Classism and Working-Class Characters in Fandom
This post by kattahj made me think about the intersection of racism and classism in deciding who gets written in fanfiction. Now, of course I think it is silly to say that "it is really just about class" or "it's really just about race"; the two work intersectionally in complicated ways. But if we agree with kattahj that CoC's are more likely to get written if
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To go back to my point, it is my empirical observation that Americans want to define themselves as middle-class as much as possible. I'm teaching a comp class themed on race and class right now; my students are willing to name only the direst poverty as middle-classness, whereas I see any manual or relatively-unskilled wage labour (and, of course, unemployment) as working-class work. But working-classness is also something I understand as defined by the communities into which one is socialized, one's cultural competencies and preferences, etc: and that is doubtless because I come from a place where there is a strong history of clearly definable, if not always encouraged, working-class culture. Class in the context in which I learned it almost maps onto ethnicity; that's why, I think, there is such a strong sense of class as consensus rather than conflict-based in parts of UK culture. (Not that I ever experienced it as other than conflict-based myself, but then I've always been just off the edge of the map.)
If you want to see contemporary British working-class/underclass culture on TV, btw, find a way to download Shameless. I have only seen a couple of episodes, but it rings very true to the environment I grew up in, although my family was in the same economic but a more privileged cultural position within that.
It's because class is cultural that economic status and educational uplift don't leave it behind, in my native discourses. My learned discourses of power and privilege let me see how one does, of course, leave much of the effects of one's class status behind, how mobility is in and of itself a change in class -- that distinction accounts very nicely for my experiences of being rejected by working-class people who thought I was a snob and fetishized/not taken seriously by higher-class people who didn't quite understand how someone with my background could exist in their milieus. (Yeah, I have a chip on both shoulders.)
I think that class cultures are clearly present in the US too, but they aren't often acknowledged. When lower-class cultures are shown, they're uncomfortable: British working-classness can be fetishized, but US working/under-classness makes the distinction between haves and have-nots too clear. Especially because the difference in the US is actually a lot bigger, given healthcare differentials and the comparative lack of social housing and the absence of a decent welfare system. I think it's very hard to hold a consensus view on class in the US, if you actually open your eyes; I wonder whether this has an effect on the willingness of middle-class-identified people (and I think the push to middle-class-identification, the sense that anyone *can* be middle class, is the way the maintains a consensus class understanding) to see those who are undeniably have-nots as fully human.
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Now, we have a new divide among working class: Hourly-with-benefits vs. "temp/part-time worker," which can extend for years, no benefits, no job security, next step up is not a raise or promotion but a guarantee of hours.
That's not a complete description, but it goes a long way towards a general overview.
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I can usually tell class background by how people talk when they're tired and the way that they dress when they're not at work (or sometimes when they are). But I sure couldn't tell you what the rules are. And I can only really do that with white or white-identified people.
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I don't think social class is defined by amount of money earned, by possessions owned, or by type of job. It's related to economic class, but not synonymous with it (I know tons of college students and recent college grads who are living at poverty or lower class level economically but who move in middle class circles and have traditionally middle class tastes). I think it's primarily defined by your values, tastes, and the people and situations you are comfortable with, but that's...well, very hard to firmly define. Which I think is a lot of why it's so hard to talk about class, even aside from the vast gulf between American and British class systems, for example.
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Class in the U.S. also seems to be constantly in flux (even though economic mobility is significantly lower than in, say, the U.K.) -- not long ago, it was possible for a unionized "working-class" worker to be making more than a "middle-class professional", with the class distinction based on education, ideology, and race/ethnicity (with some types of "white" being more middle-class-"appropriate" than others, and with anyone not white operating under a continual assumption of working-class status); now, with the decline of unions, income seems to be more strongly correlated with class. Income itself, though, is responsive to a person's adoption of (class-, regionally- and racially-marked) ruling-class self-presentation, language and ideology; to the point that there's an endless stream of self-help books devoted to cultivating an ownership-class persona (though it's never framed in those terms -- the focus is more on justifying the class gap).
