Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. The comment, of course, articulates class as primarily a cultural category, and thus performs the task of disguising the realities of class as much as it illu- minates them. Displacing class as an economic category, a fundamental struc- tural feature of a capitalist society, might be seen as a way of de-politicising the question, rendering it safe by reducing it to talk about accents, attitudes, tastes and behaviours. This is an emphasis the English, in particular, are more than comfortable with. I will discuss some of these “displacements” throughout the book. 2. A powerful critique of class analysis came also from a resurgent feminism. More significantly, though, and going against this tide, were the contributions of female scholars who insisted on the continued relevance of class, and its necessary intersection with gender. This was begun in 1986 with Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, an early intervention in the ‘end of class’ debate. Other works include Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions (1991); Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995); and Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (1997). 3. I will be referring to some of this work throughout: some key texts include Beverley Skeggs, (1997, 2004); Diane Reay (1997, 2000); Andrew Milner (1999, 2002); Gary Day (2001); Sally Munt (ed., 2000); Ben Rampton (2006). 4. Where succeeding Prime Ministers – most recently, Thatcher, Major and Blair – had hoped to see off the topic of class, still it rears its head, even at the most unpropitious moment: indeed at moments of supposed goodwill to all men and women. Thus, on the eve of Christmas 2005, I received the following by email attachment (I was one of many names on a long list). Described as the “Chav Xmas Story”, this followed: There’s this bird called Mary, yeah? She’s a virgin (wossat then?). She’s not married or nuffink, but she’s got this boyfriend, Joe, innit? He does joinery an’ that. Mary lives with him in a crib dahn Nazaref. One day Mary meets this bloke Gabriel. She’s like “Oo ya looking at?” Gabriel just goes ‘You got one up the duff, you have.” Mary’s totally gobsmacked. She give it to him large “Stop dissin’ me yeah? I ain’t no Kappa-slapper. I never bin wiv no one!” So Mary goes and sees her cousin Liz, who’s six months gone herself. Liz is largin’ it. She’s filled with spirits, Bacardi Breezers an’ that. She’s like “Orright, Mary, I can feel me bay-bee in me tummy and I reckon I’m well blessed. Think of all the extra benefits an’ that we are gonna get.” Mary goes “Yeah, s’pose you’re right”. Mary an’ Joe ain’t got no money so they have to ponse a donkey, an’ go dahn Bethlehem on that. They get to this pub an’ Mary wants to stop, yeah? To have her bay-bee an’ that. But there ain’t no room at the inn, innit? So Mary an’ Joe break an’ enter into this garridge, only it’s filled wiv animals. Cahs an’ sheep an’ that. Then these three geezers 209 210 Notes turn up, looking proper bling, wiv crowns on their heads. They’re like “Respect, bay-bee Jesus”, an’ say they’re wise men from the East End. Joe goes: “If you’re so wise, wotchoo doin’ wiv this Frankenstein an’ myrrh? Why dincha just bring gold, Adidas and Burberry?” It’s all about to kick off when Gabriel turns up again an’ sez he’s got another message from this Lord geezer. He’s like “The police is comin an’ they’re killin all the bay- bees. You better nash off to Egypt.” Joes goes “You must be monged if you think I’m goin’ dahn Egypt on a minging donkey.” Gabriel sez “Suit yerself, pal. But it’s your look out if you stay.” So they go dahn Egypt til they’ve stopped killin the first-born an’ it’s safe an’ that. Then Joe and Mary and Jesus go back to Nazaref, an’ Jesus turns water into Stella. There are perhaps few better examples of the intersection of class and gender than this one. Steph Lawler (2000) has argued that working-class people are ‘Othered and pathologised within middle-class culture’ and that ‘working- class women stand in a specific relationship to this pathologisation’. Thus often working-class women are Madonna or whore, a familiar binary – so that ‘these women are constituted as exotic and repulsive Others when observed from a middle-class perspective’ (2000, p. 123). 5. The “chav” teenager, Vicki, depicted in BBC television’s comedy Little Britain, who is willing to swap her baby for a Westlife CD, provides a good example. Similarly, as Skeggs points out (2004), The Royle Family represents the working class as ‘immobile’, unthreatening and almost bovine in their appearance. I will discuss this further in Chapter 3. 