Formations of Class & Gender

Becoming Respectable

Beverley Skeggs

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9780761955122, 9780761955115
• eBook ISBN: 9781446228296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Explanations of how identities are constructed are fundamental to contemporary debates in feminism and in cultural and social theory. Formations of Class & Gender demonstrates why class should be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity and power.

Beverley Skeggs identifies the neglect of class, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society. The book questions how theoretical frameworks are generated for understanding how women live and produce themselves through social and cultural relations. It uses detailed ethnographic research to explain how ?real? women inhabit and occupy the social and cultural positions of class, femininity and sexuality.

As a critical examination of cultural representation - informed by recent feminist theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu - the book is an articulate demonstration of how to translate theory into practice.

1

Introduction: Processes, Frameworks and Motivations

I think my clothing says I’m respectable. [Mary, 1992]

All my life I’ve wanted to say ‘look I’m as good as you’, well now I think this house says it. It says ‘I’ve made it, I’m respectable and you can’t put me down’. [Yvonne, 1992]

Respectability is one of the most ubiquitous signifiers of class. It informs how we speak, who we speak to, how we classify others, what we study and how we know who we are (or are not). Respectability is usually the concern of those who are not seen to have it. Respectability would not be of concern here, if the working classes (Black and White) had not consistently been classified as dangerous, polluting, threatening, revolutionary, pathological and without respect.¹ It would not be something to desire, to prove and to achieve, if it had not been seen to be a property of ‘others’, those who were valued and legitimated. If respectability had not been one of the key mechanisms by which some groups were ‘othered’ and pathologized it would not be the subject of this study. It is rarely recognized as an issue by those who are positioned with it, who are normalized by it, and who do not have to prove it. Yet for those who feel positioned by and position themselves against the discourse of respectability it informs a great deal of their responses. For the 83 White working-class women of this longitudinal ethnographic study, set in the North West of England, respectability is always an issue.

Feminist (and) cultural theory proliferates with theories of identities and subjective constructions, but few of these theories explore the processes by which ‘real’ women negotiate and understand them ‘selves’. This book contextualizes theoretical debates through closely detailed ethnographic research. It is based on research conducted over a total period of 12 years including three years’ full-time, in-the-field participant observation. It began when the women enrolled on a ‘caring’ course at a local college and it follows their trajectories through the labour market, education and the family. In this sense, it is part of what Marcus (1992) defines as modernist ethnography which concentrates on how subjectivities are constructed across a range of different sites, across time, enabling long-term analysis of movements, investments and positionings. It is part of the British Cultural Studies tradition in that theoretical, methodological and political concerns are worked through empirical understandings and that careful attention is paid to the historical legacies which inform contemporary representations. The book draws on a range of cultural and feminist theorists to engage with the lived experience of how the women inhabit different social positions and cultural representations.

There has been a marked tendency in recent years to move away from talking and listening to those outside of academia. This book shows how theory can be radically transformed if others are let in on the conversations. The women of this study are not just ciphers from which subject positions can be read-off; rather, they are active in producing the meaning of the positions they (refuse to, reluctantly or willingly) inhabit. The methodological debates about the production of knowledge are central to the book which engages in the more general debates within epistemology about reflexivity and methodology whilst also making explicit the processes through which the theories are constituted and reconstituted over time.

Whilst this book draws on the attempts of a specific group of women to negotiate class, gender, hetero/sexuality, femininity, caring and feminism, it does have a more general address. That is to question how feminists, cultural theorists and sociologists have generated frameworks to understand how women live and produce themselves through social and cultural relations. The ramifications of the particular analysis provide a grounded framework which is applicable to other groups (who are always positioned in proximity to respectability).² Respectability contains judgements of class, race, gender and sexuality and different groups have differential access to the mechanisms for generating, resisting and displaying respectability.³ By using respectability as an analytical tool this book aims to reinstate class in feminist (and) cultural theory. This is because class as a concept and working-class women as a group have almost disappeared from the agendas of feminism and cultural theory. Yet, as this book will show, the category ‘woman’ is always produced through processes which include class and classifying produces very real effects which are lived on a daily basis.

This introduction maps the centrality of respectability to the development of class categorizations. It then makes an argument for reinstating class and establishes a framework for doing so. The final section provides an outline and documents the motivations for the book.

