Formations of Class & Gender: Becoming Respectable(Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

This text argues that class should be featured more prominently in feminist accounts of identity and power, explaining that class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate picture of power relations in modern society. It uses detailed ethnographic research to demonstrate how women challenge, modify and reformulate understandings of subjectivity, class, heterosexuality, femininity and feminism and explore the relevance of social positioning and cultural representation. The book also re-engages in debates about class from a perspective which includes subjectivity, gender and sexuality.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Processes, Frameworks and Motivations Respectable Knowledge: Experience and Interpretation Historical Legacies: Respectability and Responsibility Developing and Monitoring a Caring Self (Dis)Identifications of Class: On Not Being Working Class Ambivalent Femininities Becoming Respectably Heterosexual Refusing Recognition: Feminisms Conclusions

About the Author :
Beverley Skeggs is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. She has published The Media; Issues in Sociology; Feminist Cultural Theory; Formations of Class and Gender; Class, Self, Culture Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety (with Les Moran) and Feminism after Bourdieu (with Lisa Adkins), and with Helen Wood, Reacting to Reality TV: Audience, Performance, Value and Reality TV and Class, along with many journal articles on class and culture.  As an ESRC Professorial Fellow she developed a “sociology of values and value’’ that included projects on the digital economy and prosperity theology, and whilst Director of the Atlantic Fellows Programme, established the ‘Global Economies of Care’ theme at the LSE.

Review :
This book is brilliant. Formations of Class and Gender is a sophisticated and passionately written account of the classed and gendered identities of a small group of working-class white women who live in the north-west of England. It is ethnography at its best, having been built on long-term, thoughtful engagements in the field. When Beverly Skeggs met these women they were all students on a variety of ′caring′ courses at a further education college. More than eleven years later, the production of this text testifies to the quality of theoretical analysis which can be produced if only those who fund research or press for lists of publications were willing to acknowledge that leading edge work normally requires real time. The text is concerned with the production of cultural and social relations and is located within an analytical framework which draws on the work of Bourdieu... Overall the text is a robust piece of writing which I have already recommended as required reading to my research students. Skegg′s Bourdieu-influenced account of British cultures of class provides a useful empirical corrective to the more grandiose theorizing within recent cultural studies, underscoring not just the economic but the cultural and attitudinal gulf between working-class individuals and the left/feminist intellectuals who claim to be their allies. For this reason alone, it should be required reading. In a discipline that boasts a high division of labour, this book goes a long way in dismantling the futile divide between class theory and feminism. It is an articulate and impassioned ethnography, fuelled by an anger of inequality but also an anger at those who are reluctant to challenge it. At a time when sociologists seem less concerned with the tangible and more interested in the abstract, Skeggs shows how these can be used productively together; theory becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself... This book really deserves to be read and taken seriously. It is a good example of responsible research which seeks to bring out the pains and humour of working- class life and the ways in which people negotiate their environments... But the greatest achievement of this book is that it gives a voice to a group of women in the hope that they can ′...no longer be ignored, made invisible, deconstructed to irrelevance, dismissed as part of a redundant concept, or pathologized as just another "social problem"′ (168). In our present political climate, what work could be more important than that?