Abstract
This interview, sees Chantelle Lewis and Michaela Benson in conversation with Bev Skeggs as she reflects on her landmark book Formations of Class and Gender (1997). Twenty-five years on from its publication, we speak about the women and the empirical research at the heart of book; its central arguments, contributions to a range of fields, and its location in the longer trajectory of Bev’s intellectual project; the importance of listening as a route to developing sociological analysis; reflect on the value of bringing together approaches from cultural studies and sociology with dialogue between scholars; discuss ongoing debates among feminists; and consider the book’s continuing legacy for new generations of scholars, in a range of fields around the world in the current conjuncture.
Keywords
Introduction
This conversation between the authors took place in October 2022 to mark 25 years since the publication of Beverley Skeggs’ book Formations of Class and Gender (Skeggs, 1997). It coincided with the end of Bev’s treatment for breast cancer. As the Covid-19 pandemic was starting to ease, we were able to record the interview in person, although it was the first time we had been together in one room for several years. In the conversation, we revisit the book and its central arguments from questioning theoretical understandings of ideology by listening to and observing how working class women (and others) were resisting this in their everyday lives, to including what’s changed in how Bev’s thinking about theory. We consider how it sits in the longer trajectory of Bev’s intellectual project and personal biography. We reflect on the value of being undisciplined, adopting interdisciplinary ways of working that bring together cultural studies and sociology, centring dialogue in social science scholarship, and how this work speaks to ongoing debates among feminists and the relevance of these at the current juncture. And much, much more.
It’s been 25 years since the publication of Formations of Class and Gender, and Chantelle and I were wondering if you could start by telling us a little bit more about your original motivation for doing the research that led to the book?
I had originally been reading a lot of Marxist theory and was particularly intrigued by the concept of ideology. The main theorist at the time was Louis Althusser. His key texts had been translated into English in 1971 and this was 1982. I was intrigued by his concept of interpellation, but overall I wasn’t totally convinced by his conceptualisation of ideology. It was one of those things where I knew I wasn’t clever enough but I had an overwhelming urge to both unpack and challenge his theory. My heroine since my own Further Education (FE) college days had been Angela Davis, someone who most definitely was not interpellated by the ideological racism of the US state, and had been imprisoned because of her resistance to it. Eventually, I decided that the way I could make an intervention was through an interrogation of how ideology was lived, not just theorised. As I began my PhD, I also started working part-time in an FE college, teaching on social care courses. At the time, UK FE colleges were developed for vocational education for working-class students, often as apprenticeships. My background prior to academic scholarship was in nursery schools, looking after small children. As I brought my developing understanding of feminism and Marxism into the further education space and social care, I thought to myself that the women on the courses I was teaching were not taking on femininity as an ideology in the way that theories of ideology proposed. They really weren’t, and nor was I. The critique of ideology linked to my background in some way. I have that question in my head all the time: how is this working? I think that is how I develop theories: does this work, for whom, in whose interests? These courses became the basis for my PhD and Formations.
Now, when I began thinking through how ideology was lived, Margaret Thatcher had been voted into power (in 1979), and Thatcherism had really started to take hold. It transformed the political context and was met with shock and resistance as people stood up to her ideology. Events created by Thatcher shaped the context for my PhD (1982–87). We’d had race riots across the UK (1981); Greenham Common (from 1981 onward); the revival of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmanent (CND); the Falklands War, with extreme jingoism (1982); the AIDS pandemic ran rife, and the related death and demonisation of lesbians and gays was horrific. We had poverty and unemployment so bad it was unequalled since the 1930s. The miners’ strike in 1984–85 was a planned attack on the strongest trade union in the UK and hit hardest in the north of England. The Tory government demonised working-class women, through policy and statements about ‘welfare scroungers’ that targeted single mothers in particular. Towns and cities were derelict in places and violence (especially domestic, racialised and sexual violence) was frequent. It was truly awful. Thatcherism was a ‘shock doctrine’. And all this was coming together, whilst in the background international battles such as the Israeli attacks on Palestine, the IRA campaign, Solidarity in Poland, continued. I was distracted a lot during my PhD as I became involved in many political struggles.
A huge amount of resistance was bubbling beneath the surface of the attacks on the Black, white, female working class. What we were seeing was that ideology wasn’t working. It really wasn’t. People were not going to roll over and say ‘Yes, attack me, take all my rights and life away because I’ve been forced into poverty, I’m Black, or I’m gay’. People were not going to say ‘Yes, I am your representation of me’, which was ‘an absolute evil degenerate human being’. They were fighting back and they were fighting back considerably, on many fronts: just a few of which were all the burgeoning LGBT feminist groups, networks, media; the anti-Nazi league. Popular culture was much more political and resistant (that is one big difference to now), e.g. all the feminist movements and media, Rock against Racism, Red Wedge, New Romantics, The Face magazine, even Marxism Today, which wasn’t at all about Marxism. . .
This context was making me even more interested in ideology. Cruelty and individualism were being promoted by the government but I was hearing some great stories about how women were caring, resisting and surviving, and that became the Formations research. Being an activist helped me develop my own understanding of ideology. At one point, I had two young women who were homeless (from Formations) and some striking miners who were trying to get to picket lines outside Yorkshire, staying in my little house, a designated safe house. We had some funny combinations of people learning from each other: three miners helped the two women glue up the local sex shop with superglue! The women organised a jumble sale for the miners’ wives organisation. These people were not interpellated; they weren’t saying, ‘let’s just roll over, let’s become feminine carers’, they were saying ‘Let’s do something’. We all really learnt a lot. The film Pride (Warchus, 2014) brings some of that connectedness together. People were supporting each other because they knew they were all being shat on (or subject to the most inhumane conditions; e.g. trying to starve strikers back to work, criminalised for being Black, allowed to die for being gay).
