Class Distinction in Zakia Mashhadi's The Cover Faces

Society is a combination of the upper and the lower class:The upper class or Bourgeoisie is busy in their world endeavors and their quest for 'more and more; whereas, in contrast, the lower class or proletariat strives for a proper one-time meal. Over time, this disparity between the classes gets horrible. The drastic consequences of this disparity become observable in society in hatred and injustice. Different authors of colonial India have jotted down social imbalances of the subcontinent, including Zakia Mashhadi. Her short story, ‘The Cover Faces’,extracted from an English translated collection ‘In Search of Butterflies’ by Saeed Naqvi (2017), was taken for qualitative textual analysis under Lois Tyson’s (2006) ‘Theory of Class Distinction’. Zakia Mashhadi showed the two parallel classes in society, where Bourgeoisie have almost everything;however, in the same society, Bourgeoisie even deprived the proletariat of the fundamental rights and necessities of life

Inheritances, social classes, and wealth distribution

We consider a simple theoretical model to investigate the impact of inheritances on the wealth distribution. Wealth is described as a finite resource, which remains constant over different generations and is divided equally among offspring. All other sources of wealth are neglected. We consider different societies characterized by a different offspring probability distribution. We find that, if the population remains constant, the society reaches a stationary wealth distribution. We show that inequality emerges every time the number of children per family is not always the same. For realistic offspring distributions from developed countries, the model predicts a Gini coefficient of G ≈ 0.3. If we divide the society into wealth classes and set the probability of getting married to depend on the distance between classes, the stationary wealth distribution crosses over from an exponential to a power-law regime as the number of wealth classes and the level of class distinction increase.

A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts or in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capitals at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Further, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, this article explains the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts. They have studied multiple femininities in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and be enacted by the same individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capital at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Furthermore, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, I explain the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

Class Distinction-Making through Etiquette, a Computational Approach

Social scientists of class and inequality have documented the rise of omnivorousness, informality, ordinariness, and emphasis on meritocracy. This apparent decline in class closure contrasts sharply with rising inequality and declining economic mobility. How are these competing developments reflected in everyday class distinction-making? In this article, we answer this question by applying Goffman’s work on the symbols of class status to the analysis of unique data. We use word embeddings to isolate and quantify the salience of six dimensions of class (affluence, cultivation, education, employment, morality, and status) to class distinction-making within a corpus of etiquette books published between 1922 and 2017. We find that education and employment are increasingly salient dimensions while status, affluence, cultivation, and morality decline as salient dimensions of class distinction-making. These results signal a decline of class operating as a status group through cultural closure, the rise of education and employment as the carriers of class in everyday life, and the corresponding legitimation of class position and class inequality on the basis of supposedly meritocratic grounds. This research opens up new avenues for research on class and the application of computational methods for investigations of social change.

GIRLS, GADGETS AND GATEKEEPERS: HOW GENDER AND CLASS ASPIRATIONS SHAPE ADOLESCENT ACCESS TO MOBILE PHONES IN MUMBAI, INDIA

Within a patriarchal, caste-based and restrictive family setup, how do gender and class work together to shape adolescent girls’ access to mobile phones in Mumbai, India? How do adolescent girls mediate their own independent aspirations and desires to variously fit within or subvert these frameworks of class stability and social morality? This paper addresses these question by using a mixed-methods study of 59 group interviews and 278 surveys with adolescents aged 13-15 in Mumbai. Taking an intersectional analytical framework, the findings show how gender and class together, create varying standards of respectable femininity and class distinction that families aspire to and cultivate in adolescent girls. The mobile phone can be seen as both a threat and a necessity to the maintenance of these standards of respectability, resulting in families variously enabling or constraining access to mobile phones by girls. Rather than interpreting the findings through binaries of lower-class/upper-class or empowered/constrained, I instead consider how classed ideals of respectable femininity create different aspirational conditions for girls belonging to each class group, and form the cultural frames of everyday life. I explore what implications this might have for adolescents girls’ understandings and enactments of independence, and how they use the site of the mobile phone to make these enactments.

