Abstract
Group-based inequalities have been explored through traditional laboratory methods using student participants, but more attention is needed at the level of people's everyday lives in cultural context. The present study looks at how people create and uphold social order through discursive practices. This dimension of social reproduction is explored in Venezuela, where the Bolivarian Revolution makes `social class' a politically salient signifier. I use the notions of interpretative repertoires (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) and carriers (Moghaddam, 2002) to analyze how women negotiate `class' and moral positions in talk about an everyday, resource-dependent practice (beauty). The analyses show how certain repertoires reproduce class positions while making equivocal the moral significance of class. I discuss how the instability of class as a carrier of moral goodness becomes a terrain on which concerns for establishing moral equality take precedence over concerns for achieving economic equality.
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