(Thanks to the linky goodness provided by Virago, without which this post would not have been possible 🙂 )
One of the things that often strikes me about conversations about class identity in the academy is how inflected those conversations are by ideals about masculinity. It’s as if the decades of work that feminists have done on class don’t exist, and the minute that the conversation turns to class, we enter a world of scholarship boys vs. the privileged “old boy network,” plumbers vs. intellectuals, out-of-work manual laborers vs. bread-winners, revolutionaries vs. “company men.” The complexities of class identity (the ways in which it is inflected by region, gender, race, sexuality) are elided, and instead we get this narrative straight out of Richard Hoggart’s postwar Britain.*
I have to say, I find this profoundly alienating and distressing. And that shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, as, I mean, it’s not like I’m saying anything new in noting the tendency for women to be excluded from the conversation once class is put on the table. I find myself thinking of Monique Wittig’s critique of Marxism in “One Is Not Born a Woman”: “This means that for the Marxists women belong either to the bourgeois class or to the proletariat class, in other words, to the men of these classes. In addition, Marxist theory does not allow women any more than other classes of oppressed people to constitute themselves as historical subjects, because Marxism does not take into account the fact that a class also consists of individuals one by one. Class consciousness is not enough. We must try to understand philosophically (politically) these concepts of ‘subject’ and ‘class consciousness’ and how they work in relation to our history.”** So while I claim working-class origins (neither of my parents went to college; my father worked as a steel worker, spent much of my childhood laid off in the era of Reaganomics, and then moved on to work as a facilities manager in a mall; my mother worked in a series of clerical positions only getting training and licensed as an insurance agent after I’d graduated from college; my stepfather is an immigrant without a college education who has worked as a parking lot attendant and then after I was 18 worked in a couple of family businesses; I lived until I was 13 in a neighborhood with wild dogs and gangs), my experience of negotiating class is profoundly influenced by factors, like gender, that don’t seem to influence the conversation when we talk about “the working-class professoriate.”
So, for example, as a woman with working-class origins, I didn’t experience the class ressentiment that Karl Steel describes, in spite of the fact that I suspect, with our seemingly identical trajectories, I experienced similar challenges based on class origins. Let me explain: I had a very steep learning curve when it came to academic culture based on my class origins, my Ph.D. program was populated primarily (though I can think of a couple of exceptions) by people who went to elite undergraduate institutions and/or had parents who were academics, and because of my undergraduate education at a mediocre regional four-year state university, I had a lot of catching up to do in terms of my intellectual work. So why didn’t that translate into me insisting as an identity as an outsider or interloper? As somehow “special” or “unique” because of my class origins? And why doesn’t recognizing that I am no longer working-class fail to cause me anxiety that “a) this profession may just not be as plum a gig as I used to think it was, and the fancy-from-birth types are off doing something fabulous and/or cruel elsewhere; b) I don’t have the faintest clue as to what I’m talking about, because I’m not a sociologist.”
I think my gender as it influences my relationship to my class accounts, at least partly, for my lack of anxiety.*** I’m going to try to break this down as clearly as I can, but I feel like these are some difficult things to untangle.
First, to return to what Wittig says about women as belonging to the men of particular social classes. I think that one conventional way that a woman is judged positively on the basis of her performance of the feminine gender role is through her ability to ascend in class through marriage. There is something to the old-fashioned idea that women go to college to get an M.R.S. degree. In other words, for a woman, I think that there is a sense that one can “trade up” in class and that this confirms, rather than challenges, her identity in terms of her gender. With this being the case, one of the traits of successful femininity is “passing” – through appearance, through ways of speaking, through various expressions of taste (the music that one listens to, the television shows that one watches, etc.). In very significant ways, traditional femininity is about eliding one’s origins to fit into new (patriarchal) contexts. Now, it’s important to note here that ascending in class status outside of affiliation with a man is not the traditional feminine path – it’s a feminist one. However, I do think that traditional femininity allows for a certain comfort with this sort of passing, and so rather than clinging to one’s class of origin and insisting on that identity, my experience in graduate school was about passing out of that identity. (This was not without attendant internal conflict, but I did not experience it as a conflict between “authentic” working-class-ness and “pretended” working-class-ness. It was more akin to worrying if one was “doing it right,” much in the way that one might worry if one is wearing skinny jeans the “right” way.)
