Fitting into Place?

Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities

Yvette Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317134886
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Fitting into Place adopts a multi-dimensional interdisciplinary approach to explore shifting geographies and temporalities that re-constitute 'city publics' - and the place of the 'public sociologist'. Class, race and gender (dis)advantages are situated in relation to urban-rural contrasts, where 'future selves' are reconfigured in and through 'local' and 'global' sites: people inhabit shifting times and places, from industrial landscapes of the 'past', to a current present and (imagined) 'cosmopolitan' 'regenerated' future. The rhetorics and vocabularies of place, as affective and material, suggest a more complex 'fit' than the language of masculine 'crisis' for past-times, or 'feminised' fit into new-futures, suggests. Across the generations, women's labour is still effaced as maps of loyalty hold up families as reference points of belonging and 'fitting in'; such architecture of place complicates reified 'geographies of choice' which centre a middle-class mobile subject. Based upon funded empirical research, this book will be of interest to sociologists and geographers.

Chapter 1
Fitting into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities

Meanings, Experiences and Opportunities of ‘Fitting into Place’

The contested nature of social transformation as fractured, uneven in pace and ongoing, undermines any attempt to easily or finally convey what was against what is, to make people and places ‘fit’ in changing versions of then and now, of past, present and future. Both tradition and modernity are revised through conserved pasts and projected futures, felt publically and privately. To ‘fit in’ may be thought of as a binding straightjacket, a restriction in getting out and ahead, or it may shore up a sense of comfortable ease and belonging. The ‘fit’ may signal a claim to change and advancement, as against being ‘stuck’ in the past, out of date and out of step. The ‘when’ – as modern and future orientated or traditional and backward – also implies a ‘where’, in terms of the places created and inhabited in changing times. Futures are created and extended across local, regional, national and international spaces, connecting social pasts with current times and linking individual and social presences (and absences) affectively and materially: Illouz (2007), for example, has discussed the making of ‘emotional capitalism’ as necessitating a fast ‘becoming’, an opening up of new frontiers for returns, which fosters a culture of inadequacy, achievement and anxiety. Different feelings, of (not) ‘keeping up’ or ‘contributing’, can be located spatially within national values (Ahmed 2000), as the worth of citizens are continually assessed – rather than newly occurring in times of economic and ecological ‘crisis’ (Tolia-Kelly 2010).

Imagining ourselves to be in, or to have a place, often involves complex feelings of loss and gain, entrenching a sense of belonging or rupturing this through disconnecting claims, entitlements and longings. These ‘economies of feeling’ work across different contexts and are present in everyday geographies as well as in macro social structures that (re)produce classed and gendered subjects and spaces (Skeggs 1997, Nayak and Kehily, 2008, Fortier 2008, Taylor 2007, 2009, Evans 2010). Not everyone can ‘fit in’, or flexibly cast themselves through trajectories of future potential, as the city and citizenry are also recast through regeneration and rebranding – and not everyone wants to ‘fit in’ to such spaces. Alongside commodified multi-culturalism celebrated in ideas of regenerative ‘mixed’ space – inhabited by ‘mixed’ acquisitive subjects – sits the temporal, inter-generational passage of risk residing in specific landscapes of disadvantage and degeneration (Thrift 2004, Bristow 2010). Notions of accretion and capacity contrast with erosion and culpability and are manifest in uneven effects across space where only certain people, with particular histories and geographies, are able to embrace and capitalise upon change.

