers, telling them that ‘he made aeroplanes or something’. I would speculate that her mother’s struggle to pay for music lessons was another dimension of this pressure to ‘fit into’ a predominantly middle-class school. Also notable is the fact that for Sandra these music lessons were short-lived. She referred to the fact that her father had thought it was important that they (Sandra and her three sisters) should all ‘have a go at music’. In a related analysis, Carolyn Steedman’s (1986) portrayal of growing up in a working-class household shows the way she had been painfully aware of how much she, and her sister, had cost: ‘We were a finely balanced investment, threatening constantly to topple over into the realm of demand and expenditure’ (Steedman 1986: 42). In this context Steedman (1986: 105) argues that: … you come to know that you are not quite yourself, but someone else: someone else has paid the price for you, and you have to pay it back. You grow small, and

 All of the interviewees have been given pseudonyms.

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quiet, and take up very little room. You take on the burden of being good, which is the burden of the capacity to know exactly how someone else is feeling.

In a similar way, the working-class interviewees in my research seemed to develop a sharp awareness of their dependence upon others, which fostered a relational orientation towards life where connections and ties to others are explicitly recognised. The economic necessity of obtaining a job meant that the possibility of entering higher education was not considered. Jacky recalled: I don’t know whether it’s just my experience but [my parents] never even said – it never even came into the equation, go to college or anything like that. As soon as I left school they said you’re getting a job and I got a job … (Jacky, 38, working-class, white).

The fact that getting a job was a financial necessity and went unquestioned by these women points to the meaningless of applying a framework of ‘choice’ in the analysis of their trajectories from school. As Skeggs (2004: 139) states: ‘Those who suggest that choice is universal betray the social position from which their perspective emerged. Choice is a resource, to which some lack access and which they cannot see as a possibility; it is not within their field of vision, their plausibility structure.’ Five of the 12 women left education at 16 years old to enter employment. Their first jobs comprised factory work (Judith), entering the police force (Sally), retail (Janet), office (Jacky), and cleaning and catering work (Jane). The remainder pursued some form of vocational training. Joan, Sarah, Stacey and Shirley had trained to become nurses following school, and Janet was about to embark upon her training at the time of the interview after being employed as an auxiliary nurse at the local hospital for five years. Sophie and Sandra trained in physiotherapy, and Julie spent two years in college training to become a nursery nurse. Training for a vocation appeared to present an acceptable form of lengthened study for these women, and their parents, since it was directly focused toward gaining employment in a particular field (see Evans, Mellor this volume). In the following section, the interviewees’ accounts of their paid work are explored, looking at the way they perceived and approached this work, and discussing how these dispositions can be understood.

  Nurse training was a particularly popular route amongst these women, reflecting the national context of gendered patterns of paid work in which women are disproportionately located in service industry occupations such as caring and cleaning (Equal Opportunities Commission 2004).

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Entering Employment: The Importance of Making a Difference In talking about their work, many of these women emphasised the job satisfaction they gained from ‘making a difference’ to people’s quality of life. Julie, a nursery nurse, spoke of the satisfaction she experienced through seeing the pleasure on the face of a child who had learning difficulties when he was taken on a day trip from the nursery: This little lad, it opened his eyes so wide … it was only a park, you know, but he just loved it and that child has been different since … He’s been so different and his language, it’s like opened his little world up if you like, so at least you feel like you’re doing something for these kids (Julie, 43, working-class, white).

For some of these women, embodying a caring self appeared to be a means of claiming moral superiority relative to others. In Jacky’s account of her work as a home carer, she represented herself as more caring than her clients’ own family members. Describing a recent meeting between herself, an elderly woman who she was looking after, the woman’s daughters and a social worker, this ‘caring self’ appeared to be mobilised when Jacky related the following: She [the elderly woman] has got Alzheimer’s, she was sitting there and they [the daughters] was talking about her like she was a dog. ‘She can’t do this, she can’t do that, she forgets this, she forgets that, she don’t know her own mind.’ And the poor old woman’s sitting there, you know what I mean … and they’re [the daughters] arguing between each other over who is going to do what to her. She needs 24 hour day care now and they don’t want to give … none of them wants to do it. And like I haven’t got any control over it whatsoever because I’m nothing to do with her but in three years when you’ve just been round to two old people you get attached to them (Jacky, 38, working-class, white).

While it is important to recognise the value of care-giving work and the way this work is a source of satisfaction, it is also necessary to acknowledge the gendered and classed social processes leading to an investment in a caring identity, as well as the potential costs involved (McMahon 1995, Skeggs 1997, Tronto 2002). As Skeggs (1997: 56) has argued in her ethnographic research, working-class women have few alternatives but to invest in a caring self: For those who had already experienced the negative allocative function of the education system by the age of 16, whose employment prospects are bleak and cultural capital limited, caring (whether paid or unpaid) offers the means to value, trade and invest in themselves, an opportunity to ‘make something of themselves’. It enables them to be recognised as respectable, responsible and mature.