Second, I don’t think that I ever saw graduate school, or pursuing an academic career, as pursing a “plum gig” that somehow served as an explanation for my defection from my working-class origins, or as an explanation for not pursuing full-time work after the B.A. Following the last paragraph, I didn’t actually think that I needed such an explanation because there isn’t the same conflict between the “feminized” professoriate and traditional femininity as there is between the “feminized” professoriate and traditional masculinity. Femininity doesn’t include same expectations of bread-winning, providing, and work upon which traditional masculinity insists, and further, with femininity doesn’t demand individual professional “success” as a result of education. (Just look at the number of women with Ph.D.s who end up as trailing spouses, or the number of women with various sorts of advanced degrees who opt out of the paid workforce in order to attend to family obligations.) I believe that this lack of pressure also resulted in a lack of idealism on my part, not because I’m somehow special or something, but just because I didn’t need to idealize what I was doing in order to motivate or explain my progress. At the end of the day, the culture at large doesn’t value women’s labor in the same way that it values men’s (and my family certainly didn’t have the same expectations for me as it did for my male cousins), which at least in this regard, meant that I didn’t have the same stories to tell about my progress through graduate work and onto the tenure-track as I think men often have to tell, whether to myself or to other people.****
Finally, (and this ultimately will lead into my discussion of “the state of the humanities” and “graduate school in the humanities”), I think that in some respects one of the results of the turn to theory, and the turn to political scholarship, in the humanities has been that individuals who pursue academic careers in the humanities have felt (still feel?) a necessity to underwrite their intellectual endeavors with some sort of “authenticating” identity, or, perhaps more generously, to be sure to situate their subject-position in relation to their intellectual endeavors. In some respects, I think that this is most difficult for white men, and particularly for white men who do not come from privileged class/intellectual backgrounds, in the humanities, who on the one hand are expected to acknowledge their systemic privilege and on the other often feel profoundly alienated from this “privilege” that is supposed to be theirs, particularly in graduate school. As a scholar in the humanities, all of those “marginal” identities can appear to have an easy subject-position to which to point: woman, black, postcolonial, queer, etc. And those who come from class/intellectual privilege can also seem to have a clear claim to labeling themselves as “intellectuals.” And so, for white men in particular, I think a claim to working-class-ness can feel like a way to fit into the theoretical discourses on subjectivity that have dominated theory and criticism for decades.
A corollary of this tendency then becomes to turn a discussion of class in the academy into one of two narratives. The first is a narrative of class mobility through education, of a world expanded through leading a “life of the mind.”***** I myself have viewed my experience through this sort of narrative at various points, and I’m not going to say that there isn’t truth in that narrative. I think that there can be. I do, however, think that it is a story – albeit sometimes a true story – that we tell ourselves. It is a narrative of meritocracy, of naive idealism. It operates under the guise of “following one’s bliss and working hard will produce a positive outcome!” The second is a narrative of disappointment and exploitation through education, of unkept promises and of the high price of seeking a life outside of one’s station. And just like the first narrative, it is a story that we tell, whether to ourselves or others, that sometimes is true. This narrative substitutes plutocracy for meritocracy, and it is profoundly cynical. This second narrative operates under the guises of “telling it like it is” or “speaking truth to power.” (I find the righteousness of this bizarre, as how exactly is it a good thing preemptively to disenfranchise large swaths of the populace from the pursuit of new knowledge?)
I believe that these two narratives are in many ways two sides of the same coin.
Both of these narratives reduce education to it’s value in a sexist, homophobic, racist economy of knowledge (“the market”), which privileges class over all other indexes of identity and creates a profound cognitive dissonance in particular as ideologies of masculinity come into conflict with ideologies of class identity. Further, this economy of knowledge fails to account for the ways in which all individuals, including men, constantly negotiate various subject-positions throughout the different facets of their lives, and they assume a one-size-fits-all answer to questions like “Should I go to graduate school?” or “Is the humanities in crisis?” (If you buy into the first narrative, the answer to the first question is “Yes!” and the answer to the second is “No!” In contrast, if you buy into the second narrative, the answers are reversed.)
