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Abstract

Historically, upwardly mobile working-class men have navigated the binary distinctions between a cerebral middle-class masculinity and a manual working-class masculinity. However, within an increasingly globalised world, the boundaries between the two are increasingly blurred and, therefore, distinctions between the two can often be quite complex. Part of the reason for this is the onset of post-industrialisation and increases in low-skilled service work which require certain facets of working-class masculinity to be readjusted. This conceptual article draws on existing historical and contemporary scholarship to delineate aspects of the borderlands between a working and middle-class manhood. We are interested in the identity work that occurs at the borderlands and what this may mean for upwardly mobile working-class men. The article acknowledges the role of sociological theory but instead foregrounds a social anthropological approach where we consider what the conceptual lens of liminality has to offer in light of historic and contemporary research.

Keywords

borderlands liminality masculinities middle-class working-class

Introduction

The study of working-class masculinities has been a significant area of historical interest within the fields of human geography, sociology, sociology of education as well as critical studies of men and masculinities. Historically, there has been an overemphasis on scholarship focused on working-class masculinity and rebellion (Delamont, 2000) rather than a consistent effort to nuance working-class masculinities, specifically with reference to those men who become socially mobile. We draw attention to how contemporary scholarship has continued to highlight the need to consider the production of ‘working-class masculinities with reference to the interplay between changing social destinies and subjectivities’ which contribute to how working-class men are multi-dimensional social subjects (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill, 1996: 19–20). This conceptual article draws on existing historical and contemporary scholarship to delineate aspects of the shifting borderlands between a working and middle-class masculinity. We are interested in advancing liminality, as a conceptual tool, to enrich our understanding of the affective identity work that occurs at the class borderlands – as well as shifting socio-economic contexts – and what this may mean for those working-class men who seek to become socially mobile.

In surveying studies of working-class masculinities, there has been a range of different theoretical approaches applied, ranging from theories associated with social stratification and Rational Action Theory (Goldthorpe, 1998) to structural symbolic interactionism (Voyer, 2018) to the psycho-analytical/psycho-social (Reay, 2002; Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012) to habitus clivé/‘hysteresis effect’ (Friedman, 2016). In comparison with previous research with a strong Marxist influence focused on working-class boys and social reproduction (see Humphries, 1981; Willis, 1977), contemporary researchers have capitalised on post-structuralist theorising to broaden their scope of analysis, drawing attention to how working-class masculinities are complex and fragmented (Jeffrey and McDowell, 2004; Kenway et al., 2006; McDowell, 2012). We no longer think of working-class masculinities in the binary terms of Willis’ ‘lads’ and the ‘ear’oles’, yet how we delineate the parameters of a working-class masculinity remains unclear. Part of this is because class itself remains a muddy picture and, therefore, what it means to be (and to become) socially mobile is complicated, often shaped by both local and global patterns of social and economic change.

We begin our conceptual article with Sennett and Cobb’s (1972) definitive study of the struggles of working-class men which highlight the ‘injuries of class’ and where betrayal of one’s class background is a central part of their participant’s social mobility journeys. Sennett and Cobb (1972) show how their participants feel caught between two worlds where, moving through their lives, they actively curate identities as they vacillate between feelings of pride and shame in moving beyond their class background. Highlighting the affective dimension of social mobility, they write, ‘A poor man, therefore, has to want upward mobility in order to establish dignity in his own life, and dignity means, specifically, moving toward a position in which he deals with the world in some controlled, emotionally restrained way’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1972: 22). Although this work is now dated, what Sennett and Cobb (1972) emphasise is the conflicted affective experience which exist during a liminal time in becoming upwardly mobile. As the working-class men in their study grapple with the expectations to be a breadwinner and navigate the boundaries of working-class and middle-class, they often place wealthier people onto a pedestal while viewing their own cultural practices as ‘ordinary’. Furthermore, Sennett and Cobb (1972) foreground that in becoming socially mobile, many of their participants often feel like imposters and how, as a ‘hidden injury’, this sense of affective unbelonging contributes to a constant search for validation and respect. They feel compelled to justify their actions as they modify their class position. The research highlights what has come to be known as the moral dimensions of class – how one’s sense of moral worth is linked to one’s social status (see Sayer, 2005) – which is increasingly foundational to how scholars today understand the experiences of individuals navigating the class borderlands (Friedman, 2016). We acknowledge the inherent contradiction involved with becoming socially mobile – as a way of ‘bettering oneself’ – and how it is a ‘wrenching process’ (Reay, 2013: 667) where those who cross over can never fully go back.