Can you talk us through how your lived experience was informing the development of your intellectual home?
On a theoretical level, I was reading everything that was coming out of the Open University at the time. There was this amazing course run by Tony Bennett on ideology. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was just down the road from where I lived and was doing my PhD (Keele), so I popped down there to go to their seminars, and made good friends with Chris Griffin, and later Paul Willis. Paul’s book Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977) 1 was really significant at the time. He had published what I had hoped to achieve, but I wanted to take it on through a feminist perspective. Understanding how culture was lived had become so important to how I understood the lives of the women on the caring courses (social care, health care, community care) that became the basis for Formations. It wasn’t just about them doing a course on caring. It was much bigger: about what possibilities they had, what alternatives they had, how they could live their lives. My research became about making sense of how you live your life in such horrific conditions. These women were making the most of their classed situation, and they were doing what Judith Butler would later say was making (their) lives more liveable. I was really interested in how all of this happened and was unravelling. But remember, I am a bit theoretically eclectic to say the least. I search for things that help me explain what I’m studying. And there was a huge amount of intellectual energy going into shaping new areas of thought: feminism and cultural studies which shaped what we now know as sociology and many other disciplines. 2
At this time there were stencilled papers coming out of the CCCS and I used to get over-excited by them, but often struggled to understand the theory. I still have them all. I didn’t have anybody around me at the time to confirm whether I had understood the meanings. I felt I was really out of my intellectual comfort zone, but then again, I don’t think I’ve ever really had an intellectual comfort zone. I think I may like that challenge. I’d go to seminars at CCCS and hear people debating, which I found both fascinating and terrifying (so much to learn, so many ways to get it all wrong). It was very interdisciplinary – the first time I’d encountered literary theorists, for instance. And very politically volatile. Everybody was critiquing each other: feminist and queer theorists, anti-racist feminists and Black scholars. Historians were bemoaning the lack of historical understanding and absolutely nobody was free from scathing critique. It was a difficult world to inhabit, a challenge to negotiate, and oddly – despite the fear – I loved it. I think I still do – it’s why I did research on software (see for example Skeggs and Yuill 2016). I knew absolutely nothing about it and thought it would force me to learn. It did, with the help of amazing software scholars.
This is where I began to understand how theory could be better explained when related to specific issues. Theory is just what we use to best explain what we need. At the same time I was going to feminist conferences, and learning a lot about sexuality, which at the time was the big issue. I also took film courses at the Midland Arts Centre, to understand representation, and workshops on anti-racist training (RAT). They were incredible. I was slowly realising that to hear people talk – and especially debate – was helping me to understand and pull disparate areas (feminism, race, sexuality) all together.
This unruly, and dare I say it, undisciplined understanding of theory really appeals to me. But I wonder if we could take a step back, and reflect a little bit more on this sense of being an activist while at the same time trying to understand ideology?
When I was doing my PhD, there were so many political diversions, but I guess that is representative of most people’s experience of research. It felt like a really lively time, where I was trying to grapple with so many issues both personally and politically. The majority of my friends were from the LGBTQ community and systematically marginalised in every way. The ‘pink pound’ was only slowly emerging, gay spaces were subject to heavy policing, and of course people were dying. Me and my friend Nicki used to go round to deliver food and care to people who needed it in Manchester.
The other huge political issue was the race riots. The police brutality against Black people was unbelievable (the head of the police in Manchester was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite and loved by The Sun newspaper). I was massively distracted by all of these political moments because how can you not react to and resist such horrific behaviour. But all of these urgencies were actually contributing to the themes in the PhD. My main reflection was that feminist theories were helping me to make sense of what was going on around me and this became really apparent in how I wrote my PhD, which was an early version of Formations.
It really points to the conjuncture in which you were writing and how influenced the PhD. But it’s also a great segue into my next question which is about the shift from PhD to monograph. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
It took five years for me to finish the PhD. I wasn’t one of those who finished on time! But remember late-hand-in wasn’t an issue then. We didn’t have to do training courses. You know, there wasn’t anything like feminist methodology at the time. Finding an examiner for my PhD was a real issue. There were people like Rosemary Deem who had written books about women in education (see for example Deem, 1978) but the PhD was much more about the state, ideology and subjectivity. And then Formations transitioned into something else, with more of a commentary on the politics of the time. I received a small amount of funding to return to the area and I’d kept in touch with a lot of the women so I kept revising theoretically as they grew older and moved into jobs and motherhood. My scholarship was also moving with the theoretical times. In the early 1990s I wrote a book about the media, contributed to a textbook on vocational jobs, a few journal articles about feminism, masculinity and music, education and a critique of postmodernism (see for example Skeggs, 1990, 1991, 1993; Skeggs & Mundy, 1992). I was also a founding editor of Magazine of Cultural Studies. I got a job at Lancaster University in 1990 where lots of inspiring people were based: Sarah Franklin, Jackie Stacey and Celia Lury, who together had edited a brilliant book for CCCS called Women Take Issue (Women’s Studies Group, 1978). We developed women’s studies together as a space and that informed how what I wrote changed the PhD from a study of the state, ideology and care into a book about feminist cultural theory. I also took huge inspiration from Stuart Hall, Paul Willis and Christine Griffin. Sadly, Chris is written out of a lot of CCCS history. In Typical Girls (Griffin, 1985) she was doing the equivalent of Learning to Labour for women but from a different theoretical position: feminist and socio-psychological.
Until now we have not talked about your methodological approach in Formations. It’s notable that this was an ethnography. As a fellow ethnographer, I am really conscious that ethnography has not always been welcomed in sociological publishing. At least, that was my experience of trying to get my first book published. I just wondered if you had faced similar challenges.