And I’m going to go further: reducing educational advancement or scholarship or intellectual work in this way with either of these two narratives is profoundly anti-intellectual and it directly undercuts the mission of the humanities as a whole, which as I see it is about seeing the world in its complexity and trying to figure it out – knowing that we’ll never be finished but that being finished isn’t, actually, the point – as opposed to reducing the world into an easy story to tell.
In some ways, I see this post as a supplement to this incredibly thoughtful and wide-ranging post in which JSench discusses his own path to graduate school in English and his own class background. I think that he does a good job of finding a middle ground between the two narratives that I criticize in this post, and I think that he offers valuable perspective and advice, from the point of view of an advanced Ph.D. candidate who may or not be successful on “the market.” I’m writing, obviously, from a position of greater privilege in that sexist, homophobic, racist economy of knowledge, as a tenured professor with a good salary and benefits. On the other hand, though, I hope that I’ve offered a perspective that accounts for the ways in which women’s experiences in the academy might differ from men’s, even if they come from similar class origins. Class is important, and I hope that I’ve made it clear that I believe that it is. I just wonder where women fit****** into this conversation, as it is most frequently framed. Because at the end of the day, the experiences of my male colleagues of working-class origins who did manual labor in the summers are not generalizable to mine or to those of most (all?) of the women in the academy who come from working-class origins that I know.*******
*It’s worth noting that even his narrative doesn’t do a good job of representing the full range of experience in postwar Britain, and I strongly recommend Carolyn Kay Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman as a necessary counterpoint to Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy.
**from French Feminism Reader, p. 134.
***I’ve actually known a fair number of academic guys with working-class origins who expressed themselves similarly to the way that Karl does about his class identity, so while his post is the immediate impetus to my thoughts here, I think it is generalizable to other white academic guys of around his age with working-class origins whom I’ve known. Also, I want to be clear that gender obviously isn’t the only factor that influences these things, but for me it’s a primary one.
****This is a tangent, but I think that this somehow connects to the narratives about the “crisis” in educating boys/men, and how it is framed as that as opposed to the “success” in educating girls/women. And the need to “welcome” boys/men into institutions of higher education, because clearly we’re doing something wrong if women are outperforming men and attending college in higher numbers than men!
*****The Rodriguez essay isn’t a perfect fit here, because he does talk about the downside of being profoundly alienated from your family if you pursue this path, but at the end of the day, but the Doom and Gloom narratives about going to grad school in the humanities are so dominant these days that another example didn’t readily come to mind.
******I can’t help myself. As I wrote that, I was really tempted to write “where my girls at” because of this song 🙂
*******I haven’t dealt at all with the ways in which race or sexuality or other indexes of identity complicate class and/or gender. This post is long enough! My point isn’t to recenter the discussion on gender, and I want to be clear about that. What I’m trying to do here is to interrogate the tendency to produce a reading of class in the academy that conceives of one kind of experience as universal or generalizable to all. To be fair, I know it’s impossible to avoid the tendency to generalize altogether, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t critique it.
Reassigned Time 2.0 
Fascinating discussion! The odd thing to me is that you have encountered, at least via prose, so many male formerly working-class academics worrying about their identity constructions. I can’t think of anyone like that whom I’ve met in my life. However, I knew plenty of female grad students in my pseudology program who self-identified as working-class, and were going through a lot of angst about the expectations on them in terms of what they did and how they did it. It’s hard to discuss in the abstract here, since the details were often quite personal, including their anxious relationships with professors who were themselves often from working-class origins and had their own anxieties and ideologies about that. Add gender and racial ideologies among all parties into that mix, and you had some tense student-advisor relations going around.
And, truth be told, I was often somewhat skeptical of the claims my colleagues made about what they wanted to be, although I readily acknowledge that I am a relatively privileged white straight male who may not have the best understanding of these issues. It often came across to me that they didn’t want to do XYZ thing that their advisors recommended, because that would conflict with the way the students wanted to do things, or would somehow interfere with their senses of self. As we all know, grad students can invent myriad excuses not to do hard work put on them by advisors, or they can exaggerate the degree to which such obstacles exist. On the other hand, the part that I understood the most was the practical limitations that women from working-class backgrounds who already had children experienced when working their way through grad school — an issue that doesn’t even come up in your post. There was a very clear sense that the professors did not want students to contemplate such a path, and those who entered the program with children frequently felt that they had been brought in just to be punching bags for their life choices.