Yet sociological thought has moved from a vision of identity located in distinct, solid markers of a person’s position (fixed employment positions, stable regional identities) set within a social hierarchy, towards investigations of identities as fluid, flexible, multifaceted and deterritorialised. Such ‘fluidities’ often centre those entitled and mobile in relation to geographical residence and lifestyle variety, anticipating how and who to be and where to be it. Notions of choice and change also shape research preferences where new rules of sociological method are proposed for a developed focus ‘… upon movement, mobility and contingent ordering, rather than upon a stasis, structure and social order’ (Urry 2000: 18 in Adkins 2002: 4). Such a call variously recognises the ways that class, gender, race and nationhood are redone anew and often aims to take account of social paradoxes and contradictions (Tolia-Kelly 2010). Despite this, less is said of the retention of identities and enduring inequalities as class in particular is dismissed as a relic of the past. Middle-class selves are frequently centred and placed in perpetual motion, always becoming rather than being. But to be someone is often a declaration of worth, investment and reflexive spatialised potential, reliant on positioning others as lacking; as un-reflexive, immobile, static and out of place (Evans 2010). ‘Types’ of people are understood to inhabit ‘types’ of locales (Taylor 2004, Parker 2010): middle-class people are positioned as regenerating places, ‘fitting into place’ as aligned citizens able to claim and activate a ‘city publics’ (Watson 2006, Pini and Leach 2011).

Herein lies the emergence and consolidation of classed forms of placed personhood, the ‘optimising self’, who is future-oriented and self-regulating, that ‘fit’ into contemporary economic and social formations (Skeggs 2004, Adkins 2008, Evans 2010, Armstrong 2010). Individuals are increasingly expected to take responsibility for their trajectories, assembling a range of networks and capitals in order to envisage and pursue a fulfilling and productive future: to ‘come forward’ and claim space as theirs (Beck 2005, McRobbie 2009, Adkins 2009). Here, questions can be asked about relentlessly individualising discourses of opportunity, choice, responsibility and aspiration: which social subjects are able to mobilise and spatialise their interests in order to achieve legitimate subject-positions in these new landscapes? When opportunities are to be negotiated by the discerning individual consumer-worker-resident what does it mean to be future-oriented, to move through these new ‘flexible’ and ‘resilient’ landscapes? New choices may be available for some but inequalities resurface as people go about investing in their future selves according to logics of choice, attainment and embodied accomplishment – where some cannot and/or will not invest or ‘appear’ in place (Bourdieu 1984, Adkins 2002, Skeggs 2004, Reay et al. 2009, 2010).

Many have signalled continuity as well as discontinuity, as change itself re-embeds rather than dismantles inequalities. The measure of change frequently encompasses normative judgement and evaluation: what – or indeed who – is worth losing or gaining? Who do we want to ‘fit in’? How might classed and gendered pasts, presents, and futures collide rather than cohere in everyday places? ‘Old’ inequalities and identifications resonate in the contemporary, fostering classed and gendered re-articulations in everyday landscapes. Attending to the intersections in ‘fitting into place’ means moving away from classed notions of hesitant subjects simply unwilling to individually re-orientate themselves towards their already, always future-orientated (middle-classed) counterparts. It means pursuing a space for class and gender within new academia collisions where (non)academic economies of motivation do not signal individual tardiness or backwardness but rather enduring tensions.

The Place of Class and Gender

Many commentators have signalled, celebrated and queried the ‘new times’ of today: women in particular have been held up as the new subjects of capacity, coming forward in their entry into education and employment, re-shaping traditional patriarchy (Nayak and Kehily 2008). Discourses on the ‘crisis of men’ also highlight new times, alongside old lamented ways (Nayak 2003, Hopkins 2009, Strangelman 2004, McRobbie 2008). In exploring where these changes are occurring and the local-global (dis)connections across place, Nayak and Kehily (2008) argue that reversals of feminised ‘success’ and masculine ‘crisis’ are powerful tropes which conceal as much as they reveal (Hey 2003). Gender is done through the ‘circuits of everyday life’ (Nayak and Kehily 2008) and these circuits frequently still reproduce heteronormative assumptions, as class is also lived through gender, sexuality and race – as well as in and through family structure, background and relationship to the local area (Taylor 2009). Attaching words like ‘success’ or ‘crisis’ to gendered movements signifies an emotional politics circulating around embodied presences and absences, supposed gains and lamented losses. Research has demonstrated continued expectations regarding predetermined future heterosexual relationships and future motherhood (Evans 2010, Armstrong 2010), with younger women reading their future commitment to their own families into their current plans, while older women respond to these commitments as mothers and grandmothers. The fact that women still take on these responsibilities says something about the extent to which gender equality has been achieved, as well as the (re)generation of new-old ‘gender regimes’ (Walby 2002, 2009). The ‘haunting’ of the past stalls, sticks and fuses then and now, where ‘old’ times, people and places are not simply substituted in the forward motion of the ‘new’ (Furlong and Cartmel 1997, Binnie 2000, Skeggs 2004).

