Profane Culture

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Willis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
The Self ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Youth Cultures ◽  
The Face ◽  
Rock N Roll

A classic of British cultural studies, this book takes the reader into the worlds of two important 1960s youth cultures — the motor-bike boys and the hippies. The motor-bike boys were working-class motorcyclists who listened to the early rock 'n' roll of the late 1950s. In contrast, the hippies were middle-class drug users with long hair and a love of progressive music. Both groups were involved in an unequal but heroic fight to produce meaning and their own cultural forms in the face of a larger society dominated by the capitalist media and commercialism. They were pioneers of cultural experimentation, the self-construction of identity, and the curating of the self, which, in different ways, have become so widespread today. This book develops an important and still very contemporary theory and methodology for understanding the constructions of lived and popular culture. Its new preface discusses the ties between the cultural moment explored in the book and today.

Feeling ‘Like a Work-Girl’: Class, Intimacy and Alienation in ‘The Garden Party’

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Face ◽  
Upper Middle Class

This essay argues that ‘The Garden Party’ confronts us with the uncanny intimacy and alienation created by class relations in the upper-middle-class household at the turn of the century. The consequences of protagonist Laura Sheridan’s desire and failure to transcend what she calls ‘absurd class distinctions’ (288) are well established in Mansfield criticism, and psychological readings of ‘The Garden Party’ often consider how the working class Other influences Laura’s developing subjectivity. In this essay, I draw upon similar psychological frameworks to examine how ‘The Garden Party’ deals with the idea of working-class selves – not just Others. I contend that, though it does not render the inner lives of its working-class characters, ‘The Garden Party’ still raises important questions about the selfhood of the Other, and the uncanny, sometimes abject, sense of the Other within one’s self.Through a series of uncanny parallels between middle and working-class life, ‘The Garden Party’ collapses the distance between Laura and the working class. As it does, it confronts us with questions about what it means to stare the working class Other in the face – as Laura stares into the swollen, grief-stricken face of Scott’s widow – and to realize that the Other is at the core of the self.

scholarly journals Leisure, Loafing, and Life as Work

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
Petar Bagarić
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Work Organization ◽  
The Self ◽  
Total Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Free Moment ◽  
Life Work

Although leisure and idleness are promoted as a panacea for the problems of postmodern man, everyday logic of postindustrial societies is still subjected to the logic of “total work”. Throughout modernism, the discourse of leisure allowed for a certain separation of the worker from the work regime. However, this discourse lost its function in postmodernism due to the contemporary erasure of boundaries between life, work, and the self. The disappearance of these boundaries, due to technological development and newer forms of work organization, is an important element on the basis of which the contemporary middle class gradually assumes the position of the former working class within the system. Thus, it can be concluded that the fundamental way in which the avoidance of the world of total work is possible today is not leisure, free, fulfilled, and meaningful time, but shallow loafing, a stolen free moment otherwise scheduled for work.

Castle, Vernon (1887–1918) & Castle, Irene Foote (1893–1969)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan C. Cook
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Individual Response ◽  
Active Lifestyle ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
One Step ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

During the years 1911–1917, Irene Foote Castle (1893–1969) and her husband Vernon Castle (1887–1918) explicitly marketed ragtime dancing as "modern" to their upper-class and, increasingly, middle-class audiences eager to partake in new kinaesthetic forms of popular culture. Dancers, who previously skipped to the 6/8 marching meter of the two step, began to trot, strut, and glide, taking a step on each beat of syncopated 2/4 meter music long associated with African American culture. Easily learned, these new one-step dances invited improvisation and individual response. Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle, as they called themselves, became the most public proponents of new trotting dances and distinguished their style from those previously associated with working-class consumers, through discursive and embodied associations of modernity, whiteness, class prestige, and restraint. Irene Castle presented new modes of modern femininity through her corset-less fashions, short haircut, and active lifestyle. With the assistance of their agent Elisabeth Marbury, the Castles collaborated with noted African American composer and bandleader James Reese Europe, who composed works for them and whose ensemble accompanied their live performances. Thus while drawing on the "primitive" yet energizing power of syncopated music, the Castles and their self-proclaimed "refined" dance style offered a modernity that promised newfound vitality while maintaining racial hierarchies.

The face of noncompliance in family interaction

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 573-598
Author(s):  
Marjorie H. Goodwin ◽  
Heather Loyd
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Family Interaction ◽  
Video Ethnography ◽  
Appropriate Behavior ◽  
Historic Center ◽  
Family Culture ◽  
The Face

AbstractThis article examines the co-construction of dispute in parent-child remedial interchanges, where preference for provocation rather than agreement exists. Employing methodologies of video ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis, we examine practices for dispute management in middle class Los Angeles families (1540 h of video across 32 US families were collected and examined between 2002 and 2005) as well as in (sub)-working-class families in the historic center neighborhood of the Quartieri Spagnoli in Napoli, Italy (120 h of video across six families were collected and examined between 2008 and 2010). We problematize the notion that preference structures featuring politeness and moves towards swift social equilibrium in remedial interchanges are the basic organizing principles used in family interaction. Our findings suggest that rather than quickly restoring ritual equilibrium, children can create their own “character contests” in which they compete with parents for control. In response to a child’s breach, noncompliance, or offensive action, the parents can sanction inappropriate behavior, and socialize the child into what counts, in the family culture, as morally appropriate behavior. Whereas in US middle class families, the parents pursue apologies, in Neapolitan (sub)-working-class families, the parents are more concerned about explanations and accounts for inappropriate desires and actions. There is no expectation that the children apologize for untoward behavior. Across culture and class, during adult-child socializing encounters, moral claims intersect with affective stances to develop and negotiate personhood, identity, and adherence to cultural norms.

