Beverly Skeggs

Formations of class and gender. Becoming respectable. Chapter 4 (excerpts)

Class is experienced by the women as exclusion. Whereas working-class men can use class as
a positive source of identity, a way of including themselves in a positively valorized social
category (Willis, 1977), this does not apply for working-class women. […]

Disidentifications

To me if you are working class it basically means that you are poor. That you have nothing.
You know, nothing. [Sam, I992]
The real working class are the ones you see hanging round the dole. They’re dead scruffy and
poor and they haven’t a job but I guess they may be working if they are working class, they may
be working. If they’re working class they should be working so they work, I guess, in all the
bad jobs. [Sheenah, 1992]
They’re rough. You can always tell. Rough, you know, the women are common as muck you
know, always have a fag in their mouths, the men are dead rough. You know. [Andrea, 1992]
Just poor, trying to get by on very little, it’s not their fault there’s no jobs anymore they’re the
ones who are struggling. [Michelle, 1992]
The ones who batter their kids. [Pam, 1992]
It used to be you were working class if you worked in the railways say and it didn’t mean you
had no money, but now it’s changed. Now it means that you don’t work, like it’s not those with
the good jobs now it’s those without jobs, they’re the real working-class. [Lisa, 1992]

[…]
The following comments begin to chart the processes by which (dis)identification occurs:

Well I think I’m working class and I’ll tell you why it’s because my mum has always had to
work for a living. She really struggles to keep us well fed and clothed. Now I work in a garage
at nights and the weekend to pay my way. She said she’d support me through college but I think
she’s supported us enough. She’s worked herself to death. We must be working class. [June,
1983]

and later:

No, I don’t think I’m working class at all now. Not after we bought the house and that . . . I
expect I’m now middle class . . . but it’s like when we go to Dave’s business dos, but 1 don’t
really feel like some of them, you know the real bosses’ wives with all their talk and that. I
sometimes feel really frightened to speak in case I show him up. I expect they’re really middle
class so I’m not really like them, but I’m not like the rest of our family without two pennies to
rub together. You know, I just don’t think class is a very useful term. I think I’m probably
classless. You know I’m not really one nor the other. I don’t really fit. [June, 1989] […]

The women may make disidentifications from being positioned as working class but this does
not mean to say that they want to take on the whole package of being middle class. Whilst the
imaginary middle class may represent elegance and sophistication, the real middle-class may
behave in ways the women do not want to be associated with, as the following comments
suggest:
It’s the way they think they know about things all the time. Sue’s [her sister] brother in-law is
a scream. He sits there pontificating. Talking absolute shite about everything. [just think he’s
a dickhead. We all do. Everyone takes the piss out of him. [Cindy, 1989]
They come into the restaurant ordering things in a hoity toity manner. They’re really ignorant.
It’s fucking pizzas for Christ sakes. We’d put snot on their pizzas you can never tell, and they’re
usually dead stingy with the tips. You can always tell the rich ones, they keep hold of their
money. [Rachel, 1986]
What gets me about these people with loads of money is they look crap. They haven’t a clue
about style, about what to wear, about how to put things together. If I had that much money I’d
look fucking brilliant. [Cynthia, 1992] […]

By insisting on the centrality of class to the lives of the women I am trying to claim and
legitimate one important aspect of their experience which they consciously try to disclaim. Even
though they dissimulate from class, their dissimulations are produced through it. In so doing I
want to suggest that class is not just a representation, nor a subject position which can be taken
off a discursive shelf and worn at will or a social position which can be occupied voluntarily.
Rather, I want to suggest that class is structural. […] Identities are continually in the process of
being re-produced as responses to social positions, through access to representational systems
and in the conversion of forms of capital. This chapter has shown how social positions and
cultural representations are entered into. These bring with them and enable access to differential
amounts of capital. For White working-class women this capital is limited: it is difficult to trade
with it on a market in which symbolic delegitimation has occurred. Their experiences were
dominated by exclusion from areas to trade their inherited capitals. They find it very difficult to
trade on being working class and even more difficult to find anything positive associated with
their working-class positioning. As the historical and contemporary analysis of class
representations suggests, we should not be surprised that the women do not want to be
recognized as such. However, the definitions of working-classness were by no means
straightforward. When they did attempt to identify themselves they first had difficulties finding
a discourse of class and, second, had problems with the methods of classification used to define
it. This was paralleled in the academic accounts of class where no clear meaning is agreed upon
and where classifications systems are strongly contested. The women tried to make sense of
their class positioning through employment, back ground, housing and money. They had a
strong sense that their social and cultural positioning was unjust. They did not adjust to their
social positioning (as Bourdieu 1986) would suggest. Rather they made strenuous efforts to
deny, disidentify and dissimulate. They attempted to display their distinction from being
classified as working-class through a variety of methods. To do so they made investments in
their bodies, clothes, consumption practices, leisure pursuits and homes. These investments
indicated a strong desire to pass as middle class. But it was only an imaginary middle class that
they wanted to be. They did not want to take on the whole package of dispositions. Their
responses to classification were informed by fear, desire, resentment and humiliation. They
were individualistic responses produced through their own bodies and influencing their
movement through social space. In this sense they become implicated in a similar mechanism
to that which enabled the construction of the caring self. Their class subjectivity monitors itself
dialogically through the real and imaginary experiences, perceptions and judgements of others.
It thus seems unlikely that the actions of these women are likely to lead to class politics, to class
organization or even to class consciousness of a directly articulated form. These women are
highly sensitive to issues of class and difference but they have no discourses available for them
to articulate it as a positive identity. Their class struggle is waged on a daily basis to overcome
the denigration and delegitimizing associated with their class positioning. This is why
representations are a key site in this class struggle; they are where symbolic violence occurs.“
Who would want to be seen as working class? (Possibly only academics are left.) Within the
field of cultural criticism working-class people have come to be seen as bearing the elemental
simplicity of class consciousness and little more. They have always been the site for the
projected longings of the rebellious middle classes who put their investment in change in others
rather than themselves. But these projections are here being refused. The women’s
consciousness of their classifications, their devaluing, their inability to get it right and their
inability to be without shame, humiliation and judgement is part of the reason why they turn to
respectability and responsibility as a means of establishing a valued and legitimate way of being
and way of being seen.