I don’t know how things go in English lit, but pseudology has something of a draw for people who don’t necessarily want to geek out about theory, but want to use the disciplinary training in particular applied ways. That’s well and good, but sometimes they go so far as to reject the obligation to know the theory, whether they plan to utilize it in their work or not. This also includes the occasional vulgar Marxists who find their way to pseudology and then refuse to sully themselves with any other stream of theory, either because they’re in over their heads and don’t understand the work, or because they are ideologically committed to a particular worldview in a discipline that makes a virtue of questioning everything. Of course, this is all a classroom matter, and the whole business of being a working-class academic is a much broader phenomenon.
Crap, have I even asked a question here, or just bloviated? Ok, here’s my question to follow all my self-indulgence: do you see this internal (or maybe external) conflict as more about how one grapples with “the work” of academia, or with the social performance of class position and professional status? Which loomed larger for you?
Interesting discussion. This quote of yours caught my eye especially: “And so, for white men in particular, I think a claim to working-class-ness can feel like a way to fit into the theoretical discourses on subjectivity that have dominated theory and criticism for decades.”
I think even men of the professional class like to use this as a shield to their being part of a put upon group of people. Dare I say, almost the tea party mentality whereby white christians can find some way in which they too are subjected? Sort of to allow them to not respect their privilege whatsoever (I’ve seen white male atheists use this tactic as well).
On another note, I wonder why defines working class from professional class. I’ve read a lot of posts along these lines where the author claims to be from a working class background. Sometimes I disagree with that. But it is interesting maybe that in many cases our parents, though not college educated, proved to be part of a bridge class. Now that’s not always the case for people who’ve gone on to professionalism or academia, but many times the parents though not educated themselves created the pro-knowledge environment that allowed their kids to get out of it. And I think it’s a different environment from what “typical” working class families might operate in. I know individuals who went into academia against the protestations of their parents who felt they’d do better to work right away, make money, and contribute to the family overall. I’m not sure wanting better for your children is consistent in working class families and many people who’ve moved into the professional class in their own generation really owe it to the prior generation.
Koshary – 1) I think that my experiences with working-class-origins-guys who have struggled with the class thing (not only in prose – more frequently in life, actually) have to do with the fact that I’m in English (though that is not the discipline of all the guys I’m thinking of). I think that there might be something involved with the fact that this is my discipline that makes this come up, as well as with my own tendency toward theory that makes such conversations as these happen. From your subsequent paragraph, though, I’ll say this: I think that women are more likely to hear this sort of stuff from working-class-origin men than are men (in general), and that working-class women are more likely to express this sort of anxiety to men of whatever class background than working-class men would ever be. This is where the whole anxiety about masculinity stuff comes in. The thing about class in America is that it is *intimate* and *personal* business, I think. (Obviously I was talking about class in a U.S. context in this post, I hope.)
2) “On the other hand, the part that I understood the most was the practical limitations that women from working-class backgrounds who already had children experienced when working their way through grad school — an issue that doesn’t even come up in your post. There was a very clear sense that the professors did not want students to contemplate such a path, and those who entered the program with children frequently felt that they had been brought in just to be punching bags for their life choices.”
No, that didn’t come up at all in my post, and, honestly? The reason that it didn’t come up in my post is that there was not a single woman who entered my Ph.D. program who already had children during the time that I was there. There was one (ONE) man, and he didn’t finish, but it had nothing to do with his being taken less seriously, or being treated as a punching bag, because he was a parent. I’ll say this: this post did have a blind spot when it came to mothers in graduate school. HOWEVER – to say that working-class-women’s experience only is “understandable” through motherhood is incredibly problematic to me. When I talk about my class origins and the challenges I faced because of them, how does that turn into an “excuse” just because I haven’t been a vessel of new life? Um, that’s fucked up, yo.
3) I think there is basically a mandate in English to deal with theory of all stripes, as there are little to no applied paths. So being an “applied” English person doesn’t produce an alibi for refusing to deal with various strands of theory. Instead, it’s like everybody gets collective amnesia once class is put on the table. Women, Men, feminists, conservatives, whatever. Like you might have been talking about gender performativity 10 seconds ago, but once you talk about “class in the academy” it’s all about the experiences of Teh D00ds.