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Developing an investment in having a caring self can also lead to exploitation by others and self-abnegation (see Parker, Evans this volume). Amongst workingclass women in my research, a sense of moral obligation to their employers, colleagues, or clients often extended to these women putting others’ needs above their own. For example, Jacky was looking forward to starting a new job in a nursing home and finishing her work as a self-employed home carer to two elderly women. The latter job had caused her much distress as she had become increasingly entangled in the elderly women’s family disputes. Upon speaking to Jacky several months later I learned that she had continued to look after the women and had not pursued the nursing home employment which she had seen as a way of doing the job she liked without such a heavy burden of responsibility. Jacky told me that one of the women’s daughters had completely ‘butted out’ and she had felt compelled to continue as the primary care-giver despite being unhappy in this role. As well as potential personal costs, investment in a caring identity can lead to a reproduction of dominant discourses in which women are positioned as inherently predisposed toward the nurturing of others (Kingfisher 1996, Skeggs 1997, Mitchell and Green 2002). Practicality was another important dimension in these women’s work identities. They spoke about their enjoyment in being at ‘the sharp end’ rather than being in roles associated with management and paperwork. Joan expressed the reservations she had felt in her position as staff nurse: I didn’t take to being a staff nurse, being in charge … at sort of like delegating, things like that, I prefer doing it myself … I’d rather be doing, I didn’t like being back in the office and doing the paperwork and things … (Joan, 39, workingclass, white).

Joan’s aversion to taking the role of staff nurse seemed to reflect a belief that she was not adequately prepared to hold the responsibility associated with that position. Though this belief may not be wholly unfounded, in that more training should have been provided, Joan’s attitude may also stem from her habitus, the process through which expectations and dispositions come to reflect the objective conditions in which they were formed. Unlike the attitude of entitlement characteristic of middle-class individuals (Reay 1998), it seemed as though these women had not grown up to believe that these positions were or could be ‘for them’; beliefs which had become ingrained, shaping conceptions of what is possible or desirable. Like the working-class women in Skeggs’s (1997) research who privileged the practical over the theoretical elements of their caring course, the women in my study made similar assessments in their work. Janet, an auxiliary nurse, stated:

  The privileging of practice over paperwork has been frequently observed in qualitative research amongst working-class women and men (e.g. Willis 1977, Thomson et al. 2003).

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Such evaluations of different kinds of work could be interpreted as rationalisations of their position, in that these women were merely rejecting the roles which they could not achieve as the habitus tends to ‘exclude all “extravagances” (“not for the likes of us”), that is, all the behaviours that would be negatively sanctioned because they are incompatible with the objective conditions’ (Bourdieu 1990: 56). However, this interpretation tends to de-value the skills displayed and valued by these women, since it implies that the women only privilege their own roles because they cannot access higher status positions. An alternative strategy would be to validate their views, by asserting that these women do ‘genuinely’ enjoy their work and do not wish to be employed in higher status posts. Indeed, some interviewees articulated very persuasive objections to being in management roles, such as the lack of face-to-face contact with client groups and the time spent dealing with bureaucratic procedures. The effect of privileging practicality sometimes resulted in these women ruling out the possibility of reaching more senior positions in their occupations. Consequently their earning capacity remained relatively low. Sophie, for example, related the way in which she had undertaken multiple jobs to piece together an adequate income because she did not want to move into a (better paid) management position. Similarly, Shirley stated that: I don’t think I’m management material because I like being a clinician too much, I like the hands on. However, there’s not many more steps you can take as a clinician, once you get to sort of where I am that’s it, you sort of stick there or you go now for one of these sort of consultancy posts but in order to do that you’ve got to have the paperwork. It doesn’t matter what experience you’ve got, you’ve got to have the paperwork (Shirley, 38, working-class, white).

As the above quote indicates, the ability to reach more senior positions frequently depends upon having the necessary qualifications, which, in turn, depends upon having the resources available to study. For instance, Janet was apprehensive about beginning her nurse training at the age of 35. She enjoyed her current job as an auxiliary nurse and was not looking forward to the theoretical elements of the course. Getting paid whilst studying was a crucial factor in Janet’s decision to embark upon the training since it meant that she had ‘nothing to lose’. Joan, however, had more or less ruled out a return to nursing, a profession she had left a number of years earlier, since she could not afford the extra training needed to update her skills. These women tended to discuss their working conditions in a pragmatic manner. Though some of the women’s working hours would be considered as ‘un-sociable’ by many observers (evenings, early mornings, night shifts), the interviewees simply referred to the fact that their hours were due to the ‘nature of

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the job’ (e.g. caring is often a round-the-clock obligation) rather than a cause for complaint. It appeared that they had learned to live with a day-by-day logic from their past experience of material insecurity where energy is devoted to ‘getting by’ (Bynner et al. 1997). As Joan said: I just take each day as it comes and try and, I don’t, no I’m quite satisfied really, quite satisfied with life to be honest, sometimes I think you can always just want something else instead of enjoying what you’ve got, I just try and enjoy what I’ve got really to be honest (Joan, 39, working-class, white).

This attitude of pragmatism also appeared to be demonstrated by the women in their approach to motherhood. As discussed below, the interviewees’ accounts of entering motherhood suggested continuity with their previous lives, in terms of the matter-of-fact manner with which they went about their mothering and their responsiveness to the needs and demands of others. The Experience of Becoming a Mother: Continuity in Caring For these women, the transition into motherhood was not presented as particularly problematic or a significant turning point. Mothering work appeared to allow the expression of themselves as caring in another field outside their paid work. In this way, there seemed to be a thread of continuity between their paid work and their role as a mother. Joan, who had been a nurse and was employed as a welfare assistant and in a retail post stated: I was in … [the] caring professions initially but when I had them [her children] they were like my caring profession and it was enough to concentrate on at one time (Joan, 39, working-class, white).