Respectable Distinctions

Respectability was a central mechanism through which the concept class emerged. Finch (1993) shows how the categorization of social groups in the UK and Australia occurred through the interpretation of the behaviour of women of urban slums and the classification of them into respectable and non-respectable. This division, she argues, came to be seen as a reasonable way of relating to, and intervening in, the lives of people defined as working class; and Nead (1988) shows how judgements about respectability were central to nineteenth-century visual representations of femininity and moral judgements about women’s appearance. Judgements of respectability were also central to the organization of women’s homes, their childcare practices and the control they exercised over members of their family. These judgements persevere, as Susan notes in response to visits by a Health Visitor:

You know they’re weighing you up and they ask you all these indirect questions as if you’re too thick to know what they’re getting at and you know all the time they’re thinking ‘she’s poor, she’s no good, she can’t bring her kids up properly’ and no matter what you do they’ve got your number. To them you’re never fit, never up to their standards. [Susan, 1992]

All the time you’ve got to weigh everything up: is it too tarty? will I look like a right slag in it? what will people think? It drives me mad that every time you go to put your clothes on you have to think ‘do I look dead common? is it rough? do I look like a dog?’ [Anne, 1992]

Respectability has always been a marker and a burden of class, a standard to which to aspire: Engels, in the nineteenth century, described the ideal of respectability as ‘a most repulsive thing’, ‘a false consciousness bred into the bones of the workers’ (1953: 522–3). The classification by and of the working classes into rough and respectable has a long history (see Stacey, 1975): many attempts – often through religion – were made to ‘rescue’ White working-class women from the clutches of non-respectability. To not be respectable is to have little social value or legitimacy.

Respectability was also central to the development of the notion of Englishness. It was a key characteristic of what it meant to belong, to be worthy and to be an individual. As Strathern (1992) notes, respectability was the means by which morality was made public and seen to be an object of knowledge. Respectability embodies moral authority: those who are respectable have it, those who are not do not. But only some groups were considered to be capable of being moral, others were seen to be in need of control. Strathern argues ‘the first fact of English kinship is the individuality of persons’; this individuality was only available to the genteel middle classes. They were defined against the lack of individuality of the masses. ‘Individuals’ were the respectable, the moral, the worthy, the English, the White and the non-working class, who could sit in judgement of others. Respectability became a property of middle-class individuals defined against the masses. This early mapping of class relationships onto what it meant to be a worthy, moral individual provides a legacy and framework for this study and for understanding the desires for respectability today. Whilst class relations have clearly been refigured through different historical periods, certain central features remain. The working classes are still ‘massified’ and marked as others in academic and popular representations where they appear as pathological: the cynical use of single mothers in the UK to represent a threat to social order to generate support for Conservative party policy on law and order (at the 1995 Party Conference) and the use of ‘Welfare Mothers’ and ‘Crack Babies’ in the US shows how easily historical constructs can be recycled. Similarly, a recent magazine fashion spread in the UK edition of Marie Claire entitled ‘Council Estate Slags’ suggests that working-class women are still represented through their ‘deviant’ sexuality.⁴

The women of this study are aware of their place, of how they are socially positioned and of the attempts to represent them. This constantly informs their responses. They operate with a dialogic form of recognition: they recognize the recognitions of others. Recognitions do not occur without value judgements and the women are constantly aware of the judgements of real and imaginary others. Recognition of how one is positioned is central to the processes of subjective construction. Throughout the book I show how experiences of being positioned and classified (as working class, as heterosexual, as feminine, as caring, as vulgar, as feminist) produce different responses which impact upon subjective construction. These recognitions enable the women to navigate themselves through classificatory systems and measure and evaluate themselves accordingly. One central feature of the research is how the positions they occupy are rarely accommodated with comfort. They live their social locations with unease. The book explores the uneasy sense of standing under signs to which one does and does not belong (Butler, 1992).

The central themes which are used throughout the book are as follows: first, processes of identification and differentiation, including recognition, disidentification, dissimulation and subjective construction; second, issues of location, positioning and movement through social space and place – here special attention is given to issues of access; third, interrogation and applicability of concepts and categories used here and in feminist theory more generally, and fourth, the deployment of different forms of capital. This chapter first makes an argument for reinstating class into feminist and cultural theory. It then sets out frameworks, used in the rest of the book – on metaphors of capital and processes of subjective production – ending with chapter outlines and a brief discussion of my motivation to study respectability.