4)”Crap, have I even asked a question here, or just bloviated? Ok, here’s my question to follow all my self-indulgence: do you see this internal (or maybe external) conflict as more about how one grapples with “the work” of academia, or with the social performance of class position and professional status? Which loomed larger for you?”
Ok, I need to think about this. Lemme respond to other comments and get back to you – either in a comment or in another post 🙂
Frautech:
“Interesting discussion. This quote of yours caught my eye especially: “And so, for white men in particular, I think a claim to working-class-ness can feel like a way to fit into the theoretical discourses on subjectivity that have dominated theory and criticism for decades.”
I think even men of the professional class like to use this as a shield to their being part of a put upon group of people. Dare I say, almost the tea party mentality whereby white christians can find some way in which they too are subjected? Sort of to allow them to not respect their privilege whatsoever (I’ve seen white male atheists use this tactic as well).”
This is such a great insight, and I agree with you that the impulse that drives both is the same. Which is really freaking scary, actually!
I’m interested in what you have to say about a “bridge class” and I’m still thinking. On the one hand, I think that what you say about creating a “pro-knowledge environment” is productive – that there is “working class” and then there’s “working class,” ultimately. That class isn’t just about money, it’s about values.
What I’d say about my upbringing, though, is that money does ultimately dictate opportunity, and that values and money aren’t necessarily in sync. In fact, the most pro-knowledge and supportive person to me in my educational ambitions was my grandmother – not my mother, who thought I should just go to community college and get a job, because even just that was beyond what she’d been raised to hope for, my mother who who told me over and over, even when I was on the academic job market, I’d always have a job because I could type. That said, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, a mother of 10 children, most of whom had to go to work before they could graduate from high school (my mother was the only high school graduate, and my grandmother consistently labeled her “average” in contrast to her “super-smart” brothers), encouraged my love of reading (bought me books), told my mother not to pressure me about moving out after high school, and believed that I should go away to college. My mother is amazingly proud of me, but without my grandmother I’d never have ended up in the professoriate. My grandmother was amazingly supportive, but without the fact that my mother found a way to make it happen with financial support, her supportiveness wouldn’t have meant a hill of beans.
In other words: I guess when I say “working class” I’m not talking about “not educated but own your own home and go on family vacations.” I’m talking about my mother’s upbringing: “10 kids and never living in a house your parents own.” I’m talking about my upbringing: “parents who were 20 when I was born; no savings for your only child’s college.” Yes, my mom read to me at night, but it was never a *given* that college was even possible, even though my IQ was crazy-high. My mom is still *surprised* that I’m a professor. Proud, but surprised.
So I get what you’re saying about a “bridge class.” But I guess the thing that I think is that “bridge class” implies some intentionality on the part of the bridgers – the parents. And neither of my parents had any intention – or a hell of a lot of influence – on what I have made of my life. Does that make sense?
That said, I *entirely* agree with you that all versions of a working class upbringing are not the same, and I totally agree that “wanting better for your children” doesn’t mean the same thing in every family. Honestly? My mom would have been happy if I’d wanted to cut hair for a living. It would have been better than what she’d been raised to expect for herself. Both of my parents would have been entirely happy if I married a guy who put food on the table. What I ended up doing had nothing to do with what either of them ever “imagined” for me when I was a baby, or with what either of them would have thought they should support me through. (I thank goodness for my stepdad, G., because more than my mom he was all, “Let the child be excellent! We shall help her! She is my little child! She is amazing!” That is so not my mom, awesome though she is. And it certainly was never my dad.)
Just to clarify, I’m not busting on you for not tackling the subject of motherhood in grad school. I understand that wasn’t part of your experience. I put perhaps too fine a point on that, simply because it was a major overt topic of discussion within my program. At least four or five women entered the program with children – all of whom, to my recollection, were single mothers who self-identified as working-class – in the last few years of my time at DOU. I was commenting on what I observed there, not on your own experience, which I acknowledge was the focal point of your post. It would be more precise for me to have said that my erstwhile colleagues’ concern about juggling parenting and grad school obligations was the most *readily* understandable point for me, since that was the concern that didn’t require a lot of insider knowledge of how they related to their advisors one-on-one. We all talked a lot of shit about our advisors that was heavily colored by our own anxieties and fears, and was naturally somewhat lopsided. I wouldn’t presume to accuse you of offering any excuses, Crazy! The proof of the pudding, after all, is in the tenured eating. 🙂
Koshary, it’s all good. I just couldn’t let that slide. Right? Right. What matters to me, Mister, is WHERE ARE YOU? I’m, seriously, dying to know 🙂
Dr. C, Thanks for your discussion. You did a good job articulating how class discussions often elide women. In the commentary, where you expand a bit on the compulsory heterosexuality that plays into women’s experience of class, I found that right on the mark. (Yes, I blame the patriarchy.)