Oh yes! Before Formations was eventually printed, I was told I’d never get an ethnography published. Specifically, I was repeatedly warned that I would never get an ethnography on working-class women published, because ‘nobody wanted to know about working-class women’. That’s why the book became much more theoretical, which I regret. It was a battle to get a lot of the ethnographic analysis included, and I was encouraged to approach it as a cultural theory book. I had by then published an edited book called Feminist Cultural Theory (Skeggs, 1995) about methodology and the publishers were keen to develop this area. I think this led to a bit of a disjuncture in the style. But for me the ethnography was essential, because how the hell do you interrogate these theories that assume how people live if you don’t actually go out and understand how they live? Duh!
I learnt a lot from anthropology, including the amazing anthropological feminists who were writing at the time. I was reversing slowly back into Marxism, from my immersion in feminist theory but I was always looking for explanations. Marxism had felt too static. I took huge inspiration from Judith Butler and from my undergraduate days Michel Foucault was always in the background. And I was reading the journal Feminist Review with brilliant debates by people like Veronica Beechey, Mary McIntosh and Michelle Barrett. I was trying to bring together Marxist and cultural studies via Stuart Hall, with post-structural feminist theory via queer debates and the anti-racist critiques of all these areas. I also loved the incredible historical debates via History Workshop Journal and feminist historians such as Catherine Hall and Anna Davin. And then, obviously, I discovered Bourdieu and I was seduced by theorising cultural capital. Like many others I got my initial analysis of Bourdieu wrong. . .
Your intellectual curiosity really comes across in the book. I think what you have just referred to as distractions were part of your weaving together a kind of intellectual issue, like an intellectual jigsaw puzzle. For me, Formations presents deep methodological reflections and your eclecticism in respect to theory really demonstrates the value in this work. Most academics are so caught up in policing their disciplinary boundaries, but I think your work is a really good example of how to divest from those processes of discipline-ing. You are always asking lots of questions. But I just wanted to pick up on the first thing you said about you not feeling clever enough to take on theories of ideology (e.g. via the influence of Althusser at the time). Looking over your body of work from Formations onwards, you do take on quite a lot of people in a very ‘Bev Skeggs’ kind of way. You take these grand theorists on from the point of view of saying, ‘well, actually, this just isn’t working for me’, and it’s not working for these other people, if and you approach that as a puzzle. But in a context where disciplines feature so prominently in the universities, and where the boundaries of those can be quite tightly policed, I wondered you faced any challenges in the early stages of your academic career in consequenceof these undisciplined way of thinking.
When I finished my PhD in 1987, there were two jobs in sociology in Britain. I didn’t get either of them. I was a sociologist and I did identify with it, but I was excluded from it. I took on three temporary part-time jobs teaching, but none of these were in sociology. I went to sociology conferences, but they were very expensive. I’d sneak in if I could and knew where they were. Educational research was also an exciting space. I’d come across a journal called Screen Education in the 1980s where there were feminist debates about Bourdieu (about how education reproduced power). I think people forget that the most critical, brilliant analysis of Bourdieu began in the UK with educational feminists in the 1980s, and Screen Education was one of the journals that was publishing that work. The discipline of education was an exciting place, as Cultural Studies continued to be.
I became re-engaged in media studies because I started teaching it at Stoke-on-Trent FE college to police cadets (now that’s another story: teaching was a dangerous activity, not just because of the sexual harassment that was normalised but also because, at the time, far-right activism extended into everyday life.) This hairy experience made me see how central representation was to absolutely everything: how do we understand social life if we don’t understand representation? I still ask this regularly of social theorists and even some of the very best do not understand how representation frames everything. The important debate between Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler on ‘Recognition or Redistribution’ takes this on but I think Butler overestimates the power of language and Fraser is not great on representation (see also Skeggs, 2001). I think I’ve always been on the outside of sociology but I do think it’s really odd that a lot of us (e.g. Jackie Stacey, Celia Lury, Sarah Franklin) went on to become heads of sociology departments. There were no cultural studies departments. But then, I’ve never felt I fitted and that might be part of that.
I’m such a big fan of your scholarship, Bev. Reading your work, it has always been clear to me that Formations is a good example of connecting sociology with cultural studies. But until now, I had never heard you speak about your route into academia and your intellectual project. Listening to you, it all really makes sense. Like many people, I have always seen you as a CCCS scholar but I think there will be a lot of people surprised by what you have said because they have come to your work as simply a feminist intervention on society. And I think reading this interview, there will be other people who now have a better understanding of the people who inspired your intellectual development.
But I just want to go back to some points that you were making about the political climate when you were doing your PhD. Here, I am referring to what you were saying about Thatcherism, the miners and the women who were part of the care workforce who took part in your research. Your work was questioning the extent to which these women consented to how they were both classed and gendered within society. You were thinking this through whilst civil society was breaking down through the miners’ strikes, the race riots and police brutality. The combination of political analysis and feminist theory demonstrates that the terms of consent and the contradictions that working-class women were living through, against the backdrop of what was happening at the time in Britain. I just wondered how we could now begin to connect how some of your reflections on the brutality of Thatcherism to the current conjuncture? Are there similar contradictions in how people are living today? For example, in the 1980s you provided numerous examples of how civil society was not consenting to Thatcherism, yet people were consistently voting for it. And we kind of have a similar moment right now in 2022. I think the terrain is similar, but different. And I wondered what you think those stories that you collated in your ethnography and then write about in Formations can tell us about the gaps in the terrain and the importance of contradictions for producing resistance.
That’s a hard question. I think we’re now in an even more horrific situation because a lot of the resistance has been broken up, some incorporated, and the far-right has been absorbed into legitimate political parties. We still had a welfare state and a functioning NHS in the 1980s; using debt to survive was present but limited and certainly not promoted in the media. People now are literally starving and freezing, police misogyny and racism is the same, but the sheer numbers of those pushed into poverty and despair without any support have massively increased. The pathologisation of the working class has been achieved via the way they are represented, the mainstream media are now craven and social media – designed to maximise profit – allow absolutely anything and enable ubiquitous surveillance.