Reinstating Class

Finch (1993) examines how ‘the working class’ as a category came into effect through middle-class conceptualizations. These conceptualizations were produced from anxiety about social order and through attempts by the middle class to consolidate their identity and power by distancing themselves from definable ‘others’. The middle class, Finch shows, came to recognize themselves through difference: a difference they produced through the generation and distribution of representations of different ‘others’: as McClintock notes:

The degenerate classes, defined as departures from the normal human type, were as necessary to the self-definition of the middle-class as the idea of degeneration was to the idea of progress, for the distance along the path of progress travelled by some portions of humanity could be measured only by the distance others lagged behind. (1995: 46)

The conceptualizations of the middle classes were enabled by particular Enlightenment technologies, such as social surveys, observation, photography and ethnography, which were part of a project to constitute ‘reason’ through the classification of observable behaviour, what Finch defines as the ‘classing gaze’:

The range of chosen concerns through which middle-class observers made sense of the observed, included references to: living room conditions … drinking behaviour … language (including both the type of things which were spoken about, and the manner in which they were referred to - literally the types of words used); and children’s behaviour … These were moral, not economic, references. (1993: 10; emphasis added)

By the end of the nineteenth century ‘the working class’ had become a knowable, measurable and organizable category. They could be recognized and they could learn to recognize themselves through categorization: a categorization which initially had no meaning for them. The importance of the use of moral categories, Finch argues, is that it placed women at the centre of the discursive construction because it was women who were predominantly observed. At the core of all articulations of the working class was the discursive construct of the modern, that is middle-class, family in which the behaviour of women was interpreted in relation to their role as wives and mothers and based on their responsibility, the control of their sexuality, their care, protection and education of children and their capacity for the general surveillance of working-class men. Observation and interpretation of the sexual behaviour of working-class women on the basis of their appearance was central to the production of middle-class conceptualizations.

The cult of domesticity was central to the self-defining of the middle classes and to the maintenance of ideas of an imperialist nation. Yet the labour involved in its production was often made invisible by the use of ‘downstairs’ domestic servants (McClintock, 1995). The self-defining of the middle classes also produced, McClintock (1995) argues, the categorizations of race. These categorizations were interlocked with those of class through the generic definition of ‘dangerous classes’. Domestic servants, for instance, were often depicted by the racialized iconography of degradation - of contagion, promiscuity and savagery. As Engels (1844/1958) notes of the working class: ‘a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and intellectually to bestiality’ (p. 33) who are ‘a race wholly apart’ (p. 361). Depictions of domestic degeneracy, McClintock shows, were widely used to mediate the contradictions in imperial hierarchy.

It is these historical productions of class into which any representation of class is located: class is a discursive, historically specific construction, a product of middle-class political consolidation, which includes elements of fantasy and projection. The historical generation of classed categorizations provide discursive frameworks which enable, legitimate and map onto material inequalities. Class conceptualizations are tautological in that positioning by categorizations and representation influence access to economic and cultural resources. The discursive constructions are recognized as a form of positioning; which is why attempts to classify the women as working class generated such negative responses (as shown in Chapter 5). They have been positioned by the historical discursive construct of class and this has an effect on how they understand themselves and others.

The long and continual process of representing the working class did not have its history in the re-presentation of an original, of a real; yet the continual re-presentation of representations, which some theorists would identify as a process of reiteration (where representations continually reference themselves through daily reproduction) does have real effects in the responses that people make to them. Representations, however, as this study shows, are not straightforwardly reproduced but are resisted and transfigured in their daily enactment. Categories of class operate not only as an organizing principle which enable access to and limitations on social movement and interaction but are also reproduced at the intimate level as a ‘structure of feeling’ (cf. Williams, 1961, 1977) in which doubt, anxiety and fear inform the production of subjectivity. To be working-classed, Kuhn (1995) argues, generates a constant fear of never having ‘got it right’.

Without understanding the significance of class positioning many of the women’s movements through social space, through education, families, labour markets and in particular, in the production of their subjectivity, could not be understood. Yet class has almost disappeared from feminist analyses, even those claiming a materialist feminist position (see, for instance, Hennessy, 1993).⁵ This may be because in the past the majority of feminist debates on class have focused on very detailed Marxist analysis of the family, the labour market and the value of domestic labour (Breugel, 1979; Brenner and Ramas, 1984) or it may be that it has disappeared because class itself is so hard to define. For instance, do we mean class structure, identity, consciousness, action, and so on when we speak of class? Other difficult...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Fm
• 1 Introduction: Processes, Frameworks and Motivations
• 2 Respectable Knowledge: Experience and Interpretation
• 3 Historical Legacies: Respectability and Responsibility
• 4 Developing and Monitoring a Caring Self
• 5 (Dis)Identifications of Class: On Not Being Working Class
• 6 Ambivalent Femininities
• 7 Becoming Respectably Heterosexual
• 8 Refusing Recognition: Feminisms
• 9 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index