Mass Observers’ Attitudes to Class, 1990

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Class A ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Cultural Homelessness ◽  
Post War

This chapter uses responses to Mass Observation’s 1990 directive on ‘social divisions’ to examine what the Mass Observers thought about class. It concludes that earlier accounts have overstated these (largely middle-class) writers’ comfortableness with technical, sociological class language. Rather, many were hostile to or ambivalent about using such terms, and drew on popular culture, especially humour, when talking about class. A rejection of ‘class’ and snobbishness, and an emphasis on ordinariness and authenticity, were again central to many Mass Observers’ writings about class. In their testimonies, we can also see that new ethnic diversity and new, more diverse norms of gender in post-war Britain had disrupted the old class categories. Upwardly mobile people were particularly over-represented among the Mass Observers and their writing shows that upward social mobility—which expanded in the post-war decades—could lead to a cultural ‘homelessness’ and critiques of both traditional working-class and traditional middle-class cultures.

Defusing the male working class: Populist politics and reality television

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 545-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrik Stiernstedt ◽  
Peter Jakobsson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Reality Show ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Cultural Artefact ◽  
Neoliberal Ideology ◽  
Right Wing Populism

This article presents an analysis of the makeover reality show Real Men, which was broadcast on Swedish television in 2016. The analysis shows that Real Men – like other shows of its genre – functions as a form of ‘governmentality’ through which forms of neoliberal subjectivity are propagated and pedagogically enforced on ‘bad subjects’. However, the show surpasses the genre conventions by questioning the authority of the norms and values (i.e. middle-class, cosmopolitan and urban values) that are being propagated and in letting the values held by the working-class men on the show eventually be victorious and accepted within the narrative. The purpose of this article is to try to make sense of a popular cultural artefact such as Real Men against the background of the crisis of legitimacy for the neoliberal ideology and the rise of (right-wing) populism, and to try to understand how the forms and genres of popular culture transform and respond to this changing political context.

scholarly journals All the young dudes: educational capital, masculinity and the uses of popular music

Popular Music ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Branch
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Educational Capital ◽  
Gendered Identity ◽  
Construction Of Self

AbstractSince its emergence in the early 1970s, glam rock has been theoretically categorised as a moment in British popular culture in which essentialist ideas about male gendered identity were rendered problematic for a popular music audience. Drawing on a Bourdieusian theoretical framework, the article argues that while this reading of glam is valid, insufficient attention has been given to an examination of the relevance of educational capitalvis-à-visthe construction of self-identity in relation to glam. It is therefore concerned with raising questions about social class in addition to interrogating questions of gender. The article draws on the ethno-biographies of a sample of glam's original working class male fans: original interviews with musicians and writers associated with glam, as well as published biographical accounts. In doing so it contends that glam's political significance is better understood as a moment in popular culture in which an educationally aspirant section of the male working-class sought to express its difference by identifying with the self-conscious performance of a more feminised masculinity it located in glam.

From the Suwanee to Egypt, There's No Place like Home

PMLA ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-88
Author(s):  
Cynthia Ward
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Seraph On The Suwanee ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) and Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985) feature white working-class women negotiating class hierarchies in rural communities. Despite present-day critics' putative concern with class and demonstrated interest in Hurston's other works, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), both novels have been largely ignored by the critical establishment, in part because readers lind it difficult to identify with the main characters. Comparing the critical receptions of Seraph, The Beans, and Their Eyes reveals that the mechanism by which readers identify with imaginary characters is constituted by middle-class reading practices. While a sympathetic audience emerged for Their Eyes, one is not likely to appear for the other two novels, which expose the class-bound roots of the literary construction of identity, meaning, and reality. In addition, Seraph and The Beans point, however obliquely, toward a vernacular notion of home that resists middle-class commodification.

scholarly journals Social-class differences in self-concept clarity and their implications for well-being

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (7) ◽  
pp. 951-960 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinkyung Na ◽  
Micaela Y Chan ◽  
Jennifer Lodi-Smith ◽  
Denise C Park
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Physical Health ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Concept ◽  
Class Differences

A consistent/stable sense of the self is more valued in middle-class contexts than working-class contexts; hence, we predicted that middle-class individuals would have higher self-concept clarity than working-class individuals. It is further expected that self-concept clarity would be more important to one’s well-being among middle-class individuals than among working-class individuals. Supporting these predictions, self-concept clarity was positively associated with higher social class. Moreover, although self-concept clarity was associated with higher life satisfaction and better mental health, the association significantly attenuated among working-class individuals. In addition, self-concept clarity was not associated with physical health and its association with physical health did not interact with social class.

scholarly journals Celebrity Personas, Self-help Culture, and Collective Psychology: Reflections and transformations

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-8
Author(s):  
Darren Kelsey
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Goal Setting ◽  
The Self ◽  
Positive Thinking ◽  
Celebrity Endorsements ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Face ◽  
Collective Psyche

The self-help industry bombards us with books and messages about how to live happier lives, but their advice is not always helpful. Celebrity endorsements of self-help methods and mythologies in popular culture create communicative tensions in our collective psyche, feeding messages of hope and optimism that are often, somewhat ironically, detrimental to our happiness. As a result, we now have a growing body of anti-self-help literature telling us to ditch the positive thinking, cut the endless fixation on goal setting, and live more resiliently in the face of life’s inevitable adversity (Brown 2016; Manson 2016; Brinkmann 2017).

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