The article is structured in the following five parts: first, we provide an overview of working-class masculinities in reference to economic and social change over the last 40 years. Second, we provide a brief overview of liminality within the field of social anthropology and consider what it has to offer for our understanding of shifting classed and gendered subjectivities. Third, we consider historic and recent scholarship on upwardly mobile working-class masculinities. This is followed by a section which considers the role of education for socially mobile working-class men as well as a consideration of what liminality and affect have to offer historical and contemporary research on working-class masculinities. The article concludes with a discussion and conclusion where we problematise aspects of the identity work which occurs at the borderlands between working-class and middle-class masculinities and articulate some notable limitations framing research on upwardly mobile working-class men.

Working-class masculinities in times of economic and social change

Research into the formation and maintenance of working-class masculinities in more recent times has focused on the influence of social and economic change and the new post-industrial landscapes (Kenway et al., 2006). Within the knowledge economy, gendered and classed employment expectations continue to shift, muddying the boundaries of the class borderlands. Arguably, in today’s economic climate, if working-class young men are drawing upon employment as part of their identity construction, Bottero (2009) writes, they are now more likely to contend with the ‘McJob’ (p. 9), which is often seen as emasculating (Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012), where they may feel a ‘disloyalty to the traditions of masculinity’ (Walkerdine, 2011: 265). This is not to say that traditional working-class masculine cultural practices such as ‘the creative hedonism; the anti-pretentious humour, the dignity, the high ethical standards of honour, loyalty and caring’ (Skeggs, 2004b: 88) are no longer present or foundational to how working-class masculinities are realised; instead, this socio-economic shift suggests historic identity practices (Willis, 1977) are less apart of where working-class males work.

In documenting the effects of austerity and precarious employment on gender identities and performativity, Bonner-Thompson and McDowell (2019) demonstrate how marginalised young men have come to openly care for each other signalling shifts away from the traditional norms associated with working-class masculinity such as stoicism and hardness (see also Gater, 2024). In what follows, we capture some of the ways working-class masculinities are performed within shifting social and economic patterns (see Miles et al., 2011; Stahl, 2020) and how documenting these shifts continues a vital and ongoing project around how we understand social mobility.

We acknowledge that, in examining class delineations in studies of masculinities, how research continues to suggest our understandings of working-class and middle-class masculinities are continually shifting. Skeggs (2002) captures how working-class men invest in their working-class identity, adopting strategies to distance themselves from identity markers associated with the middle class. In his work on the discursive relationship between class and masculinity, Morgan (2005) draws attention to the pluralisation of masculinities in relation to the pluralisation of class where he urges scholars to go beyond ‘them’ and ‘us’ with a focus on ‘a range of finer distinctions’ (pp. 169–170). The middle-class self is often conceptualised as educated, financially sound, career-oriented and adaptable to a number of fields and fluent in navigating differing discourse communities (see Lawler, 1999; Power and Whitty, 2006). In The Men and the Boys (2000), Connell foregrounds that middle-class men typically represent their masculinities by performing identities in line with notions of responsibility and rationality where working-class young men typically invest their time in leisure, sports, and sexual conquests. Certainly, historically, and in our present day, a working-class masculinity is nearly always closely associated with the corporeal across the lifespan (e.g. physical labour, virality, strength, toughness; see MacLeod, 2009; Willis, 1977). Such associations influence working-class men and those who seek to become socially mobile – the so-called exceptions which prove the rule.