Unlike middle-class women, who report feelings of disruption and shock upon becoming mothers (McMahon 1995, Bailey 2000, Armstrong 2006), motherhood did not appear to be a disruptive experience for these working-class women. Their experiences seemed to have fostered the emergence of a habitus characterised by pragmatism and care-giving. In this context, looking after a newborn baby was not seen to entail significant sacrifice. Rather, providing for the needs of another appeared as an extension of the work in which they had previously been occupied. Sarah, a nurse, described her dream:

  It can be suggested that this pragmatic approach is borne out of necessity. Without any escape route afforded by material means or having the skills necessary to change jobs, the women simply had to work with the available, and often scarce, resources.

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That’s my dream: I always wanted to have a lot of children, and I always wanted to, I’ve always been a carer so I always wanted to … do something like that. I would like to go on an island, somewhere like Shetland or somewhere, and be a nurse, so I could go and be a midwife and then look after people from cradle to grave (Sarah, 39, working-class, white).

A mother of four children, Sarah had also fostered a number of children. However, she did not see anything remarkable about her role as a care-giver to several children. Sarah seemed to see it as an obligation or duty, describing herself as being ‘selfish’ now that she had given up her role as a foster mother. For these women then, the transition from being childfree to being a mother appeared seamless in the sense that the experience of looking after a new baby did not contrast sharply with their previous lifestyles since they had become accustomed to accepting difficulties and constraints (though these were not necessarily perceived as such by them) as a part of life. The demands of motherhood were no different in this respect. However, it is important to emphasise that care-giving did not come ‘naturally’ to these women. Instead, it was an extension of the skills and dispositions they had already learnt and embodied in their family relationships and in their employment. Having explored the women’s accounts of paid work and mothering work, the following section focuses on the issue of how the interviewees combined the two, paying particular attention to their perceptions and understandings of this work. As will be demonstrated, rather than seeing these activities as necessarily separate and in opposition, the interviewees’ accounts suggested that their paid work was part of what it meant to be a mother and that the role of mother and employee were complementary. ‘The Best of Both Worlds’? Though two of the women had continued in full-time employment alongside mothering, the majority had combined less than full-time paid work with childrearing. This employment was ‘fitted in’ around their mothering and housework. The jobs undertaken by these women included cleaning, serving in food outlets, nursing and care work. Their paid work tended to be fitted in during evenings and weekends or, when the children were older, during the school day. Some of these women had worked shifts so that they dove-tailed their hours with their husbands’ shifts in employment. Janet said that since their children had been born she had worked approximately 22 hours per week ‘opposite her husband’ who was a prison auxiliary. For Jacky, combining work as a home carer for the elderly alongside   Not all of the jobs performed by these women would be included in official statistical tables. Jane told me that during her children’s pre-school years she had done ‘little cash-inhand jobs’ to pay for school uniforms and Christmas presents.

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mothering sometimes meant that her youngest child would accompany her and wait in the car whilst she visited her clients. Fitting employment around motherhood was presented as a taken-for-granted pattern, an attitude which may be explained in terms of the women’s histories. Most recalled their mothers being in some form of employment: As far back as what I can remember I always remember mum working (Shirley, 38, working-class, white). My mom worked to help to keep us … (Julie, 43, working-class, white).

The women’s mothers had been employed in various occupations and had, like the interviewees themselves, ‘fitted in’ paid work with their mothering and housework. For these interviewees then, the expectation that they would combine paid work with mothering may have been formed at a young age through their observations of their own mothers’ work. Combining paid work with motherhood was thus presented as somewhat unremarkable by the interviewees themselves. However, as others have implied (e.g. Ferree 1985, 1987, Glucksmann 2000, Reynolds 2001), the fact that working-class women have demonstrated such ‘flexibility’ for many years tends to be overlooked in debates which construct ‘work-life balance’ and ‘juggling’ as new challenges. The economic necessity of earning tended to vary amongst these women, depending upon factors such as their husbands’ income, as well as varying within individuals’ lives due to sporadic costs (such as those over the Christmas period). In addition to acknowledging the economic importance of wage-earning for these women, it is also important to recognise that paid work for many women may offer more than an income (Ferree 1985). Many of the interviewees stated that paid employment allowed some valued time out of the home. Julie had been grateful for the social contact at her workplace, as she explained: I wanted something else rather than just staring at four walls … I went to work, help out at playgroup. I was on my own a lot of the time and I think that was another reason why I wanted to go back to [paid] work, because other than [at the playgroup] some days I wouldn’t see another adult … if the weather was bad or you couldn’t get out it was a bit of a nightmare, you’d be on your own (Julie, 43, working-class, white).

These interviewees also referred to the fact that having their ‘own money’ was important. The significance attributed to having their own money seemed to arise out of previous experiences of financial insecurity, either of their own, or their mothers. Sarah implied that her mother’s experience of divorce had highlighted the importance of being financially independent:

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In discussing their jobs and their role as mothers, these women articulated a holistic vision of this work, whereby one role was seen as complementary to the other role and combining paid and unpaid work was seen as having ‘the best of both worlds’. Janet believed that the time she spent away from her children in her job as an auxiliary nurse meant that the time she did spend with them was more valued and enjoyable, for both herself and her children: It gives me time away from them to appreciate them more really. If I spent every minute of every day with them … it’s enjoyable … but I wouldn’t appreciate them as much as I appreciate them, having time away from them. I love my job … it’s something that I do that’s not child orientated or anything (Janet, 35, working-class, white).

In this way, paid work was positioned as being a part of – rather than conflicting with – their role as a mother. As Sandra explained: A lot of the money that I earn goes to letting [my children] have opportunities I didn’t have … (Sandra, 41, working-class, white).