Thanks for the discussion.
Nothing brilliant to say, but reading the post did make me think about princess stories where a working class lady is rescued to become a princess by Prince Charming. Social climbing by marriage does seem to be something magical for women in Western society at least… so long as the woman in question is sweet, pretty, and demure.
I’m going to write more on this a little later, but you really hit the nail on the head in terms of what was bothering me about that particular response to Pannpacker; gender.
Thanks for this fantastic discussion. I’m tweeting it out, then I’ll come back and really comment once I’ve had more coffee.
I wonder if the elision of women in class analysis has to do with what you identify as working class women’s “passing.” I was thinking about it in terms of performance and wondering if one could think about the erasure as a negative/ backlash version of Butler where performing = playacting. The logic would go that because women are playacting gender all the time, it’s not “real,” so it just doesn’t register when it comes to class analysis. In this logic, women– whose gender identity becomes something secondary and dispensable and, pretty easily, false– are opposed to men, who do have “real” identities. (I don’t think this angle is at odds with the argument about passing, marriage and social mobility for women.)
This idea of men’s identity (because, you know, men don’t have gender) being “real” then gets complicated with the issue of “authenticity”– and here I’m not talking about authenticity where identity underwrites professional/professorial authority. I’m wondering if there’s something about the way working class masculinity (WCM) is perceived or constructed that makes it somehow seem more resistant to analysis. Like, it’s a version of masculinity for which analysis is kryptonite: because WCM is so real and authentic and unmediated by intellect* it somehow escapes analysis, and once it’s analyzed it’s not “real” WCM.
I’m totally just thinking outloud here, and my own class background does not lend itself to first hand knowledge.
*Yeah, this formulation completely ignores lots of histories of working class self-education. But, I think that in those cases that education and intellect gets reconfigured to be somehow different from (effeminate, bourgeouis) knowledge.
Brilliant response, and very welcome, Dr C. I don’t have analysis to add here, but maybe you’ll indulge my telling a few anecdotes:
a) there were bridge-class elements in my family growing up, in that my mother (notably, predictably, not my dad) took my brother and me to the library and piano lessons frequently. That’s about it, though. There wasn’t any talk of college, and the only help I had during college was that my parents helped me with my rent every so often. As I (eventually) said in comments to my G+ post, gender I’m sure has a great deal to do with the fact that my brother and I “made it out” and my sister didn’t (though, in a sense, she had entirely different parents, as she’s 9 years older than my brother and me; plus she could get pregnant at age 17, and we couldn’t);
b) for some more on gender and class, see the link to Bee Lavender’s Lessons in Taxidermy in my G+ thread;
c) I’m reminded of some friends I think I can speak freely about since they don’t read blogs. The woman’s a highly paid corporate lawyer from a well-off, educated family; her not-quite-husband was a poor kid from a non-college family who got a scholarship to an Ivy and then went on to get a PhD at another one and then an MFA at a decent school here in NYC. He’s had a rough go of it since then, and he’s looking for work. My wife and I wonder at this: why does he need to get a job? Can’t he just write full time? He can certainly be supported by his partner, because I’ve been supporting my wife for the last 3 years while she writes, and doing it with, well, an assistant professor salary. And we get by just fine. We had always thought that the difference is taste: theirs are expensive; ours aren’t. But your post gives me an answer that should have been *totally* obvious to me.
also, I’m not sure if this is a helpful data point, or what: but for a straight guy, I’d say I’ve had a maybe unusually ironic attitude towards my own gender performance probably since I was 14-15 and being beaten up pretty much every day for being a “faggot”: so, yeah, lipstick and eyeliner in high school (but it was the 80s, so, yeah), dj’ing at a mostly gay club for 4 years in my 20s, and probably some other stuff. I’ve given my *own* gender performance a fair amount of thought, but–obviously, I’m afraid–not the larger social implications of gender and its intersections with class (let alone race, since reading a little bell hooks does not, at least in my case, a sophisticated thinker make).