But there are differences in the politics of then and now. I was thinking the other day, how would Stuart Hall rewrite the book on Thatcherism? Thatcher had an ideology. Today it is the politics of chaos which has proven to be very effective as a weapon of war (e.g. the War in Iraq): some of it ideological (e.g. promoting greed), some of it financial (e.g. the huge increase in debt) and the financialisation of daily life. Other forms appear to be straightforwardly politically corrupt – developing policies to benefit political funders – and some of it is about alienating people so much they no longer participate in democratic institutions, creating non-participation. The lack of accountability now for me is also important. Few people are calling this out. The mainstream media rarely hold people to account and they are owned and funded by those who need to be held to account. Drama is more successful in respect to accountability. I am thinking for example of drama series like Succession (Armstrong, 2018) and Line of Duty. The blatant greed and corruption of the government and political funders is rarely made publicly accountable, although thank goodness for The Good Law Project, Carol Cadwalldr – the journalist who called out Brexit funding – and alternative media outlets such as Byline Times and Open Democracy. It is remarkable that now politicians don’t even bother to claim legitimacy for their greed, and corruption. And people are ‘forced’ to cooperate with the mechanisms that generate inequality (e.g. using debt to survive, communicating via social media); or use forms of privatisation (e.g. health, education, transport, heat, telecommunications, water) because they have no choice. For those who do know how they are being manipulated, few alternatives are available (e.g. what is the alternative to debt to survive?). I think the individualism, greed and privatisation Thatcher promoted has produced indifference to those who are so far away from fitting the individualistic discourse. It’s a ‘whatever’ response. A form of quietism that encourages people to disengage. They just don’t participate, which is actually very useful for the government because it’s the disenfranchised who could really cause trouble. Or when they do resist, it takes the form of righteous anger and nostalgic value for something they never had but which makes them feel a bit better than those who are socially proximate. The form (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) becomes as important as the content because it enables certain forms of communication (think Brexit, Trump). I also call convenience an ideology because it legitimates almost anything (e.g. allowing ‘pre-emptive’ surveillance technology into your home via Alexa; using Amazon because it’s easy). Thatcher was a very different object. She had political plans, although we have to remember that she only ever got 48% of the vote; half the population absolutely hated her. Now, because the current political leadership does not have ideological plans – just accumulation of every form for themselves – I think it’s much more difficult to directly challenge them. Also, government and finance are all so interconnected and they hold power in so many different spheres (e.g. global finance) and are so slippery. They have used ‘legitimate’ forms to develop a whole system of shadow banking. We also now have populism which is a very different beast. So some ideology still exists in direct form, with devastating effects on ordinary people. What is also different is the ability of politicians such as Johnson to just blatantly lie (Taylor, 2022). When politicians are not held to account and govern through chaos, the relationship between interests and ideology is even more obfuscated and power operates unhindered.
I think there is still resistance, without a doubt. A major issue now is climate destruction, but for many it is still an abstract issue and/or they have no idea how to tackle it. All these major issues are changing how we address ideology. And the corporate and neoliberal takeover of the mainstream media (Freedman, 2021), the impact and manipulation of social media and the complete lack of belief in the authority of politicians through corruption mean the response is different. We have moved much further to the right than in the 1980s. We now have a level of state cruelty that the government continually legitimates. Some of the Thatcherites (e.g. Ferdinand Mount) are truly astonished and horrified by the cruelty and corruption of the recent Conservative governments (see Mount, 2021). In the 1980s, it was his cruelty as Thatcher’s advisor that truly horrified me. That’s how far we have come.
And what you were saying, Michaela, is really funny, because I’ve been having these debates about ideology. There was a moment when I sat over there at that table, finishing off the reality TV book and this argument I’ve been having against the ghost of Althusser for years just comes out of me, like a maniac. Have you ever done that when you’re writing? Asked yourself where the hell did that come from? It’s taken me years to get there, but you know, it’s my attempt to really take that on, to argue that working-class women are struggling with these contradictions, and it’s the struggle that matters and that is where we should be paying attention. They’re not consenting, not interpellated; rather, they are bound up in contradictions which are about struggles for values. And that is exactly what is represented, as we showed with the research project I did with Helen Wood on reality TV (Skeggs & Wood, 2012). And as a result of the privatisation of TV (which becomes reliant upon sensationalism, lies and a huge amount of corporate funding, for example Breitbart TV) we ended up with Johnson and Trump. I’m interested in the structures that influence the formation of our subjectivities. So after the moral economy of Reality TV which was reshaping the public, my next project was on software, the platforms that were reshaping social relationships and in particular the relationship between value and values. I hope that helps answer your question, Chantelle.
You’ve always been really good at understanding my – what at times feel like – gibberish words. And you always make me think really creatively. But this is why I think you’re such an amazing cultural studies scholar, because you’ve linked – you’re able to link – so many things at once. And I think that’s where sometimes sociology is a bit dry, isn’t it?
I think that you are right, Chantelle. But there are still some people who have that kind of intellectual curiosity where they are happy to look over there in anthropology, for example. But for the most part, I think that people are not trained or encouraged to do that. As somebody trained in an interdisciplinary environment, I’ve found it quite difficult to work in a context which doesn’t support interdisciplinarity in lots of ways.
I feel so privileged and lucky that I have been mentored by interdisciplinary scholars. I don’t think that’s necessarily an ordinary route. But I feel really privileged to have been around people who said to me, why don’t you think about this? Why don’t you think about that? Or how does this relate to this thing? And thinking about the media or thinking about feminism, thinking about film, like, music, TV, but also everyday life. And I think that that’s where I think I’ve found sociology sometimes more difficult to engage with. But I guess the people who have inspired me – like you, both of you – have always been people who have been thinking about who my research is for. What’s our scholarship for? Who is it for? Is it freedom that it isn’t for anyone and it’s just intellectualism, as bell hooks would say?
