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I wasn't taking the piss, but I can see when we're discussing something as silly as the notion of 'Chav'-dom how there's potential for all sorts of classist pisstakery.
You've kinda hit the nail on the head of the 'Chav' thing Granny- there's really not anything special about people are identified and who identify as 'Chavs' - they're pretty much jut regular people doing regular people stuff for their class and background- most of it (shopping, watching the football, going to the pub etc) hardly unique to one particular class, or race, or subculture or whatever. The one thing that, to a person on the street say, that identifies them as 'Chavs' is, like I said, the physical manifestations, more often than not the clothes, rather than some almost indefinable X-factor (even those nasty shark-eyes that Rural Savage seemed to think they have). Again, hardly unique as Goths or Punks- a lot of people own hoodies, trainers, track-suit bottoms, baseball caps and the like. It is as if somebody* took a look at the ordinary things young working class people were wearing and decided that this was a unique and unprecedented style just like the Mods, Teddy-boys, Punks, Goths of other times. They assigned them a name- 'Chav'- and some characteristics- the socially constructed 'Chav' that Allecto mentions above. What's interesting is that this construct has been very successful as a 'meme' (almost everybody in Britain could identify the traits and look of a stereotypical 'Chav' regardless of whether the term refers to something real in the same way that everybody could describe a Unicorn or Bigfoot) and has gone on to affect the real people it refers to- the Burberry thing for instance- and real people, knowing full-well what looking a certain way will mean to others, are choosing to use the physical manifestations of 'Chav'-dom- 'use' being the important word here.
*= Not one particular person of course, these things are far more organic than that. |
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