Thank you for adding the vexed relationship of gender and class into the discussion. (I thought I’d written something last night but it seems to have disappeared.)
I have nothing profound to add, except this: the romance of social mobility through education is under threat for all our students, not just those who go to grad school in the humanities. After all, what’s happened to the academic job market is only a mirror of the corporate system as it now functions. The illusion that everyone who doesn’t go to grad school in the humanities will be a millionaire working in the tech sector or Wall Street is just that. My students who might even 3-5 years ago thought a good civil service or teaching job would be fine may not even get those with the contraction of the public sector generally.
Sorry about that repetition– I’d commented at Notorious’s place, not here. Duh!
I took yesterday and nearly all of today off the computer – sorry for taking so long to check back in! And thanks to all of you for the thoughtful comments. And welcome to Karl, whom I don’t believe has ever stopped by before!
Sensible – I think what you’re talking about is very much born out by the way that George Orwell talks about working-class masculinity in *The Road to Wigan Pier* – one of the things in play here is that WCM is perceived as “authentically” masculine in ways that bourgeois masculinity is not, so it is a claim to power in spite of disenfranchisement through class. In contrast, for women, working-class-ness is “masculinized” – the reverse of bourgeois class status as “feminized” – think about the connotations for “soft hands” for women, vs. “soft hands” for men. And this also traces back to Frautech’s comment about the link between masculinity and political conservatism, i.e., it offers one explanation for conservatism among “union guys” who don’t obviously seem to benefit from conservative fiscal policy: basically, being a “real man” means independence, lack of interference of government, etc., and a “successful” working-class guy means that not having a safety net doesn’t make a difference because you are a “provider.” (Not sure if I need to unpack that more – it makes sense in my head, though 🙂 )
Karl – what you note about your sister, and actually what Koshary notes above about women with children in his doctoral program, do fit together – one thing I didn’t bring up at all here (though I’m sure I’ve written about it before as Dr. Crazy) is that perhaps the strongest message my mother (who was pregnant with me at 19) ever sent that contributed to my success (or whatever) was how important it was for me to have safe, reliable birth control so that would have options for a future that she didn’t have. In spite of the fact that I think it was hard for her to be a facilitator for me in getting birth control (she was horrified when she found out I’d been having sex with FL, though always with a condom because, really, I was no dummy, but once she found out she took me to the gyno and got me BCP pronto), I think that she cared more about me choosing my own future than having it chosen for me, which I think is how she saw (her own) pregnancy (with me). I don’t think my mom has regrets about the way that her life went, but I do think that she “wanted better” for me, and for her that wasn’t necessarily about getting a middle-class job or something – I think it was about me *not* getting pregnant accidentally when I was a teenager. (Let’s note: she really would welcome an accidental pregnancy now, as her time is running out for grandmotherhood 🙂 ) But so anyway, this may also be one reason why I have always seen gender/sex as much more determining influences on my life, too. Because, ultimately, those were the most consistent messages I got as I was growing up – that the thing to worry about was having my ambitions thwarted because I was female, and not so much that I had fewer options because of class (though obviously that was there – it’s just it wasn’t primary).
Susan – no worries – it happens when people around our little corner of the blogosphere get to talking about the same topic 🙂
Koshary wrote a thousand years ago: “do you see this internal (or maybe external) conflict as more about how one grapples with “the work” of academia, or with the social performance of class position and professional status? Which loomed larger for you?”
I’ve been thinking about it. What I’d say is that it’s really hard to separate the two out. At the end of the day, “the work” of academia is anathema to the work that I expected to do in life based on example. The fact that I have to manage my own time, the fact that I have to be entirely self-motivated…. All of that is not at all “natural” to me – I come from people where a boss runs your whole life. I think in many ways I was ill-prepared for how different this sort of working life would be from the working lives that I was familiar with (less so in grad school, and more so in my t-t life, actually, because grad school was still “school” and so that seemed normal). So that work in itself is a social performance, a version of passing.