Though using the phrase ‘having the best of both worlds’ to describe these women’s working lives has positive connotations, the long-term implications for women in part-time lower status employment may be negative. As Warren (2004) observes, part-time working has been lauded as holding the potential to help women with families integrate and balance ‘home and work’. However, much of this work tends to be characterised by poor working conditions (Warren 2004). Haylett’s (2003) research also points to the dangers in uncritically prioritising involvement in paid work as the ultimate panacea. Haylett notes that neoliberal welfare-towork policies in the United States and Britain effectively devalue the labour of   In this conception, a ‘provider role’ is incorporated into motherhood rather than being seen as conflicting with that role (a notion articulated by the African-Caribbean mothers in Reynolds’s 2001 study).   Although, as Perrons et al. (2004) note, the distinction between private and public sector work cultures is important in considering working conditions. For example, they point out that while many firms have work-life balance policies, in the public sector these are considered an entitlement rather than a favour. Amongst working-class interviewees in my sample, working conditions did vary according to whether they were employed in the private or public sector, the latter being associated with better conditions (e.g. emergency leave, less pressure to work over-time and ‘flexi-time’ i.e. the ability to start or finish work earlier or later, and to vary the length of the working day).

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working-class mothers in caring for their own children by encouraging these women to engage in low paid service sector employment (frequently focused upon the servicing of middle-classes). Nevertheless, in perceiving paid work as part of their mothering work, the working-class women I interviewed effectively challenge dominant representations which present women’s employment as secondary to their mothering role and as having detrimental effects upon children’s well-being. These women’s orientations also point to the necessary interconnectedness of paid and unpaid work rather than presenting the public and private spheres as independent. However, most of these women’s understandings reproduced conventionally gendered divisions of labour, in that responsibility for childcare and household work was primarily borne by these interviewees and perceived as their responsibility rather than being perceived as the responsibility of both mothers and fathers. In the next section, the chapter turns to focus on the women’s views on their futures, examining their accounts of how they foresaw the years ahead. As will become clear below, these women’s horizons appeared to be shaped, and in some respects constrained, by their past experiences. Unchanging Futures? These interviewees tended to anticipate that their lives would remain largely the same over the coming years. They talked about continuing in their current jobs and of the possibility of becoming grandparents. Some of these women spoke with apprehension about their children leaving home because a sense of themselves had become interwoven with the relation they had with their children. This relationality is conveyed in Joan’s description of being a mother: You become such a much more important person for who you are, not like what qualifications you have or what a good job you have, just for who you are and it’s lovely, you just feel so much wanted and that. That’s the most special thing I think really being a mother, it really is. It’s lovely, just somebody (laughs), somebody special without being special, if you know what I mean (Joan, 39, working-class, white).

Other interviewees predicted that future grandchildren would offer new beginnings, filling the void that would be left by the departure of their own children. In their paid work, change sometimes appeared to be associated with unwarranted instability and insecurity, in both a material and psychological sense. In the context of insecure, or at least precarious, conditions, change can be feared, or at least not welcomed, since there is no safety net in the advent   For an illustration of the risks involved for working-class women embarking on life-changing paths see, for example, Brine and Waller (2004).

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of failure. Janet, an auxiliary nurse, spoke of her anxieties with regard to her forthcoming nurse training: So I went for an interview for this Higher Education course and the day after they wanted me to do the training and I was like ‘oh no’. You know … it’s nice and safe, and it’s nice and secure and it’s regular money, the job I’m doing, you know, and the hours, the hours fit so nicely with the kids and home life and work … (Janet, 35, working-class, white).

Whilst it is necessary to recognise that inequalities may lead to such evaluations, it is also important not to bring an automatically negative judgement to bear upon such expressions of satisfaction with stability by, for example, proclaiming that it shows a ‘lack’ of ambition, and a ‘reluctance to change’. This judgement denies the struggle which may be involved in attaining and maintaining security and stability on a day-to-day basis for many women. As indicated earlier, some of my interviewees had experienced poverty during their childhoods. Informed by such experience, these women had worked hard to ensure that their own children were provided with opportunities which they themselves had been denied. Also, to argue that these women are lacking ambition overlooks the importance of the satisfactions associated with certain social relationships (Brannen 2002, Haylett 2003, Sayer 2005). Many of the interviewees derived pleasure from relationships in and of themselves, aside from, and sometimes at the expense of, capital or status concerns. Indeed, in some cases, the sense of satisfaction these women seemed to gain in their jobs had sometimes led them to eschew routes to more senior positions. For example, Sophie was aware that she could pursue a management position but seemed unwilling to sacrifice the rewards she gained from having face-to-face interaction with clients in her current job. Moreover, to adopt dominant evaluations and assess these women’s lives as lacking and deficient in contrast to those of middle-class women who are identified as ‘superior’ because they are ambitious, mobile, refined, future-orientated10 fails to recognise classed and gendered relations of power. It may be argued that the care-giving provided by these women constrains their own movement (though with satisfactions) and enables the movement of others. Yet their labour is afforded 10  These dominant evaluations tend to be reflected and reproduced in academic research. For example, in looking at working-class lives there is a tendency to focus disproportionately on the exceptions – those who ‘make it’– in terms of occupational, educational and material success – rather than those ‘left behind’ (e.g. Walkerdine et al. 2001). Whilst a focus upon the ‘exceptions’ is of utility in detailing what is lost and what is gained (and in showing how exceptions prove the rule, Bettie 2003), this should not be at the expense of a detailed analysis and interpretation of the lives of others (the majority). This pattern of a disproportionate focus on those who ‘make it’ reflects an ‘improvement narrative’ (Skeggs 1997, 2004) running through popular cultural representations whereby working-class femininity is portrayed as excessive and something to be left behind.