Mac an Ghaill’s (1994) New Entrepreneurs were from working-class backgrounds and – as versions of Willis’ ‘ear’oles’ existing some 20 years later – embraced their post-Fordist futures with many focusing on what the field of information technology would offer them. Here, economic developments work in tandem with subjectivities, informing how we think about class borderlands and social mobility. Within a post-industrial landscape, we are interested in how understandings of labour (and education/training) inform how upwardly mobile working-class men understand the different class-based forms of masculinity they come to interact with (see Giazitzoglu, 2014; Giazitzoglu and Muzio, 2020). For example, recent work by Roberts (2018: 213) suggests that young working-class men of today are less likely than previous generations to consider service sector employment as ‘antithetical to working-class masculinity’, indicating an expanding repertoire of gendered positions (and performances) available for working-class males. Scholars of masculinity emphasise both the interactional nature of gender identity formation within social context and well as the role of recognition, where it is ‘not just as what men do, but . . . how respondents recognize it’ (Pascoe, 2011: 119). Certainly, in surveying studies of working-class masculinity, while social and economic change is apparent, what has remained enduring is the importance of gaining and maintaining blue-collar labour (e.g. the breadwinner) as well as manual labour as integral to how masculinities are produced (Stahl, 2015). Bearing this in mind, our conceptual article seeks to foreground what this may mean for the shifting borderlands between a working-class and middle-class masculinity.

Writing some 20 years ago, Morgan (2005) asserted that masculinity remains an underexplored dimension in the study of social class and vice versa. However, in the past decade or so, there has been significant attention to the nexus of gender and class in studies of working-class masculinities (Ackers, 2020; Giazitzoglu, 2014; Nixon, 2009; Roberts, 2013). Nevertheless, there is still a need to map the borderlands between a working and middle-class manhood and to delineate how masculinities are classed – how they come to be – in reference to classed and gendered forms of distinction which serve as key identity markers of what is acceptable and normative. These borderlands, we argue, are important for how we comprehend the ways in which working-class men pursue social mobility, often with limited financial and symbolic capital. We foreground how social mobility is both a liminal and affective experience framed by feelings of pride, inferiority, shame, and so on. However, social mobility is also a gendered experience tied closely to the discursive space of acceptable forms of masculinities and femininities within certain professions (Morgan, 2005; Stahl and McDonald, 2021).

Liminality, class and gendered subjectivities

We are interested in liminality as a concept to think with when investigating upwardly mobile masculinities as we feel it has analytical purchase. The notion of liminality is rooted in social anthropology and focuses on the experience of ‘in-between-ness’ and the study of change (Ybema et al., 2011: 21). Building on Turner’s (1969) seminal work on liminality, The Ritual Process, Thomassen (2014) describes liminality as ‘any “betwixt and between” situation or object, any in-between place or moment, a state of suspense, a moment of freedom between two structured world-views or institutional arrangements’ (p. 7). Liminality is particularly concerned with rites of passage, in which people pass from one identity state (or status) to another (van Gennep, 1960 [1909]) in reference to wider social change. For van Gennep (1960 [1909]), such rites of passage happen in the following three phases: separation (identified by symbols of detachment), transition (when the ritual subject goes through a realm with few or zero of the same attributes of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states) and reincorporation (the consummation of the passage). Surprisingly, to date, engagement with liminality has been relatively limited in studies of historic changes and social mobility (Katernyi, 2020). For our purposes, we consider liminality as a theoretical provocation which works to problematise notions of fixity and to enhance our understanding of the fragmentation, performances, pluralities and identity practices for upwardly mobile working-class men.