That said, the overt “social performance” stuff – one of the things that I reported back to high school friends of mine after my first year in my PhD program was that I learned to drink gin and wine, not beer and shots, in my first year of grad school – is in many ways not terribly hard – it’s just a matter of switching one “norm” that you’re not terribly committed to for another. And there are things that cross class boundaries in the “social performance” realm: classic rock and baseball, to name just two.
I guess, though, as I think about this more deeply, I feel like the “which one loomed larger” question doesn’t really make sense to me, experientially. I think that it wasn’t a matter at the time of “this is more weird” or “this is more foreign” – it was more a question of, “wow, I’m entering into foreign territory in all ways.” Kind of like when I went to Lebanon with G. a few years ago. It wasn’t, “which is more challenging: drinking a thousand cups of arabic coffee a day or being with people who speak arabic a lot” – it just all was weird and not normal. I don’t know that I have ever separated it out the way that you do here. I will also say that ending up at the kind of institution I did on the t-t was really, really positive for me, because I felt (at least with my students, from the moment of arrival) that I no longer need to pass – in fact, my origins are their origins and so I can be “real” here in a way that I never felt I could be in my grad programs (and that being “real” was actually a positive and not a negative). And yet, still hardcore and intellectual, because I’m not the same person I was at 18 – my experiences throughout my education did change me. But I do think that it helps that I “get” their experience in a first-person way, and that I can draw on my life to mentor them in ways I couldn’t if I didn’t have the past that I’ve had. And then also that I can tell them that they can’t rely on that as an alibi for fucking up. You know?
I hope that answers your question… not sure if it does, though. I’m happy to continue the conversation, if you want to continue it.
thanks DC, and thanks all for this discussion (with an implied extended thank you to the chain of blogs all digging down on this topic). It’s funny for me to have been caught up in this, and not only because I very rarely post anywhere about my so-called personal life. I had intended my post to be my final word on the topic of me, class, and academia, because I realized that a) I was tired of telling the story; b) my classed narrative of self had nothing to do with where I was now; c) I kept running across other academics (often fully, even comfortably employed) with a similar class background to mine. I felt a need to think of myself demographically, which is either a posthumanist or biopolitical reflex. Whatever it was, I just wanted to get over myself.
But I’m drawn back in to the topic. Here’s why. I think my sense of being comfortably NOT working class has a great deal to do with my institution and its students. If I ended up teaching at, I don’t know, Dartmouth or Swarthmore or Vassar, I still might want to claim, dubiously, some working class “authenticity” (barf). But no way in hell does it work at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where the students, substantially nonwhite, immigrant, and first-generation, are just scrappier and (often) poorer than I ever was. For me to get up and say “I’m like you folks,” when I have the advantages of my ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and being raised in a time when a union salary from the pulp mill could (more or less) support a family, and when I have a decent TT job (with, I need to say, a strong union): well, that would be worse than silly. This is a long way of spinning out the truism that class is relative, but there are deeper, more significant truths here too that I’m not sure I have the expertise to unearth.
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Just finding this via a UVenus link. I really like your analysis. You bring up some really useful points about all of this and I think you are right about those 2 dominant narratives of class and grad school.
I have been troubled by much of this discussion of class, grad school, humanities and I think this post also helped me clarify why that is. I’m a sociologist (albeit one who lived in a Cultural Studies department for a big chunk of my career) and that might make the difference.
My problem is with the idea that class (and gender and etc.) is about identity. Obviously, identity is an issue and is how we experience class in our individual lives. But for me these things are structural. Regardless of my identity and personal trajectory through these things, class, gender, etc still exist and influence how things work in ways that are not about my identity.
So, for example, the ways in which non-manual work is feminized is important. And it’s important both amongst men as well as for its impact on how women get to live in professional contexts like the university. There are long histories of narratives that use gender to denigrate men (among men). The ways in which working class men talk about intellectual work historically already feminize that work whether it is done by women or not. And partly that’s a way of reasserting (gendered) power in the face of (classed) power. Again, amongst men.
Which is all to say, probably, that I agree that the real role of the humanities in this is to tease out that complexity. My discomfort is probably with the tendency of “identity” to attach processes of gendering, classing, etc to individual bodies in ways that obfuscate other ways in which these categories matter.
As a (male) colleague once said in casual conversation, patriarchy is (also) a series of relationships among men.