What worries me is – where’s the keenness, the excited scholars, those prepared to try out their ideas through reading the stuff, through debating ideas? I do feel like I was a child in a sweet shop for most of my time and I was able to inhabit interdisciplinary spaces where the ferocious debates taught me lots. If they were not in my space, I went to find them. It was a collective enterprise in Birmingham; CCCS was the best example of intellectual practice. So what happens to it? It gets closed down. Look at Goldsmiths now, where all that remarkable intellectual energy is being destroyed. What I personally wanted to do at Lancaster in the 1990s, with the Centre for Women’s Studies, was to try and create that sort of interdisciplinary space and bring people in. The CCCS also wanted that type of space, where flourishing is possible; a space where it is possible to be wrong, which isn’t just shaped by the imperatives of inhabiting the moral high ground: ‘I am right, therefore you are a bad person’. When we held the Transformations conference at Lancaster in 1997, it was truly fantastic. 3 I fell in love with Lauren Berlant and her paper on affect – not individualised trauma but everyday struggles to survive – was brilliant (Berlant, 2000). We argued a lot after that but her loss has created a big gap in challenging all our thinking; as has that of David Graeber. We brought in the people we wanted to hear. I think those sorts of interdisciplinary spaces are so important. I’ve tried to do that everywhere that I’ve worked. I’ve set up centres, units, etc., because I want to be surrounded by clever people I can learn from and try out ideas with. When I was finishing Formations, we had a group where we read each other’s writing. I had five very different sets of comments from very different perspectives on one of the chapters (Lynne Pearce, Jackie Stacey, Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Alison Young). I learnt so much, as I had to explain myself to people who didn’t agree or understand what I was saying, and it was also fun.
I love interdisciplinarity even though it’s so very hard. I learned so much about law and how to argue against Foucault from writing the sexuality book with Les Moran (Moran & Skeggs, 2014). We argued like hell, still do, but I learned so much from him. Helen Wood, who works in media, said to me, on our reality TV project on moral economies: ‘you can’t just take a media object and say that’s it, I’ll just use it as an example for my argument’ (Skeggs & Wood, 2012). She taught me how to analyse very carefully. You learn so much from other people. They also help you to write and learn lots about what you are trying to say. Simon Yuill taught me so much on the software project (Skeggs & Yuill, 2016). Without these people I’d be much more intellectually cramped.
I think I’ve never thought I really knew anything. And sometimes I may appear like that. I think I live in a position of doubt. Most of the time I doubt practically everything I know and think it’s not right. And also I’ve changed. So you know, I loved Bourdieu and then I thought, ‘Oh, God, that doesn’t work’. I hate the concept of habitus. I saw habitus appearing everywhere when editing The Sociological Review. Authors were just stating it and not interrogating it. Also, many did not know all the feminist critiques or had wilfully chosen to ignore them (Adkins & Skeggs, 2004). Lazy and sloppy. When I realised I’d got cultural capital wrong – I thought all culture could be converted into capital (it can’t), I didn’t fully understand the significance of fields of exchange and the role of the symbolic – I rectified it. I admitted it and that led onto further examination, which ended with me developing a values and value frame to understand non-powerful life. Bourdieu is a brilliant analyst of power but much less so of the powerless (especially gender and sexuality). His major works are all about reproduction. His analysis of cultural capital and taste reproduces the lack of power and taste of the working class. For Bourdieu, it is only capital if it can be converted into dominant legitimate value. Hence the use of the metaphor of capital to mean that which has value. Tony Bennett, the cultural studies scholar, pointed out the problems with Bourdieu and when I read his critique of Bourdieu’s (1984) Distinction, it was a moment when I went, ‘Oh bloody hell, why didn’t I see that?’ (see Bennett, 2011). But when you get over that feeling it’s great because you’ve learnt, you’ve developed your perspective and you’ll never see things the same again. I went on to experiment with the idea of ‘person-value’ (i.e. avoiding capital), about the use values that are important to people and then developed an analysis of values and value, which includes moral value, because if you are discussing gender and motherhood the discourses are infused with morality. That’s why I’ll always love learning. I’m curious. I want to know how things work. I like a challenge. I like experimenting with ideas. I like asking questions.
What’s notable in Formations is that I don’t think habitus appears at all. You describe it, but you don’t name it. And actually, the description that you’ve got of Bourdieu and the different forms of capital and his metaphors is probably one of the clearest I’ve seen. You actually explain what symbolic capital is, which most people don’t understand.
You can’t understand anything without symbolic capital, because you wouldn’t have legitimacy without symbolic capital. And that’s why it’s a very violent form of capital. It is power in action through the symbolic domain. I think the enhanced definition in Class, Self, Culture (Skeggs, 2004) is better!
How do we distinguish symbolic capital from cultural capital?