As borders between ‘now’ and ‘then’ are temporally and geographically reconfigured how does one find and know their own place within sticky regional-national-international boundaries of sameness and difference, embodied in ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinctions? Such stickiness at once alludes to moral and material associations – we cannot help but imagine a slightly suspect subject in the shadows: the geographer might want to give her a map, the sociologist might want to give her an interview and the politician may want to give her ‘responsibility’ and a sense of civic duty. We’d all probably lose her in these attempted captures. Yet the desire for capturing the new – and the ‘old’ – cannot be underestimated or easily dismissed. Newness in particular holds an appeal, a possibility, and a different way of being. But when or where is this achieved, and what losses as well as gains may be highlighted when the ‘new’ of today is pitted against the past of yesterday – when the future of tomorrow as free, open and up for grabs is abstracted from constraints, traditions, legacies and inequalities? To situate analysis as still concerned with gender and class inequalities becomes a risky, potentially ‘boring’ out-of-date project, where the stubborn academic is digging her heels in and is herself somewhat out of place, incapable of leaping forward. So, what is a girl to do?

The girl of today has been imbued with youthful potential, able to take-up her place in the world of work, to move between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces with ever more visibility and confidence, to juggle her time more effectively and achieve a balance between career and care (Adkins 2002, Walby 2009, McRobbie 2009). As an abstraction this girl is perhaps very appealing; what’s not to like about her? She’s efficient. She finds herself called upon by academics, politicians, media commentators, all asking, guessing, how far she can take us, the family, the community, the nation, in extending forward into a global world. Yet the capacities invoked here do not include all: some are rendered not as capable subjects but as culpable ones, as those not able to move ‘us’ forward. Taking this into account does not so much return us completely to the ‘old’ of yesterday, but rather compels a re-thinking of the interconnection between tradition and futurity, marked on the embodied presences of women in inhabiting their everyday worlds. In such inhabitations we can ask if we are first and foremost members of a family, residents of a community, or citizens of a country? Or are these now redundant associations, remnants of a bygone age when we identify and belong in more ‘global’ ways, unbound by geographical constraint, able instead to materialise different kinds of journeys and associations? We may all always be in motion in the most mundane of ways, whether changing a sentence once complete and now edited, or in retraining, re-skilling, adding another publication to the CV. But we may do all this without being, or being seen as promotional, cosmopolitan subjects, able to spatialise and actualise our own knowingness, self-interests and social networks (Binnie et al. 2006, Butler 2007).

Many want to consign the ‘old’ of class to the pages of history and to a naïve sociology, now transformed by shifts, flows and networks; by assemblages, affects and tendencies. While such turns have the potential to speak to complex intersections, we have to be alert to what avenues are closed down in turning to ‘new’ words unattached to lived lives. In re-describing our academic interests, excitements and tendencies, are we propelling only our own ‘newness’ forward as an individualising trajectory which itself displaces classed and gendered realities? In mapping new circulations and productions, we may ask if class was ever only about one thing; was the measure ever purely economic? Was the location ever only in one place?

