A Middle-Class Misidentification

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-798
Author(s):  
Yun Li ◽  
Rong Rong
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Rural Identity ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Peasant Workers ◽  
Autobiographical Poetry ◽  
Chinese Migrant Workers ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Through the autobiographical poetry of contemporary Chinese female peasant workers, this article studies how Chinese migrant workers are dis-identified by the identifying hukou system and thus become bodies of non-identity drifting in cities. Driven by the urban desire intrigued by national discourses on modernization, peasants deidentify themselves by abandoning their officially recognized rural identity only to see that they are disidentified by the authority that rejects their urban citizenship. The double dispossession leaves them no way to identify themselves. To deradicalize the nonidentity, postsocialist ideologies invent a middle-class dream, attempting to reshape migrant workers into a “working class” misidentified with a class image beyond its financial reach as well as social function. It thus disunites the working class by throwing migrant workers into constant search for identities.

scholarly journals Drifting Peasant Workers: The Reflection of the Hukou System within the Chinese Cinematic Network

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Huimin Deng
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Registration System ◽  
Peasant Workers ◽  
Chinese Migrant Workers ◽  
Urban Working

Migrating from rural areas to urban areas, Chinese farmers become part of the urban working class. The migration have attracted both urban cinema and independent documentary to represent the integration of farmers into urban space. However, whether the figures of peasant workers in urban areas can be simply treated as the urban working class is problematic. Here I introduce the theories of textuality and intertextuality to explore the audiovisual representation of Chinese migrant workers within Chinese urban cinema and Chinese independent documentary at the turn of the 21st century, searching for the communal sign representation and social signification of peasant images within urban context. As a result, peasant workers are depicted as drifters between urban areas and rural areas because they are marginalized by local workers, urban elites, and urban governors due to the household registration system. Their identity, cultural manifestation, and social status are shaped by the rural-urban mediation, if not conflict.

scholarly journals The Making of a New Working Class? A Study of Collective Actions of Migrant Workers in South China

2009 ◽  
Vol 198 ◽  
pp. 287-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris King-Chi Chan ◽  
Pun Ngai
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
South China ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Foreign Capital ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Specific Process ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
Class A ◽  
Living Space ◽  
Chinese Migrant Workers

AbstractIn this study, we argue that the specific process of the proletarianization of Chinese migrant workers contributes to the recent rise of labour protests. Most of the collective actions involve workers' conflict with management at the point of production, while simultaneously entailing labour organizing in dormitories and communities. The type of living space, including workers' dormitories and migrant communities, facilitates collective actions organized not only on bases of locality, ethnicity, gender and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also on attempts to nurture workers' solidarity in a broader sense of a labour oppositional force moving beyond exclusive networks and ties, sometimes even involving cross-factory strike tactics. These collective actions are mostly interest-based, accompanied by a strong anti-foreign capital sentiment and a discourse of workers' rights. By providing detailed cases of workers' strikes in 2004 and 2007, we suggest that the making of a new working class is increasingly conscious of and participating in interest-based or class-oriented labour protests.

Nostalgia, Class and Rurality in Empire Falls

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-518
Author(s):  
STACY DENTON
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Rural Identity ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
American Society ◽  
Rural Places

In American society, rural spaces – particularly those of the working class – are seen as stagnant holdovers from a temporal past that “modern” society has evolved beyond. As a result, working-class rurality and those living within these places are viewed as static, ignorant, insular and so on: whatever places do not conform to the appearance of “modern” progress and development simply must be regressed, on both socioeconomic and cultural levels. While scholars in some disciplines are attempting to redress this misconception, other disciplines (like literary studies) largely align with the mainstream perspective that rurality represents a regressed past to our evolved present. However, despite the critical lack of attention to rurality as a viable space in the present, we can see in various fictional works that working-class rural spaces can effectively show us the interrelationship of rural spaces with “modern” society and culture in the present, the continuing relevance and deep history alike of said spaces, and the potential of these fictional working-class rural places to confront America's norms of progress and development within and without their fictional borders. Richard Russo's fiction illustrates the potential to bring out this critical working-class rural voice. Russo's fictional treatments afford the reader an opportunity to witness the ever-changing complexity (not the temporal and cultural regression) of working-class rurality. In turn, Russo's fictional working-class rural spaces offer a counterperspective to the mainstream (defined here as middle-class and (sub)urban) notions of progress that otherwise dismiss these perspectives. In his book Empire Falls, Russo uses nostalgia to assert this counterperspective. This nostalgia not only reaffirms the postwar and early twenty-first-century working-class rural identity of Empire Falls, but it also offers a critique of dominant conceptions of progress and development that continue into our present.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

scholarly journals ‘A Cockroach Preserved in Amber’: The Significance of Class in Critics' Representations of Heavy Metal Music and its Fans

2014 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-741 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy R. Brown ◽  
Christine Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Heavy Metal ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
Heavy Metal Music ◽  
The Uk

In this paper we engage with new cultural theories of class that have identified media representations of ‘excessive’ white heterosexual working-class femininity as a ‘constitutive limit’ of incorporation into dominant (middle-class) modes of neoliberal subjectivity and Bourdieu's thesis that classification is a form of symbolic violence that constitutes both the classifier and the classified. However, what we explore are the implications of such arguments for those modes of white heterosexual working-class masculinity that continue to reproduce themselves in forms of overtly masculinist popular culture. We do so through a critical examination of the symbolic representation of the genre of heavy metal music within contemporary music journalism. Employing a version of critical discourse analysis, we offer an analysis of representative reviews, derived from a qualitative sample of the UK music magazine, New Musical Express (1999–2008). This weekly title, historically associated with the ideals of the ‘counter culture’, now offers leadership of musical tastes in an increasingly segmented, niche-oriented marketplace. Deploying a refined model of the inscription process outlined by Skeggs, our analysis demonstrates how contemporary music criticism symbolically attaches negative attributes and forms of personhood to the working-class male bodies identified with heavy metal culture and its audience, allowing dominant middle-class modes of cultural authority to be inscribed within matters of musical taste and distinction.

Social Class and Code Elaboration in Oral Communication

1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millicent E. Poole ◽  
T. W. Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Class Groups ◽  
Parental Occupation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Coding

The Bernstein thesis of elaborated and restricted coding orientation in oral communication was explored at an Australian tertiary institute. A working-class/middle-class dichotomy was established on the basis of parental occupation and education, and differences in overall coding orientation were found to be associated with social class. This study differed from others in the area in that the social class groups were contrasted in the totality of their coding orientation on the elaborated/restricted continuum, rather than on discrete indices of linguistic coding.

scholarly journals Shifting power dynamics in interviews with children: a minority ethnic, working-class researcher’s reflections

2021 ◽  
pp. 146879412110347
Author(s):  
Imane Kostet
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethics Committees ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Minority Ethnic

This article aims to contribute to the literature on power dynamics and researchers’ positionality in qualitative research, by shedding light on the experiences of a minority ethnic researcher with a working-class background. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts, it discusses how middle-class children confronted the researcher with language stigma and how they, while drawing boundaries vis-à-vis those who ‘lack’ cultural capital, (unintentionally) drew boundaries against the researcher herself. In turn, it illustrates how during interviews with working-class children, manners had to be adopted with which the researcher is no longer familiar. This article calls on ethics committees to more strongly consider how researchers might become ‘vulnerable’ themselves during fieldwork and to acknowledge intersectional experiences that potentially cause power dynamics to shift, even in research involving groups that are socially believed to have little power, such as children.

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