Cultural capital begins with the culture we learn, but only some forms of it can be converted into capital. People learn to inhabit and embody the culture with which they are familiar. Some people just have culture that they cannot capitalise upon (e.g. the working class, who are told that their knowledge does not count, or their mothering is bad or their social life and bodies are a drain on the nation). Working-class culture usually only has value in local spaces between themselves. It doesn’t convert to capital in wider fields of exchange, such as employment – e.g. the cultural knowledge required to work for the BBC. It is a cramped form of culture that does not extend into that which is considered to be socially legitimate. They can try and learn other forms of cultural capital, e.g. me transported to a grammar school (not very successful), but as Bourdieu points out, the history of the episteme (how we learn rather than what we learn) often makes this very difficult or impossible (e.g. speaking with authority about art, inhabiting spaces with confidence). Those who can accrue symbolic capital must have access to the fields of exchange (e.g. the law or the national mainstream media, which determine what legitimacy is). For instance, if you go to Eton, everything you do – what you learn, the way you learn (the episteme), the way you speak, how you inhabit entitlement and authority (embodiment) – is legitimated by and legitimates the dominant symbolic culture to become capital. To have the power to make a judgement about what is legitimate is what secures symbolic capital. This is why religion used to be incredibly significant as it judged who was deserving and undeserving, who could be ‘redeemed’. We see this tradition passed through many institutions where some groups are represented as undeserving and others as legitimate. Most people live and embody lots of culture that cannot be converted into symbolic capital and power. So, for example, the law is the key representative of symbolic capital. It basically legislates for what is proper, is or is not capital with value (cultural capital). Without an understanding of symbolic capital, you can’t understand legitimation. If you don’t understand legitimation, you don’t understand how power works. Reality TV was an instrument of symbolic violence (e.g. those with symbolic power – media producers – de-legitimate for the purposes of entertainment and profit those whose culture is already de-valued), rendering and representing the working class as nearly always undeserving; this de-legitimation carries through into welfare, education and the criminal law system (Skeggs, 2009). And the conceit of many programmes was exposing the contestant’s lack of cultural capital.
That’s a crash course in Bourdieu!
It really is! One thing that is really evident in Formations is your inherent curiosity and concern to listen to people. Could you reflect on some of the challenges that you’ve faced in doing this?
Listening to the women was exactly the point of the ethnography. They still inhabit my head when I’m trying to understand things (e.g. food banks). But a real challenge for me was listening to the ones who weren’t like me. It was hard to listen for the silences, hearing what they wouldn’t say. When you do an ethnography, over time you build up that sense of what’s missing from what people are telling you, through both deeds and words. For example, Mary and Karen, two of the women in the ethnography, are loud characters like me. I was only a few years older than them, we used to go out together, and I kept in touch with them for years. I felt that it was easier to understand what they were doing, what they were saying, because of the similarities between us. Whereas others were really quiet and I had to work very hard to understand. And so that’s where I would always start, with what Les Back calls ‘the listener’s art’, listening really, really carefully and over a long period of time (Back, 2007). And that’s step one in the sociological imagination. But I also think you need to see how people live contradictions, that gap between what they say and what they do. Or what they say in one space and contradict in another. For me, it’s looking for those gaps and contradictions. So it’s looking as well as listening, and bringing that together through a careful analysis to make it sociological.
For example, at the heart of Formations is the fact that the women taking part didn’t want to be called working class. I was asking myself, ‘Well, what the hell do I do now? I’m stuck with this.’ They were happy to be designated women (they even discuss it), but they don’t want to be working class. I had to think, why is this the case? I kept returning to the question of class to get to understand why they really hated being represented by this term. The more I went back, the more I learned, heard and was able to analyse, moving beyond the way they defined themselves to make clear how they were living with the effects of symbolic power through their degradation and pathologisation by those with symbolic capital (teachers, social workers). It was their defence against judgements of degradation that made respectability central. And this is why I worked with and against the concept of identification. I used disidentification to understand their distance from the representation of class, but identification with the idea (not always practice) of motherhood. Listening and observing over time, focusing on the contradictions and gaps, makes sociology not just the art of listening but of listening to generate the art of analysis.
You’ve talked a little bit about the alignments between you and some of the women taking part in your ethnography, but I wondered if I could ask what was it like working on something that was caught up in your own personal biography?
Painful, quite difficult actually. I came to realise it was as much my mum’s biography as mine. She was the one who really invested in respectability – and I was always rebelling against it. Quite a lot of the women were much more like my mum than me, for example through their investment in motherhood as a representation of value. It wasn’t anything about the practice of motherhood but about claiming moral superiority, moral values. I’ll give you an example. My mum said to me, ‘you know, the worst thing you can ever do is have kids; they ruin your life’. Thanks, mum. But she promoted and invested in her role as a mother (which had much more value than being a cleaner in the local culture), a moral universe of values. At a very early stage in the research, it became clear to me that motherhood was a category that the women in Formations had to perform to prove that they were legitimate and valued women, respectable. And it became performative. I found writing really, really painful, because some of their stories are quite horrific. There are stories of homelessness, sexual abuse, domestic abuse and a huge amount of symbolic violence. It is their constant pathologisation that leads them to invest in motherhood and respectability.
To bring it back to my personal biography. I arrived at university with a complete feminine appearance, with a Farrah Fawcett-Majors hairstyle (1970s American glamorous detective with big hair) and the most inappropriate clothes and quickly learnt that I inhabited the wrong culture. My version of femininity had absolutely no cultural capital and was symbolically denigrated. Constantly. I had local value where I grew up, in the local marriage markets and that kind of stuff. But as soon as I moved into a high cultural capital environment (field of exchange as Bourdieu would say) I had none. When I did the research, I was seeing how femininity and motherhood was playing out in different arenas. So I think it helped, but also made it really difficult and very painful as it reminded me of all the humiliation I endured without knowing why.
I think that a lot of other people would have uncovered that story through some kind of deep psychological investigation. But what really struck me, returning to Formations, was how sociology helps to make sense of that for you.
Absolutely. When I was writing Formations, psychoanalysis as a theory had quite a hold. So Jackie Stacey and I used to talk about it. If I disagreed with her psychoanalytic explanation she’d joke, ‘you’re just repressing’! But I did use concepts such as investment, mis-recognition, disidentification, dissimulation, ambivalence and abjection to understand power and social relations. I think if you grow up with working-class culture, it’s your social relations not some individualistic inner self that is the focus. In fact, in Formations the women are very rude about people who consider themselves to be ‘individuals’, referring to those who they think use authority to judge them. I was very resistant to the concept of shame, because I thought it was far too psychoanalytic and I didn’t want to individualise but now I think we have a lot of social shaming and we should examine it through the religious, historical and psychological discourses that shame us (see for example Walkerdine, 2010; Walkerdine et al., 2001). I also learnt a lot from the first attempts by Julian Henriques et al. (1984) and later Lisa Blackman (2008), to put together the psychological with the social. I learn from them but make it work for me.