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Part of what pings for me in a character as a quality which is often mapped onto education but doesn't have to be; Buffy can mention Sartre and Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett intelligently (if not continue on about them fluently; her cultural literacy is enviably broad but nonetheless quite shallow) but hasn't completed so much as two years of college and hasn't completed high school for a significant portion of the time the show covers. It's this classed (and raced, but not particularly gendered as far as I can tell) web of linguistic signifiers Buffy is at the center of I was mainly calling "class," because I don't really have another word for it
But Xander, despite being working-class in all of the ways people mentioned in the comments, in terms of income and occupation and even hobbies, is at the center of a semiotic web not all that different from Buffy's at the end of the day, if with less emphasis on highbrow texts and more emphasis on geeky ones (but geeky enough texts to bespeak a certain type of privilege in their own right, if you know what I mean?). So I do see Xander as belonging to a certain class culture which isn't in harmony with his actual class status on a variety of socioeconomic levels
Faith, on the other hand, is at the center of a semiotic web so radically different--she would have no fewer signifiers than Buffy or Xander, although she manifests fewer on the show as a result of the middle-class college-educated writers not really being fluent in her type of semiotic web--as to make the attempts at communication between working-class Faith and middle-class Buffy quite literally disastrous.
Wesley's tale is that of someone who is traumatically shifted (from upper- to working-class) to a lower class in economic terms but only slowly becomes downwardly mobile in terms of class cultures--and once he has done so, becomes bicultural in that he can shift between registers whenever he needs to do so, which becomes a valuable skill (and that results in a sort of overall middle-class identity?).
Sorry about talking so much a show which isn't one of your fandoms, but I think this makes what I'm trying to discuss more clear. Not class per se, but something more closely linked to class than any other vector with which I am aware, and isn't as closely linked to race as one might at first think.
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I think your analysis is pretty valid, here; I articulate this difference by comparing cultural to economic capital. You can be immersed in a semiotic web of class culture without having access to its material privileges (the cushion of parents who can support you, say -- have you heard the Pulp song Common People? Note that the speaker meets the woman at St Martin's College; they share a semiotic web but they are very clearly of a different class!), and you can have material privileges without the higher-class semiotics. Of course, one often 'buys' the other, but not necessarily.
a certain class culture which isn't in harmony with his actual class status on a variety of socioeconomic levels
I would tend to call this a disjunction between economic and cultural capital -- and such class confusion/alienation is definitely something that draws me to characters, because it's been my experience so often. That's why it made me so angry when they gave Gunn his class upgrade in Angel S5 -- as though everything about him had to change in order for it to be possible that a working-class black man could change classed milieu! Grrr.
So yes, I totally agree with your read of Buffy, Xander and Faith, even if I might label it differently. I do think that the kind of cultural capital that accrues to geek texts is really different to that which attaches to Sartre et al, though; the former, even with mainstreaming, are subcultural and/or popular and don't, I think, ping 'upward' in the same way, they don't give full-on cultural capital and access to upwardly-mobile privilege in the way that fluency with philosophy, canonical literature, etc do.
I agree with your description of Wesley's narrative, but I wouldn't frame it in class cultures. I would say the fluencies he develops take him outside of regular class cultures altogether at times; I guess it's possible to call what he develops working-class and he keeps his upper or upper-middle fluencies (I am sure he would still identify that way if he were asked), but he definitely doesn't become middle class.
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Whoever said class identities were fixed in the UK? I think you'll find the British people on this thread stating that they are complicated not that they are unchanging; class mobility was the great safety valve of Victorian society; it was one of the things which Marx and Engels got spectacularly wrong, and it was the principal reason that not only wasn't there a revolution in 1848, there never was one at all and it was left to Russia to lead the way (where there really wasn't the safety valve).
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