Joining the Club? Academia and Working-class Femininities
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 19:55authored byValerie Hey
The feminist working-class academic is an exemplary queer subject, someone whose presence (and practice) questions the norms of the academy without ever being able to completely occupy the 'other' term. She is an archetypal late modern subject of reflexivity and mobility. This article explores some consequences of this position by looking at class as lived as a re/location, reflecting on its pleasures and pains. The author looks principally at autobiographically inspired accounts of class, as well as other auto/biographical material, which have influenced these personal narratives. In doing so she alludes to more research-based texts to point to the cumulative importance of this particular class literature to problematise a sociology without a society.
This paper was the first systematic attempt to comment on and abstract the theoretical and methodological significance of what Hey defined as the `English feminist poststructuralist school'. It featured a discursive essay on `classic' feminist poststructuralist texts (indicatively Steedman 1988) and argued for their power in terms of revitalising class analytics not least because of the central importance of gender to their analytic grammars. It seeks to effect an acknowledgment of how the work undertaken to rethink and recast class consists of feminist analytic and conceptual vigour. It was cited by Lawler (2005) in her expository commentary in the Introduction to the Sociology special issue, and acknowledged by her as 'an excellent commentary' in another of her recently published pieces.