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relatively little symbolic or material recognition. Such patterns may be seen as both products of, and productive of, inequalities associated with class, gender and ethnicity11 (Adkins 2002, Skeggs 2004). Conclusions and Implications Overall then, across the accounts these women provided of their experiences there appeared to be a certain seamlessness. In showing the continuous and integrated character of their lives, this research has demonstrated that theorising from these women’s accounts of their lives can serve a number of purposes. Exploring the character of these women’s lives through the accounts they provided serves as a reminder of the degree to which all individuals are necessarily interdependent on others in different ways at different points during the life course. This includes the ways these women recognised the financial cost of their own upbringing, how they were anxious to provide materially for their own children, their accounts of providing care for others in their paid work and how this labour exempted others from the labour of care-giving relations. Crucially, it is important to consider the ways in which these relations of interdependence are, or indeed fail to be, recognised. The accounts of the working-class interviewees point toward a work orientation which takes into account the interconnectedness of paid work in the public sphere and unpaid work in the private sphere. As Ferree (1985) observed from studies of working-class women in Germany, these women tend to approach their work as mothers and employees with a disposition of ‘both/and’ rather than perceiving these roles as mutually exclusive and conflictual. For the majority of my workingclass interviewees, this orientation remained conventionally gendered in that it was primarily the women, rather than both themselves and their male partners, who embodied this disposition; responsibility for childcare and domestic labour seemed to be assumed as a taken-for-granted part of their role as partners and mothers. However, such gendered orientations are not fixed; it is possible to envisage greater equality in the distribution of care and paid work between men and women in a differently structured society.12 It is insufficient to characterise working-class women in terms of what they lack since relying upon negative interpretations neglects the skills and knowledge that these women demonstrated in their everyday lives: skills in caring, their sense of social responsibility, and their resourcefulness in coping with limited means – a disposition which may be described as pragmatic and relational. As Kuhn 11  This way of conceptualising inequalities by tracing relations of interdependency can be extended to analyse international divisions of labour (for illustrations of these interdependencies which are, crucially, about inequalities of power, see Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). 12  For an example of the changes envisaged to be important in creating a potentially more equitable distribution of paid and unpaid work see Gardiner (2000).

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(1995: 100) has emphasised in discussing her own departure from a working-class family, it is important not to overlook the ‘lessons of life’ or ‘knowledge from below’ that is dismissed as inferior to dominant (middle-class, male, white) ways of knowing. She argues that this ‘common knowledge’ can be seen as: ‘… the knowledge of those who understand that the world does not belong to them, but who see themselves as belonging to the world … [It] is mundane and practical: it makes use of the stuff of everyday life, and is always directed towards some useful purpose’ (Kuhn 1995: 100–101). Whilst arguing for recognition of the value of working-class women’s dispositions and practices, it is necessary to emphasise the importance of the conditions of emergence for these dispositions and practices. This involves acknowledging the unequal distribution of resources which constrain the lives of working-class women, limiting their access to education and their opportunities in employment. In other words, it is important not to overlook the ways in which a pragmatic relational disposition may be a product of, and serve to reproduce, inequalities. For example, a more relational way of being sometimes seemed to lead to the needs of others becoming prioritised above the women’s own well-being, as well as serving to constrain the subject positions taken up by the women. Theoretically, habitus serves as an invaluable concept for conveying the ways in which individuals’ perceptions and dispositions are formed in relation to their access to financial, cultural and social resources; it directs attention to the way the past inhabits the present, as well as the future, by influencing both what is possible and what is seen as possible. Orientations towards life are not a ‘given’, rather, they require explanation. Here the focus has been on the experiences of the working-class women in my research, highlighting that the approach taken by these women toward their employment and motherhood was shaped by their classed and gendered upbringings and subsequent trajectories through life. Other research has shown that movements through space are influenced by an individual’s positioning in social relations where certain sexualities, physical attributes and ethnicities are privileged over others (e.g. Thomas 1997, Bettie 2003, Taylor 2007). This means that habitus is never only classed, or classed and gendered, but emergent from the coming together of, and interactions between, multiple strands of social inequality; interactions that are undoubtedly complex (Walby 2009), but are nonetheless crucial to understanding the way an individual sees the world and can ‘be’ in that world. Pragmatically, this chapter raises the question of ‘so what, what is to be done?’ Possibly the most immediate implication of the arguments presented concerns adequate pay to reflect the value of the work performed by working-class women. It is not enough to occasionally ‘champion’ these women while at the same time failing to adequately remunerate their labour and continuing to pathologise their behaviours. Attention needs to be focused on reducing the wide class inequalities that exist in advanced capitalist societies such as the UK and USA (OECD 2008). This in itself would go hand-in-hand with the beginnings of a cultural re-thinking, to move from, for example, the currently popular and largely vacuous ‘work-life