In measurable income and employment classifications that which is ‘… a fraught and highly sensitive issue for many people has all too often become, in the hands of the sociologists, a dry academic debate about social classification schema’ (Sayer 2002: 2). This dryness of measure is followed dramatically by ‘death’, where class is positioned as ‘zombie category’ (Beck 2000). Yet whilst industrial restructuring has led some commentators to declare class redundant, others demonstrate complex shifts in the mapping of class. Powerfully, Reay (2000) declares classlessness a ‘myth’ given that a whole range of institutional power relations, between the state, the individual and capitalist driven markets, depend upon the reproduction and reiteration of class. Even as class is dismissed it is still known and done, as Skeggs argues: ‘while there have been claims from academics and politicians that class no longer exists, there has also been a massive proliferation of popular cultural output devoted to its expression’ (2004: 5). Class is shaped through these battles in academic, popular and political arenas, arguably intensified in contemporary representations of worthy workers, citizens and individuals. Rather than disappearing, such distinctions are produced at ever more intimate levels, including bodily disposition and appearance, made known in (de) valuing ourselves and others (Skeggs 1997, 2004, Sayer 2005, Gillies 2007, Parker 2010). It is precisely because class is so embedded that it becomes disguised as an explicit category; as we take up new spaces and subjectivities, as we move from responsible worker to tasteful consumer, class is done with and without our clear consent.

Some of the most extreme classed mis-representation is taken as a truth, located on specific bodies as in the case of the contemporary UK figure of the ‘chav’: such terms are replicated in different locations all acting to deride working-classness (Wray and Newitz 1997, Nayak 2003, Pascoe 2007, Gidley and Rooke 2010). These current formations reveal (dis)taste of working-class pasts and presents, where heroics and romantics are replaced in the contemporary with disgust and distaste (Roberts 1999, Lawler 2005, Parker 2010). The past, predominantly male, worlds of heavy manufacturing work are (re)mapped where classing now pervades a range of sites as an acutely gendering and sexualised process (Savage 2000, Skeggs 2004, Taylor 2007, Parker 2010, Wilson-Kovacs 2010). Tropes of incivility, sexual immorality and located excess circulate widely with young working-class mothers in particular vilified as ‘chav’ and ‘welfare’ mums (Nunn and Biressi 2008, Tyler 2008, Clavering 2010): ‘The poor are increasingly identified by where they live, what they wear, what they eat and how they parent their children as much as where they actually work’ (Wills 2008: 28). In contrast, ‘tight, white, middle-class mothers’, positioned as cultural and national bearers of future, are tasked with bringing forth neo-liberal citizens (Baraitser 2009, Gillies 2006, Parker 2010). Skeggs (2004) suggest that such representations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers, citizens and futures, signal an acceptance, legitimisation and institutionalisation of class differences, where middle-classness is assured and reproduced in opposition to its pathological other. Yet even the middle-class mother may not find this an entirely comfortable location (Taylor 2009).

Taking account of such complex intersections, Skeggs argues for a reinvigorated class framework that ‘… goes beyond the ‘economic’ and exchange to understand the consequences of cultural struggle and how this is part of new marketisation, new attributions of value, new forms of appropriation, exploitation and governance, and new selves’ (2004: 186). Yet within class analysis cultural, social and economic aspects are often differently valued, where ‘structural’ frames are invoked to demonstrate the ‘real’ higher stakes of class analysis – as well as its ‘structural’ disappearance (see Hennessy 2000, Taylor 2011a, Seidman 2011). Such a stance skips over the complex ways that economic and cultural aspects combine to bring class into effect on an everyday level, through immediate associations and (mis)recognitions. This is not to make the ‘notoriously slippery’ concept of class more graspable in invoking it as a ‘catch all’ (Adair 2005, Bottero 2004) but the swings and dismissals between a solely materialist view of class and a ‘cultural turn’ may well fail to catch that which matters still (Binnie 2011).

To speak of continuations is not to deny the complexity and complications of ‘working-class’ and ‘middle-class’ as conceptual and experienced categories. Inhabiting middle-classness may not always be a seamless ‘fit’ intersecting with, for example, sexual status, whereby middle-class capitals are ‘lost’ and recuperated (Taylor 2009, 2011a,c). And classed capitals are not simply held and carried automatically but rather they can be regenerative, accumulated across time and holding subjects ‘in place’ even in insecure instances. Both ‘working-class’ and ‘middle-class’ are moveable, inter-related categories rather than self-evident and clear-cut: that said, how they materialise and (mis)position people in everyday life can be quick, automatic and prohibitive of individual choice and movement beyond classification. ‘Choice’ attaches to everyday dis-identifications in the moments that class is assigned, taken-up, rejected and disclaimed: there can be an embarrassment around middle-classness where disclaimers may shore up a sense of ‘ordinariness’, highlighting the unease of that category – as well as its relative ease as a neutral taken-for-granted middle-ground, neither ‘upper’ nor ‘lower’, just right, if you please (Mendez 2010). The boundary work between these categories is disruptive and cementing of material and moral hierarchies, where middle-classness is re-done via ‘chosen’ geographical repertoires, via future-orientated trajectories and projects of self-making, and via a cosmopolitan knowingness which can encompass other pasts and places (Savage et al. 2005, Savage 2010, Taylor 2010a).

