>I'm never sure what classist means. I suppose, though no one has ever given
>me a definition, that it's an attempt to place it within the string of
>'racism, sexism... [hence:] classism'.
ahhh yes. true. short hand really. i do not know what to call it when folks make judgments about poor whites as lazy, prone to incest and bestiality (jennifer's reference to Kentucky migrants to Ohio is suggestive of that actually) i do not know what to call it when people assume poor whites are racist, gun toting bigots. what do you call it when someone assumes that, cause you're a woman you'll support affirmative action, but because you're working class then you won't. what do you call it when your
employers tell you to *never* hire people with certain addresses, when they get out a map and show you exactly where these areas of town are and the names of the streets? what do you call it when a faculty member assumes that the secretaries and women from working class backgrounds will just LUV to hear dirty jokes and talk of his sex life because they're those kinds of girls. what do you call it when you're confronted with the kinds of attitudes expressed in that anti-whitetrash web site? what do you call it when a prominent feminist questions you about your future plans and suggests that "grad school is serious business and not for housewives with time on their hands" what do you call it when your opportunities for advancement in the corporate world are delimited by the fact that you didn't go to the right uni and don't have or didn't have access to the 'right' cultural capital?
i would say that "classism" as a term emerged here in the states as a response to "intersectional" analyses of race, gender, sexuality, age, able-bodiedness, etc. so, yes, from what i've seen of that literature it is ill-defined, and very closely linked to a multi-culturalist pedagogy--a rather uncritical one that is.
and heavenhelpme it always, always it seems to me about *identity* and generally offers very little in the way of a structural analysis. i reviewed a number of "race, class, and gender' readers a couple of years ago and i found that most of the discussions of class were about "what it feels like to be working class"
now there is nothing necessarily awful about this. it is an important task to ask how class shapes identity, one's self understanding, and the like. say, for example, i didn't know that i was working class until i got to grad school --an experience probably unique to the US. I heard similar stories when i interviewed downsized mgrs who'd managed to make it but when they got they they realized that they were lacking 'cultural capital' one fellah told me about spending hours in the library studying art and music and opera so that he'd know how to negotiate the corporate world where he'd once been a CFO of a multi-nat'l conglomerate.
but there seems, at least in these texts, a general distaste for or inability to link up such analyses with a structural analysis of capitalism. classism becomes a matter of education, of teaching people how not to say such things, of changing attitudes and beliefs.
and, I don't actually think it's at
>all similar. racism and sexism are both about attaching bodies to forms of
>social organisation, oppression, a hierarchy invested in physicality, etc.
i think though that it can and has been this. that website / dave / posted did very much define white trash as having ugly bodies, ugliness that is exacerbated by poor fitting clothes and bad taste, bad hair. oh hair, ange, hair. i tell ya there's something there but i've not had time to think about it. the only thing i can say right now is that upper middle class people think that white trash people have big hair. think the flik Working Girl and her transformation from secretary to exec. changed her hair and her speech --voila!--transformed! attached to poor bodies are certain kinds of sexuality, incest, bestiality, promiscuity. (in the states incest & bestiality is distinctly associated w/ poor whites). the bodies of poor/working class women are unruly. they have bad posture, they take up too much space, they are loud and boisterous, they are not sleek, refined, smooth, they don't know how to comport themselves.
maybe catherine can fill you in on how she understands the way in which the word slut is used, it's sexist but specifically hurled at women in a way to suggest poor/ working class. but cat seems to have wrangled with it's variations more than i have. i do know that i brought this up to my students, predominantly black, latino/a, chicano/a, puerto rican, mexicano, cuban, and we came up with several different words that were used to define a woman as sexually promiscuous but they generally didn't use slut. slut, at least in this part of the south, seems to be a white term. now, for the life of me i can't find my notes, but when i do....
oh and then there is the grrRl band phenom that emerged with the likes of grunge which valorized working class fashion. (annalee?) there was a trend here in the southern states --lipsticks and nail polishes with names that referenced white trash stereotypes. revlon put them out. can't recall what they were as i heard about this from a friend. one significant aspect of this fashion/style that emerged: chipped red nail polish (purposeful) and bleached blonde hair w/ dark roots. so in a sense it's about what is done with the body.
and doug has pointed out elsewhere that he believes that men's fetish for large breasts is inversely proportional to class location.
and i have some citizenship books from the turn of the century that were given to immigrants in the states. the focus is on cleanliness, eating habits. comportment, posture, and the like. teaching poor immigrants how to become proper citizens was very much about learning how to take on middle class values about the body.
so yes, it is all variable and localized here in the states. ever shifting. but there's some detail for you that i think, at least as i see it, does suggest that there is a way in which poor/working class white bodies are marked in ways that are similar to but distinct from the bodies of poor/working class blacks, latino/as, etc. i've focused largely on women here because that's my interest thus far, but i suspect that we could find similar things re men.
kelley
“touch yourself and you will know that i exist.” ~luce irigaray