6. For comment and debate in the press on this and other “anxieties” concern- ing working-class “disenfranchisement” see ‘Class division now is worse than the 1950s’, The Observer, January, 2005; and Madeline Bunting’s piece in The Guardian, ‘Ignored, angry and anxious: the world of the white working class’, 13 February 2006. 7. In his discussion of these approaches to class, Savage (2001) takes Thompson to task for failing to recognise that the cultural aspects he studied with regard to class consciousness or formation could not, when more closely examined, be reduced to class as the sole determinant. Savage argues that ‘gender, eth- nicity, age, national identity … all seemed equally, or more, salient’ (30). This observation then, in some significant sense, crucially undermines class analysis for Savage, though why it should do so quite so comprehensively is difficult to say. Surely it has generally been recognised that class is not always present (or possible) in some “pure” form, but is intertwined with other identities and movements related to nationalism, race, gender or sexuality, as well as being articulated and struggled over in the field of representation. Besides, Savage’s comment works the other way with regard to identity politics and any focus on the importance of gender, race and sexuality that ignores the powerful determining factor of class. As bell hooks (2000) asserts, in the context of class in America, ‘race and gender can be used as screens to deflect away from the harsh realities of class politics’, and she criticises this tendency, arguing that ‘the neat binary categories of white and black and male and female are not there when it comes to class’ (6). 8. The material drawn upon here is from the project ‘Does Work Still Shape Social Identity and Action’. ESRC/RES 148–25–0038 Notes 211 1 Northern Exposure: The Travails of Class in a Post-Industrial Landscape 1. The popularity of former Lancashire steeplejack turned industrial historian and televison presenter, Fred Dibnah, I would argue goes some way to re- inforcing this, too. For instance, see the series, Fred Dibnah’s World of Steam, Steel and Stone, shown on BBC2, Autumn, 2006. The series plays in well with the heritagisation of history – though I would argue that Dibnah’s excursion into the industrial past is less reification than commemoration. See Raphael Samuel (1994) on the positive aspects of history as heritage in his Theatres of Memory Vol. 1. 2. For further elaboration on this, and a discussion of the powerful gender inflec- tion associated with such representations, see Terry Lovell, ‘Landscapes and Stories in 1960s British Realism’, in Higson (ed.), (1986). 3. This is a central critique of Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Women: A Story of Two Lives (1986), where she attacks the work of Richard Hoggart and Jeremy Seabrook, two influential writers on working-class life and culture in the post-war period in Britain, often – certainly in Hoggart’s case – with a particular focus on the North. See especially, The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Seabrook’s Working-Class Childhood (1982). In this context see also Beatrix Campbell’s criticisms in Wigan Pier Revisited (1984). 4. For instance, the building of Britain’s first giant mall, Meadowhall, in Sheffield, was on the former location of the huge Hadfield’s steelworks closed in 1984. 5. Peter Fannery’s drama series Our Friends in the North was broadcast by the BBC in 1996. It touches on many of the issues of place and class raised here, but requires a complete chapter of its own to do it full justice. 6. In Work, Consumption and the New Poor (1998), Zygmunt Bauman argues that ‘a steady, durable and continuous, logically coherent and tightly structured working career is no longer an available option’ (27). Citizenship is, then, not linked to work-based senses of self, say, but to the acts of consumption. If it becomes a duty of the citizen, as citizen, to consume in this new dispensation, then those excluded from such processes – such as those individuals docu- mented by Charlesworth – will be, according to Bauman’s analysis, marginal- ized and dismissed, as the choices they make in consuming goods will be, because of their material deprivations, defined as bad choices, and thus rendering them “bad” citizens (1998, p. 71). 7. My own upbringing was working class: the son of a factory worker and hos- pital domestic, raised in a small terraced house, two up/two down, in an industrial city in the English Midlands. I followed both my father and older brother into the factory (textiles), and work in a range of other areas of indus- try following that, before returning to education at a relatively late stage.

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