It's a very circular argument, and in lots of ways the only way to argue that is your academic way of saying the same thing -because it is about the socioeconomic signifiers to a far greater extent than the socioeconomic status. Does that make more sense?
I share your frustration, Jack V. I'm not sure if I won't fall into the same problem. There's a book, however, on this very phenomenon, that strikes me as being written (yeah yeah, by an academic! BUT!) in a pretty simple voice--using personal narrative, etc. I haven't read yet the book, but I've read some excerpts, and this thread reminded me that I want to read it. The title is itself a fairly simple term that may help us, Covering, the requirement that we all try to be as "normal" as possible in order to get a kind of power cultural power. The book is by Kenji Yoshino. I think he'd say that the use of the term "chav" applied to Beckham (and maybe that boss, upthread, too) is a kind of punishment for failure to "cover."
I read an essay by him in the NY Times Mag (The Pressure to Cover), that is already an archived piece on the nytimes site, of course. (So, once again, if you're interested in the whole thing, PM me, and I'll shoot you a copy.)
Here's an excerpt:
When I began teaching at Yale Law School in 1998, a friend spoke to me frankly. ''You'll have a better chance at tenure,'' he said, ''if you're a homosexual professional than if you're a professional homosexual.'' Out of the closet for six years at the time, I knew what he meant. To be a ''homosexual professional'' was to be a professor of constitutional law who ''happened'' to be gay. To be a ''professional homosexual'' was to be a gay professor who made gay rights his work. Others echoed the sentiment in less elegant formulations. Be gay, my world seemed to say. Be openly gay, if you want. But don't flaunt.
I didn't experience the advice as antigay. The law school is a vigorously tolerant place, embedded in a university famous for its gay student population. (As the undergraduate jingle goes: ''One in four, maybe more/One in three, maybe me/One in two, maybe you.'') I took my colleague's words as generic counsel to leave my personal life at home. I could see that research related to one's identity -- referred to in the academy as ''mesearch'' -- could raise legitimate questions about scholarly objectivity.
I also saw others playing down their outsider identities to blend into the mainstream. Female colleagues confided that they would avoid references to their children at work, lest they be seen as mothers first and scholars second. Conservative students asked for advice about how open they could be about their politics without suffering repercussions at some imagined future confirmation hearing. A religious student said he feared coming out as a believer, as he thought his intellect would be placed on a 25 percent discount. Many of us, it seemed, had to work our identities as well as our jobs.
It wasn't long before I found myself resisting the demand to conform. What bothered me was not that I had to engage in straight-acting behavior, much of which felt natural to me. What bothered me was the felt need to mute my passion for gay subjects, people, culture. At a time when the law was transforming gay rights, it seemed ludicrous not to suit up and get in the game.
''Mesearch'' being what it is, I soon turned my scholarly attention to the pressure to conform. What puzzled me was that I felt that pressure so long after my emergence from the closet. When I stopped passing, I exulted that I could stop thinking about my sexuality. This proved naïve. Long after I came out, I still experienced the need to assimilate to straight norms. But I didn't have a word for this demand to tone down my known gayness.
Then I found my word, in the sociologist Erving Goffman's book ''Stigma.'' Written in 1963, the book describes how various groups -- including the disabled, the elderly and the obese -- manage their ''spoiled'' identities. After discussing passing, Goffman observes that ''persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma. . .may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large.'' He calls this behavior covering. He distinguishes passing from covering by noting that passing pertains to the visibility of a characteristic, while covering pertains to its obtrusiveness. He relates how F.D.R. stationed himself behind a desk before his advisers came in for meetings. Roosevelt was not passing, since everyone knew he used a wheelchair. He was covering, playing down his disability so people would focus on his more conventionally presidential qualities.
I find it helpful, anyway, and not particularly academic. Part of the problem is that it can be hard to say things in a short-hand way (which is another reason that jargon develops, because it's a kind of shorthand), without the kind of narrative that makes this so compelling. But that story-telling approach takes time. However, part of his point is that we are all outsiders at some level, and most of us have had an experience of having to "hide" or downplay some part of our identity in order to "fit" better, and most of us don't like it...so there's hope, maybe. |
Hurrah!
*end disclaimer*