We invest in certain things because they enable us to have some sort of value within our field of exchange, some cultural capital or symbolic legitimacy, so that is how it works as a concept for me. When I worked at Worcester College of Higher Education I offered to do ‘Racism Awareness Training’ with local teachers on their training days (I had been trained). It was then I realised how significant investment in values is: racism is a part of a structure of value. People don’t change through exposure to learning/knowledge if they are invested in maintaining their own superiority because they feel they have so little value in their own lives. This is one of the biggest political challenges that we face. It was also only later that I found out that disidentification also has psychoanalytic routes. But really, we should not be surprised that Marx and Freud were sharing similar discourses for different purposes (Day, 2001; McClintock,1995).
That’s really helpful. I was really struck when I was re-reading Formations that we’re probably in another psy- moment in lots of ways, where everything can be reduced to psychology, we’re in a moment of hyper-individualisation where, going back to your response to Chantelle’s earlier question, the political process works with no ideology.
But to stay with the women a little bit, I’d like to kind of – to draw you out on your quite explicit critique in the book of feminist theory.
Or bourgeois feminist theory!
The 1990s was a time of significant debates in feminist theory. I was based in the Centre for Women’s Studies at Lancaster University and it was inhabited by many different feminists, but post-structuralism was gaining hold (of me). Broadly, to be post-structural meant to understand structure but to not see it as determinate; to see it as part of a conjuncture shaped by over-determined forces in which discourse plays a significant role. Drawing from Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, Chris Griffin, Paul Willis and Angela McRobbie, the focus on culture enabled structures to come into effect in particular ways, e.g. the collective work on ‘Policing the Crisis’, the media-made phenomena of mugging at the time (the 1980s), which they show was a product of long histories of racism, poverty, labour, gender, urbanisation, representation and symbolic power (Hall et al., 1978). These different forces and structures interact with each other over time, both constituting and disrupting each other to produce a complex conjuncture at a particular moment. Now, that analysis was very different to patriarchal critiques where men or institutions determined structures. The cultural studies approach was also about struggle, how people make history but not in the conditions of their own choosing, which is Marx, of course, but it’s about how people are making their lives, how they inhabit and embody their culture. At the time the emphasis on culture, on representation and discourse generated a lot of resistance within feminist and sociological communities. There was cleavage, that we lived at Lancaster, where radical feminists accused post-structuralist feminists of being apolitical, and post-structural feminists critiqued radical feminists on the grounds that they didn’t have an adequate analysis. So that was always there, as it is now in different forms. I think I was just writing it through in Formations, explaining my take on the conjuncture that the women lived. I was working out my theoretical positions and that was when I lost my Marxism as I turned to other theories to help me explain what I was experiencing, seeing, hearing. But I think I turned too far. I actually hate attacking people, unless they are truly awful, because usually they’re trying to do their best. But sometimes it just frustrates me and I get really cross and then it’s gloves off. Especially when they, as sociologists, legitimate the dominant injustices in their claim for popularity and symbolic power. Grrrr. . . Now that’s an example of symbolic violence: shoddily explaining the lives of others in a way that actually produces harm, all for one’s own self-advancement. It is a disgrace for a sociologist. Unforgivable.
I think it’s really interesting – this sense of not wanting to attack people – but looking back at that moment in feminist debate and thinking about the radical feminists, what they were talking about and where that discourse has ended up now, particularly with respect to transgender, would you have anticipated that those people would end up aligning with far-right discourse? Could you have anticipated that they would eventually be invoking patriarchy in the far-right themselves?
Yes, because of their critiques and claims on the state. There was already some alignment at the time if we look at the work of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. I don’t think it was a straightforward alignment. I think at the heart of their work, they’re attacking the power of the patriarchal state and masculinity. But they get put to use. I don’t think many feminists align themselves with the right; I think the right loves using their critiques of the state for their own purposes. Think about Farris’s (2016) analysis of ‘Femonationalism’, of how far-right groups and governments use feminist arguments of many kinds to legitimate their abuse. And I think once you call on the state to behave in a particular way, you are usually in trouble. Because the state, by its history, is the source of legitimate symbolic violence. Just look at the brilliant feminist legal scholars who outline how this works. So I can see the logic of how that alignment comes into effect. It’s why I’ve always argued against identity-recognition politics. For queering not recognition. Paradoxically, we do need the state for institutions of protection against matricide, femicide, rape, misogyny, domestic violence, because there is so much. The state produces these responses through legitimation but then has to compensate for its own production. The government is a case in point.
There have always been vicious battles between feminists because there is a lot at stake. For example, we’d organised a conference on sexuality at Manchester in the early 2000s and the queer anthropologist Don Kulick gave a brilliant keynote, which critiqued the Swedish position on sex work, and boy did he get attacked and demonised. That was what was going on then and it continues – different groups are fighting for symbolic power, to have their position recognised as legitimate. It really was nasty. I fought back by doing the work – let my work talk for me, not moral statements on Twitter from the not very well informed as we often see now. They are so righteous and certain. Taking positions without knowledge should not be the work of scholars. They should be producing knowledge that stands up. For me, it matters who has the best analysis, and analysis is not easy and can rarely be reduced to soundbites. Also, divide and rule has been the best political strategy of the powerful since ancient times. We should be working on our collective politics, not our singularity – on what is achievable, not engaging in a nasty tournament of singular identity suffering.