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balance’ dichotomy which elides difficult questions about the gendered inequalities in work, toward a conceptualisation which acknowledges the inter-connectedness of the public and private spheres (e.g. Glucksmann 2000). Such changes need to address both class and gender simultaneously, together with other dimensions of inequality, a ‘tall order’ but one that it is possible to at least work towards. Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of the women involved in my research, and all of those who have commented on this chapter. Bibliography Adkins, L. 2002. Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity. Buckingham: Open University Press. Armstrong, J. 2005. Classed and Gendered Experiences of Combining Employment and Motherhood. PhD thesis, Lancaster: University of Lancaster. Armstrong, J. 2006. Beyond ‘Juggling’ and ‘Flexibility’: Classed and Gendered Experiences of Combining Employment and Motherhood. Sociological Research Online [Online], 11 (2). Available at: http://www.socresonline.org. uk/11/2/armstrong.html [accessed: 25 May 2009]. Bailey, L. 2000. Bridging Home and Work in the Transition to Motherhood: A Discursive Study. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 7 (1), 53–70. Bettie, J. 2003. Women Without Class: Girls, Race and Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bottero, W. 2000. Gender and the Labour Market at the Turn of the Century: Complexity, Ambiguity and Change. Work, Employment and Society, 14 (4), 781–91. Bourdieu, P. 1987. What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 32, 1–17. Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. et al. 1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity. Brannen, J. 2002. The Work—Family Lives of Women: Autonomy or Illusion? Paper presented to ESRC seminar ‘Work, life and time in the new economy’, London School of Economics, 25 October 2002. Brine, J. and Waller, R. 2004. Working-Class Women on an Access Course: Risk, Opportunity and (Re)constructing Identities. Gender and Education, 16 (1), 97–113. Bynner, J., Ferri, E. and Shepherd, P. 1997. Twenty-Something in the 1990’s: Getting On, Getting By, Getting Nowhere. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Dex, S., Joshi, H. and Macran, S. 1996. A Widening Gulf Among Britain’s Mothers. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 12 (1), 65–75. Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A.R. 2003. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. London: Granta Books. Equal Opportunities Commission. 2004. Facts about Women and Men in Great Britain. Manchester: EOC. Ferree, M.M. 1985. Between Two Worlds: German Feminist Approaches to Working-Class Women and Work. Signs, 10 (3), 517–36. Ferree, M.M. 1987. Family and Hob for Working-Class Women: Gender and Class Systems Seen from Below, in Families and Work, edited by N. Gerstel and H. Gross. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 289–301. Gardiner, J. 2000. Rethinking Self-sufficiency: Employment, Families and Welfare. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 24 (6), 671–89. Gillies, V. 2007. Marginalised Mothers: Exploring Working Class Experiences of Parenting. Abingdon: Routledge. Glucksmann, M. 2000. Cottons and Casuals: The Gendered Organisation of Labour in Time and Space. York: Sociology Press. Hakim, C. 2000. Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hakim, C. 2002. Lifestyle Preferences as Determinants of Women’s Differentiated Labour Market Careers. Work and Occupations, 29 (4), 428–59. Haylett, C. 2003. Class, Care and Welfare Reform: Reading Meanings, Talking Feelings. Environment and Planning A, 35 (5), 799–814. Hochschild, A.R. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kingfisher, C.P. 1996. Women on Welfare: Conversational Sites of Acquiescence and Dissent. Discourse and Society, 7 (4), 531–57. Kuhn, A. 1995. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso. McMahon, M. 1995. Engendering Motherhood: Identity and Self Transformation. New York: The Guildford Press. McNay, L. 1999. Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity. Theory, Culture and Society, 16 (1), 95–117. Mitchell, W. and Green, E. 2002. ‘I Don’t Know What I’d do Without our Mam’: Motherhood, Identity and Support Networks. Sociological Review, 50 (1), 1–22. Olsen, W. and Walby, S. 2004. Modelling Gender Pay Gaps. Manchester: EOC. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2008. Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries. Paris: OECD. Perrons, D., McDowell, L., Ward, K., Fagan, C. and Ray, K. 2004. Living and Working in the New Economy: Regional Contrasts in the UK. Paper for ESRC seminar: ‘Gender Mainstreaming, the New Economy and New Employment Forms’, University of Leeds, 3 September 2004.

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Reay, D. 1998. Class Work: Mothers’ Involvement in their Children’s Primary Schooling. London: UCL Press. Reay, D. 2000. A Useful Extension of Bourdieu’s Conceptual Framework?: Emotional Capital as a Way of Understanding Mothers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Education? Sociological Review, 48 (4), 568–85. Reay, D. 2004. Cultural Capitalists and Academic Habitus: Classed and Gendered Labour in UK Higher Education. Women’s Studies International Forum, 27 (1), 31–39. Reynolds, T. 2001. Black Mothering, Paid Work and Identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24 (6), 1046–64. Sayer, A. 2005. The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge. Steedman, C. 1986. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. London: Virago. Taylor, Y. 2007. Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, C. 1997. The Baby and the Bath Water: Disabled Women and Motherhood in Social Context. Sociology of Health and Illness, 19 (5), 622–43. Thomson, R., Henderson, S. and Holland, J. 2003. Making the Most of What You’ve Got? Resources, Values and Inequalities in Young People’s Transitions to Adulthood. Educational Review, 55 (1), 33–46. Tronto, J. 2002. The ‘Nanny’ Question in Feminism. Hypatia, 17 (2), 34–51. Walby, S. 2009. Globalisation and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities. London: Sage. Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H. and Melody, J. 2001. Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class. London: Palgrave. Warren, T. 2004. Working Part-time: Achieving a Successful ‘Work-life’ Balance? The British Journal of Sociology, 55 (1), 99–122. Willis, P. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Aldershot: Gower Publishing Company.