All this compels a re-engagement with class as increasingly complex. Much existing literature on class formations highlights the ways that working-class people are unwilling to identify themselves in classed based terms, posing a crisis of self-identification. In fact, Skeggs (2004) and Savage (2005) posit a recent re-configuration of class relations in British popular culture, such that a (frequently unmarked) middle-class position has attained a cultural and ideological dominance in the neo-liberal social order, squeezing out an earlier possibility of collective working-class subjectivity. In rethinking class, and the terrain on which class identifications can occur, there is still room to consider the possibility of recognition, as ‘past’ biographies and histories act as resources for formulating and understanding present classed experiences. But care has to be taken in ‘returns’ to sociological agendas, debated and deemed as ‘past’: there can be no simple journey home to a purer form of class analysis free from considering intersecting inequalities of gender, race, sexuality and generation (McDowell 2008, Taylor et al. 2010). Our girl of the future has to be understood as coming from somewhere – rather than dislocated from place and standing for everywhere (Nayak and Kehily 2008, Walkerdine et al. 2001).

This research retains the conceptual categories of ‘class’ and ‘gender’ and demonstrates what these still do on an everyday, empirical level. In hoping to answer over-lapping concerns, a wide range of interdisciplinary literature and frameworks are drawn upon: feminist frameworks regarding gender inequality and identity (Adkins 2002; Skeggs 1997, 2004, McRobbie 2009); human geography perspectives on regeneration, gentrification and the spatialisation of class (McDowell 2005 et al. 2005, 2006, Binnie et al. 2006, Watson 2006); and interdisciplinary work on emotions, strangeness, memory and nostalgia as grounded in particular economies of space (Ahmed 2004, Back 2007, Tolia-Kelly 2010). In pulling such literatures together there is a risk that the academic will herself fall out of space rather than neatly ‘fit in’; such selections, even when incomplete, aim to best speak to the empirical and analytical questions that are attended to here.

Class, Gender and ‘Fitting into Place’

Explorations are based on ESRC funded research (2007–2009) and, as the project title ‘From the coal face to the car park? The intersection of class and gender in women’s lives in the North East of England’ implies, the objectives lie in charting gendered transitions from the industrial landscapes of one or two generations ago, to a current present and (imagined) future. The concern is with the reconfiguration of class and gender relations in relation to spatialised urban-rural ‘publics’, where ‘future selves’ are constructed in specific settings, negotiated as people live out shifting geographies and temporalities. A specifically classed framework of intersecting social, cultural and economic capitals1 has analytical purchase in theorising younger and older women’s experience of transition, extended in considering the ways that classed capitals may also be understood as gendered (Bourdieu 1984, Adkins and Skeggs 2004, Lareau 2003, Devine 2004, Reay 2004). Class and gender account for the differentiation of ‘future selves’ in extending and limiting geographical range: this is witnessed, for example, in the intersection of schooling, residential and parental geographies which extend the middle-class child into a space of her own; it is reflected in regenera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Fitting into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities
• 2 ‘City Publics’ and the ‘Public Sociologist’
• 3 Affective Geographies: Regional Re-framings
• 4 Geographies of Choice (or Not)
• 5 Fertile Spaces: Landscaping Gender
• 6 Geographies of Excess: ‘What’s in a name, What’s in a number?’
• 7 Regeneration and Degeneration: Proximities and Distances
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• Index