Chameleon on Redemption Blues has interviewed Professor Beverley Skeggs, who works at the intersection of feminism and class. There’s a bit of fairly heavy theory at the top, but if that isn’t your thing, do stick with it, for there’s some excellent analysis of British society, e.g.
There is an alliance between social theorists and governments, which is slightly worrying if you think of Clinton and Blair and of the impact of neo-liberalism in this country now. Choice in education? Well, who can choose? Who has the knowledge? Who can move house? All this choice rhetoric is so powerful. I see the power of class working through these different ways in which people put a lot of effort into denying class, the ultimate symbol of the fact that it really does exist. That denial can always be rebutted from so many different directions.
On the ladette phenomenon:
…it’s about the burning out of a very particular sort of Laura Ashley femininity that was no longer appropriate for women who were all going to have to go out and work and who were being taught through Thatcherism, neo-liberalism and individualism that they could be strong.
On the “chav” label:
There’s a woman, Lady Sovereign, who is defined as the chav pop singer. She’s only 16, really good, really clever. She’s like young, white Miss Dynamite with really urban, political songs. She talks about being really hurt by being labelled chav because it was consolidating negative value so that wherever she went, her style of clothing, everybody could read her as having no value. That is the pain: you enter a space and you know you have to prove that you have value without just taking it for granted that people will listen to you, take you seriously and accept you.
There’s also an interesting discussion about the relationship between “different forms” of feminism – can you “do” gay feminism without being gay, etc?
The professor’s current main research interest is, perhaps a little curiously, about reality TV, which she says is all about displaying the “proper emotions” and “respectability”. Not, perhaps, quite what your grandmother meant by “respectability”, but I suppose I see the point.
She’s also done work on understanding the place of hetero women in Manchester’s gay quarter, and I do have to track down “The Toilet Paper”, about the interaction between women in public loos.
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