Formations of Class & Gender: Becoming Respectable / Edition 1

by Bev Skeggs

Overview

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 posit

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761955122
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	07/21/1997
Series:	Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society , #51
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Beverley Skeggs is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. She has published The Media; Issues in Sociology; Feminist Cultural Theory; Formations of Class and Gender; Class, Self, Culture Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety (with Les Moran) and Feminism after Bourdieu (with Lisa Adkins), and with Helen Wood, Reacting to Reality TV: Audience, Performance, Value and Reality TV and Class, along with many journal articles on class and culture. As an ESRC Professorial Fellow she developed a “sociology of values and value’’ that included projects on the digital economy and prosperity theology, and whilst Director of the Atlantic Fellows Programme, established the ‘Global Economies of Care’ theme at the LSE.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Processes, Frameworks and Motivations
Respectable Knowledge: Experience and Interpretation
Historical Legacies: Respectability and Responsibility
Developing and Monitoring a Caring Self
(Dis)Identifications of Class: On Not Being Working Class
Ambivalent Femininities
Becoming Respectably Heterosexual
Refusing Recognition: Feminisms
Conclusions

Editorial Reviews

This book is brilliant. Formations of Class and Gender is a sophisticated and passionately written account of the classed and gendered identities of a small group of working-class white women who live in the north-west of England. It is ethnography at its best, having been built on long-term, thoughtful engagements in the field. When Beverly Skeggs met these women they were all students on a variety of 'caring' courses at a further education college. More than eleven years later, the production of this text testifies to the quality of theoretical analysis which can be produced if only those who fund research or press for lists of publications were willing to acknowledge that leading edge work normally requires real time. The text is concerned with the production of cultural and social relations and is located within an analytical framework which draws on the work of Bourdieu... Overall the text is a robust piece of writing which I have already recommended as required reading to my research students.

Gender and Education

In a discipline that boasts a high division of labour, this book goes a long way in dismantling the futile divide between class theory and feminism. It is an articulate and impassioned ethnography, fuelled by an anger of inequality but also an anger at those who are reluctant to challenge it. At a time when sociologists seem less concerned with the tangible and more interested in the abstract, Skeggs shows how these can be used productively together; theory becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself... This book really deserves to be read and taken seriously. It is a good example of responsible research which seeks to bring out the pains and humour of working- class life and the ways in which people negotiate their environments... But the greatest achievement of this book is that it gives a voice to a group of women in the hope that they can '...no longer be ignored, made invisible, deconstructed to irrelevance, dismissed as part of a redundant concept, or pathologized as just another "social problem "' (168). In our present political climate, what work could be more important than that?

Paul Johnson

Skegg's Bourdieu-influenced account of British cultures of class provides a useful empirical corrective to the more grandiose theorizing within recent cultural studies, underscoring not just the economic but the cultural and attitudinal gulf between working-class individuals and the left/feminist intellectuals who claim to be their allies. For this reason alone, it should be required reading.

International Journal of Cultural Studies