Julie Bettie (2003)
In this text, Bettie argues for a discussion of social class - in addition to discussions of race and gender - as a way to end educational inequalities. The author utilizes class theory in order to consider new tools for understanding how class identity is constructed and how it may fail to be constructed with race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The author explores the categories of subculture and style that White and Mexican American girls in a high school in California's Central Valley use to explain class and racial/ethnic differences among themselves. She identifies and describes several groups of girls and their experience with class difference and identity: the chicas (settled living), the cholas (hard living, or hard-cores) and the trash girls. Through nine months of interviews and observations, Bettie creates depictions of the complex identity performances of contemporary girls and shows that school cliques and styles they display reflected race and class differences among students at times.
Her analysis considers the performativity of class through which she defined students not only as working or middle class but also as writing- or middle-class performers. Through such performances, the participants who were passing (or metaphorically cross-dressing) had to negotiate their ‘inherited’ identity from home with their ‘chosen’ public identity at school. By viewing the gap between how the participant’s families looked and talked at home and how the students looked and talked at school, Bettie creates a way of conceptualizing class as a material location and a performance.
Relevant concepts:
Significant quotes:
Of interest:
Questions:
Her analysis considers the performativity of class through which she defined students not only as working or middle class but also as writing- or middle-class performers. Through such performances, the participants who were passing (or metaphorically cross-dressing) had to negotiate their ‘inherited’ identity from home with their ‘chosen’ public identity at school. By viewing the gap between how the participant’s families looked and talked at home and how the students looked and talked at school, Bettie creates a way of conceptualizing class as a material location and a performance.
Relevant concepts:
- Badges of dignity
- Class injuries
- Reflexive ethnography (22)
- Habitus (51)
- Membershipping (141)
- Race and gender projects
- Subculture (45)
Significant quotes:
- “… race, class, sexuality, and gender are not properties of individuals, but axes of social organization that are shifting and fluid. But there is a temporal fixity, bound by the context of history and culture, and these identities are routinely embraced as real by social actors (ie., I am Mexican American, I am white, I am a girl) and are real in their consequences” (53).
- “… race and class are always already mutually implicated and read in relationship to one another. But when class is couched in race and ethnicity, but further, because of the conflation, we fail to learn much about the existence of racial/ethnic cultural forms and experience across class categories” (86).
- “The symbolic economy of style at the school was the ground on which class relations were played out among white students by making claims to stylistic authenticity” (127).
- “The social pressure for girls to conform and follow rules as part of the definition of femininity makes it a possibility that they might do better in school than working-class boys, for whom defining manhood includes more pressure to engage in risk-taking behavior and overt resistance to control” (143).
- “… having a structural rather than individual explanation for one’s class location, such as the history of colonialism and institutionalized racism, assisted some working-class students’ success. Family stories “represented the creation of a history that would break the links between the parents’ current occupational status and their children’s’ future academic attainment (1995, 55)” (154).
Of interest:
- The role that fantasy plays in this text (187) echoes the same ideas as Cintron's participant's use of fantasy.
Questions:
- What are race and gender projects? (45)
- As the author acknowledges, there are risks and rewards that come with analysis of class. [How] does the focus on class through explanations that take into account the multiple nature and discursive constitutions of class-based subjectivity affect that risk?
- [How] does the insistent attention to the structuring of class relations affect the researcher’s (and our) interpretations of these accounts of class? (Could these accounts of class be defined as materialist forms of poststructuralism?)
- How would the research/findings be different if the study was not just bilingual and English-speaking participants?