Mirror Sites:
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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: January 10, 2002
Latest Update: January 14, 2002
Faculty:
jeannecurran@habermas.org
Olivier at tapcourse@yahoo.com
takata@uwp.edu

On the Denial of Class

Journal entry by jeanne

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, January 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on one of Lauren Langman's comments on PSN. Because we in the U.S. have insisted for so long that we are all middle class, we have become complicit in the denial of class in our own social climate. In the thread discussed below Lauren Langman speaks of the cost of such complicity. More on this soon, but I wanted it up, so you could begin a discussion. I'll catch up soon. After all, I'm retired now. lnp, jeanne.

On Tuesday, January 22, 2002, Lauren Langman posted to PSN:

Subject: Class-theory/research/lived experience

In an offline chat with colleague, the subject of class came up. We have touched on it looking at the question of how some folks became rich, aka, upward mobility. Now most of us know that ability, hard work, impulse control are important-as well as having rich, powerful or both parents. (See W the lesser of pretzel fame). But this said, there has been a decling in concerns with class/strat/inequality, and very little on the lived experiences of class based life. O sure the poor, especially racial minorities have long been a staple, see Dumier or Anderson's work, Rubin's Families on Fault Line, etc. But not much on the better off working classes or the lower middle classes, all part of the social construction of "middle class" that includes everyone. What about the lives of thepeople described by Mills in White Collar today. Many sociologists have come from the petit bourgeois class-I did-but there seem little concerns/discussions of the realities of class today. And I would say harsh realities of blue collar/petit bourgeois as K-mart seems to be going under with 1/4 million employees. Anyhow, let me suggest that folks read the piece-by an English prof-undettered by the pomo crap rampant in that neck of the woods. After all, for those of us who teach, one of the most important things we teach is that "the history of all hitherto societies has been a history of class conflict" (wish I would have said that).

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i20/20b02401.htm
[But you have to subscribe to access it! Sorry. jeanne]

Why Academics Don't Study the Lower Middle Class By Rita Felski.

"We need new ways of talking about class. The common belief that everyone in America is middle class makes no sense in a country that boasts some of the largest income disparities in the Western world. The Marxist model of class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, still popular among some academics, simply fails to come to grips with how people experience and make sense of class.

"In the United States, class identities and affiliations cannot be divided up so neatly. People of modest means aspire to an upper-middle-class lifestyle; wealthy professionals feel virtuous by eating the food of Tuscan peasants. Millionaires shop at Wal-Mart. Poverty-stricken adjuncts brim with education and erudition. Everyone shops at the Gap. In short, we see what looks like a postmodern jumbling of the signs of class. Yet what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb once called the "hidden injuries of class" may be more entrenched than ever."

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