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Index

Academia 1–4, 35–52 Adkins, L. 200, 214, 229–31, 249, 251 Adkins, L. and Skeggs, B. 9, 33, 144, 175, 219, 229, 233 Ahmed, S. 175, 214 Aim Higher 61 Ann Summers parties 219–20, 225 Appearance 19, 25, 29, 103, 128, 188, 221, 222, 223, 227 Area effects 96, 98 Armstrong, J. 235 Audit culture 38, 42 Authenticity 30, 31, 88, 107, 185, 195, 210 Ball, S. 14, 15, 21, 30, 32, 71, 76–8, 84–5, 89, 175 Bauman, Z. 120, 133, 144, 155, 218, 231 Beck, U. 14–17, 23, 32, 49–50, 65, 70, 144, 155, 161, 175, 200, 214, 217–18 Beck–Gernshein, E. 217, 231 Belonging 5, 7, 41, 77, 81, 93, 100, 137, 143, 152, 165–6, 189, 193, 210 Benefits 17, 26, 44, 103, 120, 147–9, 204 Binnie, J. 175, 182–183, 190–94 Bourdieu, P. 9, 17–19, 29, 32, 33, 39–43, 47, 48, 50, 55–6, 62, 70–71, 83, 104, 114, 118, 121, 133, 141–3, 159–61, 166, 175, 182, 188, 194, 201, 208–10, 218, 228, 235–7 Byrne, B. 160–63, 165–9, 176 Careers 61, 67, 79, 85, 88 Casey, M. 181 Chav 5, 25, Child 4, 6, 13–33, 36, 39–40, 44, 48, 66–8, 73–74, 77, 79, 82–5, 87–9, 103, 105–7, 117, 120, 122–6, 128, 130–33, 144, 148, 152, 160–74, 183, 204–5, 221, 235–40, 243–50

Choice 2–9, 26, 31, 61, 69, 77, 85, 118, 120–1, 127, 132, 142–3, 159, 166, 168–9, 172–5, 190–200, 211–19, 227, 230, 237, 239 Citizenship 2, 4, 13–14, 17, 20, 23, 27–9, 117, 129, 165 Classlessness 2, 13–20, 27, 29 Clavering, E. 117 Coming out 4, 8, 45, 167, 199–214 Community 6, 15, 27, 31, 40–46, 74–82, 85–7, 97, 102, 105, 117, 121–32, 144, 147–9, 155, 160, 163, 166, 168–73, 182, 188, 192, 194 Consumption 2, 5–9, 37, 103, 105, 118, 121, 127, 131, 133, 139, 146, 182, 186, 188, 193, 218–22, 227, 229–31 Cosmopolitanism 166, 182, 192 Crompton, R. 39, 68 Cultural Capital 7, 15, 19–20, 23, 25, 28, 39, 42–3, 46–7, 57, 67, 77, 118, 120–21, 124, 127–8, 146, 160, 163, 182–5, 189, 192–4, 203, 223, 228, 240 Division of labour 38, 68, 89 Economic capital 19, 121, 149, 175, 182, 189, 191–3, 208 Education 2, 4–5, 10, 14, 16, 19, 21–3, 27–32, 35–6, 38–49, 53–62, 65, 67–9, 73–8, 81–9, 96, 99, 103, 112, 140, 155, 159, 160, 162, 166, 172, 174, 182, 201, 207, 211–12, 221, 228, 236, 239–40, 248, 250 Employment 2, 8–9, 14, 16, 19, 39–40, 55, 65, 67–8, 73–74, 79, 86, 96, 119, 123, 133, 140, 144, 148–9, 168, 181, 199, 204–5, 207, 235–6, 239–41, 244–7, 250

256

Classed Intersections

Enterprising self 15, 31 Ethnicity 2, 4–5, 14, 31, 36, 48, 55–7, 65, 73–7, 80–81, 85, 88–9, 105, 118, 132, 145, 159, 167, 183, 200, 249 Ethnography 89, 119 Evans, S. 53 Families 2, 4–5, 7, 27, 35, 40–41, 44, 55, 62, 69, 74–5, 77, 80–86, 89, 102, 105–6, 110, 118, 123, 126, 160–64, 168, 173–4, 187, 209, 237, 246 Families of choice 2, 7, 161–3, 174 Fathers 66, 74, 78, 82, 103, 105, 119, 247 Femininities 7–8, 218–19 Friendship 41, 55, 164, 168 Future 3–4, 9, 14, 18, 22–3, 29–30, 55, 65–9, 79, 82, 87, 89, 112, 123–4, 131–3, 161, 171, 189, 191, 194, 236, 247, 249–50 Gay Men 7, 174, 181–94 Gay scene 187–9, 193–4, 207 Gender 1–2, 4–9, 13–15, 20–21, 28, 30–31, 35, 37–8, 42, 46–9, 53–7, 59, 61–9, 73–7, 79, 82, 84, 88–9, 104–5, 117–18, 131, 145, 149, 171, 175, 182–3, 192, 199, 201, 214, 218–31, 235–51 Gender mainstreaming 68 Gentrification 6, 96, 137–46, 152, 154–5, 186 Giddens, A. 15, 17, 23, 144, 199–200, 217–18 Gidley, B. 95 Gillies, V. 4, 13, 16, 30–31, 75, 77, 82–3, 102, 120, 161–2, 165, 169, 171, 235 Habitus 43, 49, 56, 62, 66, 69, 103, 141, 143, 161, 208–12, 214, 223, 235–6, 241–3, 250 Haylett, C. 5, 14, 26–7, 29, 81, 95, 101, 105–6, 111, 132, 140, 246, 248 Hennessy, R. 182, 228 Heteronormativity 67 Heterosexuality 65, 119, 163, 212–13, 218, 229–30 Hidden injuries 41