This really resonates with the current political climate where I think we can see a similarly vicious battle where some feminists are claiming that they are protecting ‘women’s rights’, whilst they simultaneously contribute to discourse and politics which seeks to make life unliveable for transgender populations, with devastating real-life consequences for this already vulnerable, oppressed and stigmatised population. It feels like it’s about power. I’m trying to think about the similarities and differences between then and now. Was it similarly this combination of power and capital then?
Yes, it’s clear that then as now there was never a consensus around feminist politics, and what I mean by that is that there were different approaches and positions within this, and different political alignments. My feminism on that was always informed by my investment in queer politics; I was involved in lots of stuff around queer scholarship. We wrote a book on sexuality following a large research project on sexuality and violence – where we worked with Paul Tyrer, Karen Corteen and Lewis Turner – that challenged the link between the proper (symbolic capital/power) and property in gay spaces (Moran & Skeggs, 2014). I’ve always thought of queer as a verb, not an identity. This is really significant because I think that identities as singular can be dangerous. Think about all the very powerful academics you know who claim a singular identity that eclipses all their other privileges and power. Identity is an end-point in a long process of oppression and identities are over-determined by a huge number of forces; sometimes they are imposed upon us, other times we make them out of a complex history. They are not static and they exist in relationship with many other disrupting and constituting forces. I would argue that everything should be ‘queered’ (Ha. The Sun accused me of saying, ‘Manchester should be made gay’ the last time I made this statement). We should ask what do we need identity to do? Most identity struggles start with activism, the re-signification of the evaluation and judgement of the representation of the classification (e.g. Black is Beautiful; I’m Queer I’m Here), and yes I know that’s a clunky way of saying it but I’m trying to draw attention to the valuation of the representation that has previously been loaded with immoral value (usually dangerous, contagious), but then they fall into demands for recognition from the state. Usually, each struggle operates in a vacuum, mostly not connecting to other struggles, and that is because it’s really hard to do so: the Civil Rights Movement tried, BLM do, but some forms of identity claims become claims for property, homonormativity, the right to consumption – e.g. the pink pound – and invariably those who have cultural capital and access to symbolic power take over and divisions are drawn within the identity. This is why the women in the Formations research had problems identifying with the term feminist. For them feminism was about even more privileges for middle-class women. It is about how the battle is fought, for whom and who is included and excluded from the terms of the discourse. Just look at the institutionalisation of ‘diversity’ (Ahmed, 2012). In Manchester in the 1990s many of us were arguing for non-binary, for connective queer activism. But at the same time, we were also arguing for safe spaces (for all queers) as a result of the research project on sexuality and space (Moran et al., 2001) and the different groups (LGBTQI) at the final ‘Citizen’s Inquiry’ where the local state was present (police, council, plus campaign groups). Everyone argued against each other for resources: ‘we are. . .’, ‘we should have. . . ’, ‘we are more deserving. . .’. It was really difficult. There are a lot of things that should be happening and need to be thought together, not in opposition. But also – and this makes it especially hard – gender is a really violent binary identity. It is about power and property. Masculinity comes loaded with power – physical and symbolic – institutionalised (think British Police) in often violent ways, symbolically and physically. Misogyny is structured into our lives in so many ways. In 1979, Monique Wittig divorced sexuality from gender binaries; in 1994, Biddey Martin asked, ‘Why are those gendered binaries that are symbolically violent to everybody being reproduced in queer politics?’ (Martin, 1994). On this, Lev C. R. Hord (2022) argues that as gender becomes less binary we see how it is the fundamental structure of identity that has sanctioned identities built on exclusions and that is the problem. We’ve been having these debates for a very long time (43 years). We have to queer gender (for who does it actually benefit?) whilst also protecting the people who are subject to its violence. This is a time and space problem too. But the big problem is that these fights occur on a moral high ground – ‘I am right’ – and we get nowhere, because (as above) moral politics is the domain of the far-right, which is populist. Or, it’s a bourgeois politics of protection and recognition. I would argue that once you inhabit the moral high ground of identity, critique is lost.
There are so many complex debates in here, but I think we need to really, really challenge those gendered categories that get used as if they are queer and they’re not. They’re not doing any queering, they’re inhabiting legal categories established in the interests of power and property, built through colonialism, exploitation and oppression. Now, for me, that’s not queer. But I know I’ll get attacked for that.
I think that really helps to demonstrate succinctly the complexities and histories that inform these contemporary debates, which have become particularly vicious in respect to transgender.
Before we finish, I was just wondering if I could ask a final question about how people have taken up your work, or perhaps misinterpreted it.
For the most part, the misinterpretations are really funny. But I always think that if you get misinterpreted, you haven’t explained yourself clearly enough, unless it’s really wilful or from the moral high ground. The one that has come up a few times, and it’s notable that it is from Scandinavian colleagues, is that the women in Formations wanted to be middle class. It’s exactly what they don’t want to be, although they do want everything the middle class are perceived to have: cultural authority, the legitimacy, having material security. And I think these other scholars saw those desires and thought that meant they wanted to be middle class, but they really didn’t because for them the middle class were a symbolic category that would judge, demonise and pathologise them. This is why we have to pay attention to the representations of value.
That’s definitely a misunderstanding of the central argument of the book and its theoretical framing. But as you said, sometimes it points us to the need to explain a little bit better. But I also think that about what translates because, of course, you’re talking about a different cultural context as well, where different things might be happening, and they read those in their own way.
Of course, you never know how the written work has been translated, that’s the other thing.
This has been such a fantastic conversation and it’s been great talking with you both. I love talking to both of you. Because it really sparks off lots of interesting conversations. And I am sure that we could continue for much longer.
Thank you. It was a good conversation and thank you for challenging me.
It’s always learning from – like you said before – and coming from a position of love, care, possibility and hope. And if we have that as the foundation for our conversations, then we can have critical friendship that helps us understand the world better.