Inflection Classes in Verbs in the Romance Languages

The Romance languages inherited from Latin a system of four inflection classes in verbs featuring a dedicated theme vowel (or its absence). The presence of the theme vowel in inflectional forms differs from language to language and from inflection class to inflection class. In Latin, the theme vowels are found in most forms; in Romance, their presence has declined but they are still featured at least in the infinitive of most inflection classes. Most Romance languages simplified the Latin system by reducing the number of inflection classes while retaining the class distinction by theme vowels. In many Romance languages, new inflection classes have evolved. The existence of verbs with a stem-forming augment is often described as a subclass in traditional grammars. But the augment appears in a well-defined set of paradigm cells warranting the introduction of a new class. In a synchronic analysis, French and Oïl varieties show mostly a distinction based on length of the stem or, from another perspective, pattern of syncretism as many forms are homophonous. This is partly due to the fact that some very frequent forms do not feature any longer inflectional suffixes in their phonetic realization (although these are retained in spelling). New irregularities in the stem found in all Romance languages suggest the emergence of an additional class distinction based on the form, number, and distribution of the stems. Morphomic patterns arose which may be interpreted as inflection classes. The most radical change took place in French: Some analyses claim that none of the traditional classes distinguished by theme vowels survives; only stem distinctions may be used to establish inflection classes. Other studies still assume theme vowels in French, at least with verbs ending in -ir in the infinitive. Suppletion or other processes may lead to heteroclisis (i.e., forms of the same verb pertaining to different inflection classes).

UNDERSTANDING BOURDIEU’S DISTINCTION: SOCIAL AND LITERARY CONTESTATION TO GAIN LEGITIMATE POSITION

This writing reveals the subtle domination in the area of literature and social practice which is illustrated through the practice of coffee consumption and also the claims of legitimate authors. Bourdieu examines this sociological space as a field of contestation, so he constructs his sociological project by mapping the type of social power in arena in which every subject wagers his capital to achieve a legitimate position. In the arena, each subject desires to get power either by way of embracing the rule that applies, doxa, or to fight with the practice of the new, heterodox. Following the existing rules are not able to change anything because it dictates the subject to be a disciplined subject. Bourdieu proposes the emerging heterodox because doing resistance to all forms of domination can give birth to the new alternative social structure and preventing the old one to remain in power. Social change is expected because Bourdieu's symbolic power as in symbolic capital tends to provoke symbolic violence. Having symbolic capital enchanting for its power to subtly dominate people with less capital. Oppression becomes natural due to everyday practice normalizing the oppression. shapes the taste of a certain class as class distinction. Bourdieu’s concept of distinction investigates a more sophisticated strategy in the social arena where every agent plays subtle intimidation and indeed domination.

Tricks of the Light

While there is a growing literature focusing on clients in sexual economies, much of this relies on heteronormative and/or unproven assumptions about masculinity and men’s motivations for purchasing sex. This collaborative ethnographic research takes a comparative approach by studying performances of masculinity in heterosexual and homosexual commercial sex venues in Rio de Janeiro. The authors argue that masculine performances not only are about homosocial male bonding between clients but also are aspirational performances in which actors must work within and across particular class- and race-based structures to jockey for position within the local hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity. They conclude that the connection between masculinity in heterosexual and homosexual venues is fractal, refractive, and coconstituitive. That is, even though the performances of masculinity look different in outward appearance, they actually operate within a shared ideology of gender and are coconstructed through actors’ own pretensions toward class distinction.

The Cuban Revolution through cinema. Between a real world and a possible world

The Cuban Revolution meant transformations in all directions (eco-nomic, political, legal and sociocultural) depending on the internal and external contexts that took place. A Revolution; a country for workers, peasants, petty bourgeois and progressive intellectuals, where everyone was to be revolutionary. A Revolution; a policy of interaction that in-cludes the former marginalized sectors and links them with other sec-tors of the society without class distinction, proclaiming them all as equals. A Revolution that needed a new way of thinking, of behaving, of socializing, of living, under the principles of socialism. National cinematography has reflected these incidents ahead of historiography in many of his speeches. His keen gaze reveals the Changes made, dia-logues with them reflecting new codes, patterns and realities. It exposes the scenario in which society develops and the solutions adopted by the government and the people in the face of vicissitudes showing the Rev-olution in its entirety. The paper proposes a look at cinema as a histori-cal source from the analysis of five film that reflect different moments of national development. Namely: Memorias del subdesarrollo, De cierta manera, Páginas del diario de Mauricio, Larga distancia and Sergio y Serguei.