Higher Education 4, 35–9, 42, 46–7, 53–62, 65–9, 73–4, 77, 86, 88, 201, 239, 248 Homophobia 165, 167, 172–4, 181–2, 202 Housing 5, 26, 54, 83, 95, 97, 102, 119, 122–3, 139, 141–2, 146–7, 153, 168–9, 204 Identification 7–8, 28, 53, 59, 126, 138, 145, 151, 154, 185, 188–9, 199– 200, 203–9, 213–14, 217, 220–21 Identity 1, 4, 6–8, 13–14, 16, 18–23, 25, 27–32, 39–45, 48, 55, 59–63, 65, 78, 81, 89, 95, 105, 112, 117–19, 121, 124, 126–33, 137–9, 141, 143–4, 148, 151, 154, 182–5, 188–94 Intersectionality 14, 29, 174 Intimacy 8, 16–17, 23, 162, 217–31 Islam 74–89 Labels 43, 78, 108, 129 Lawler, S. 3–4, 14–16, 21, 24, 26–9, 67, 79, 82, 121, 200–201, 207, 210, 212, 217, 219, 221–3, 228–9 Lesbian and gay parenting 10, 34, 71 Lifecourse 235, 249 Lifestyle 3, 8, 16, 21, 41, 69, 121, 130, 132, 137, 145, 161, 184, 185, 194, 217–19, 230, 244, 252 Manual work 36, 39, 78 Masculinities 7 McDermott, E. 199 Media 6–15, 17, 24–30, 38, 61, 102–5, 110, 120, 137, 146, 183, 186, 192 Mellor, J. 73 Mental health 200–202, 204–5, 208, 213–14 Middle-class 2–9, 14–15, 17–19, 23, 26, 30, 35–46, 55–9, 61, 65, 67, 76–9, 85, 89, 95, 99–109, 112, 127, 130, 137–47, 152–3, 159–75, 181, 186–90, 194, 199–214, 218–23, 226–8, 238, 241, 243, 247–50 Mix 27, 54, 56–60, 68, 87, 122, 140, 142, 149, 154, 160, 162–74, 201, 226 Mobility 4–6, 9, 17, 29, 35–6, 41–42, 45–9, 58–60, 62–5, 74–7, 82, 88, 104,

Index 107, 109, 152, 162, 181–4, 189, 191, 193–4, 200–208, 214, 236 Moran, L. 164–5, 199 Mothers 4, 6, 13–17, 21, 23–6, 31, 53, 65–6, 71, 74, 77–82, 87, 106, 117, 119–22, 124, 127, 131–3 Multiculturalism 27, 30, 81, 163 Murray, C. 17, 117 Muslim 5, 73, 82, 87–9 New Labour 15, 17, 20, 29, 31, 56, 68, 96, 101, 119, 155 Networks 5, 7, 19, 21–2, 73–7, 84–91, 96, 132, 142, 161–5, 170–71, 201, 208, 236 Parker, S. 13 Paton, K. 137 Performance 4, 8, 49, 59, 60, 65, 118, 128, 162, 203, 222, 225, 227–8 Politics 1, 14, 20, 22, 27–8, 53, 68–9, 81, 95, 108, 140, 145–6, 151, 160, 167, 170, 182, 217 Postcode discrimination 96 Poverty 27, 44, 48, 61, 75, 77, 80, 83, 89, 95–9, 111, 124, 140, 167, 169, 171, 219, 248 Production of knowledge 1, 3, 7–8, 13–21, 24, 29–32, 37, 56, 63, 75, 182–4, 188–90, 192–4, 199, 212, 214, 221, 223, 226, 229, 236–7, 240, 249–50 Putnam, R.D. 75, 83, 88 Queer theory 7, 105, 170, 182, 192–4, 200–201, 214 Race 1–24, 28, 53, 57, 60, 68–9, 79, 100–102, 106, 109, 112, 118, 163, 166, 182–3, 192

257

Racism 27, 80–81, 108 Reay, D. 4, 13–14, 17, 21, 31, 38, 42, 48–9, 58, 62, 80, 81–2, 96, 138, 144, 201–2, 220, 223, 235–36, 241 Reflexivity 9, 48, 200, 211, 221, 226, 229 Respectability 22, 86, 111, 119, 128, 130, 149, 219–20, 227, 229–30 Rooke, A. 97 Scene Space 8, 188, 192 Single parents 144 Skeggs, B. 2–5, 14–15, 18–31, 45, 48, 53, 65, 79, 95, 102–4, 108–9, 120–21, 129, 131, 137, 144–5, 148–9, 183, 193, 199–201, 205, 209, 211–14, 217–18, 220–23, 227, 229, 231, 233, 235–41, 248–53 Social capital 5, 7, 14, 19, 22, 27, 29, 73–7, 82–5, 88–9, 132, 149, 159–71, 174–5, 236 Tart 8, 221–31 Taylor, Y 1–9, 14, 19, 29, 31, 35, 45, 57, 61, 65, 67, 73, 140, 158–61, 163, 165, 182, 188, 192, 198, 200, 211, 213, 219, 250 Tourism 2, 7, 181–94 Unemployment 73–4 University 18–19, 23, 36, 41–3, 46, 49, 54–5, 57–8, 61–3, 67, 69, 73–89, 107, 150, 201–14 Wakeling, P. 35 Weeks, J. et al. 99, 159–63, 165, 168, 170, 172–5, 199, 217 Weston, K. 161–2, 165, 167, 191, 201 Whiteness 27, 30, 106, 159 Wilson–Kovacs, D. 217 Work–life balance 245–6