Liminality, as an analytical tool, allows us to glean insights not only into the identity work of socially mobile individuals but also be more attune to the social and economic change which has led to both a reframing of gendered expectations and gender roles (Adkins, 2000, 2002) as well as a reaffirmation of gender and class normativity (Stahl, 2017, 2024). In this way, liminality goes beyond what Bourdieu (2004) calls a habitus clivé, a destablised habitus where individuals may accept doxic discourses regarding upwards mobility while simultaneously maintaining key dispositions established in their habitus of origin. While there are overlaps between habitus clivé and liminality – specifically in terms of transition and modification – liminality allows for a consideration of socio-economic structures in tandem with identity transitions tied closely to traditional rites of passage. In this article, we foreground how rites of passage are shifting for men based on economic and social change – what Morgan (2005) refers to as the pluralisation of masculinities and the pluralisation of class – and what this may mean for the class borderlands.

Reay (2004) argues that class is ‘a complicated mixture of the material, the discursive, psychological predispositions, and sociological dispositions’ (p. 151) where class identities are not fixed but rather re/produced through relational structures and processes which results in social identities as contested spaces (see also Skeggs, 2004a). As individuals who are becoming upwardly mobile move through various spaces – and enter a liminal time – their identity comes into a process of negotiation where they may adopt new subjectivities while ‘losing’ certain aspects of their traditional working-class selves (Reay, 2001). Furthermore, as people move through these spaces, their journeys may be influenced by pathologising discourses which position working-class identities as ‘lacking’ which, in turn, inform their sense of personhood (Skeggs, 2004a, 2024b). Echoing the previous scholarship by Sennett and Cobb’s (1972), these feelings not only highlight the moral dimensions of class (Sayer, 2005), but also an internalised feeling of inauthenticity, inadequacy and guilt for those who seek to move beyond their working-class status (Skeggs, 2002). Some individuals may be able to function as ‘class straddlers’ with feet in both camps where they are compelled to serve as a bridge between cultural systems that are, at times, fundamentally opposed (Carter, 2006; Martin et al., 2018). Many will find this confronting, if not damaging (see Reay, 2002). Revisiting van Gennep’s (1960 [1909]) approach to liminality enhances our understanding of social mobility by highlighting that it involves not only separation and transition but also the challenges with reincorporation, as individuals encounter barriers to moving beyond their class status. While individuals move through new social fields (Bourdieu, 2004) – informed by both the socio-cultural history of the context as well as rapid social change – they come in contact with different social milieus which demand an aspect of versatility, albeit within certain limits.

During periods of liminality, gendered subjectivities undergo change but these changes occur often within a limited discursive space as the gender norms are policed (Martino, 2000a, 2000b; Morgan, 2005; Paechter, 2002; Stahl, 2015, 2017). In fact, feminist post-structuralists contend that ‘subjectivity is an effect of constant struggle among competing discourses and conscious and unconscious forces. It is multiple and fragmentary, both fragile and aggressive, constantly in a process of renewal’ (Lee, 1997: 17–18). As men and women move through time and space, they encounter normative constructions of masculinities and femininities, where they perform their own subjectivities in relation to these constructions (Paechter, 2002). More specifically, we establish our masculinities and femininities as subjects through recognising aspects of ourselves in reference to particular types of gendered subjectivities, contributing to our identity construction as certain types of men and women (Coleman, 1990; Martino, 2000b). We are reminded here of Butler’s (2001) work on the ‘desire for recognition’ and how individuals invest in the gendered performances which we enact where, according to Butler, the formation of gender identity is an embodied practice of ‘bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds [which] constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self’ (Butler, 1988: 520). For example, while there is evidence of middle-class men performing working-class masculinities (Brewis and Jack, 2010; Young, 2012) and several examples of working-class women performing middle-class femininities (see Skeggs, 2002; Walkerdine, 2011), there is little evidence of working-class men performing middle-class masculinities.¹

Identities, composed of aspects which are both liminal and durable, are constructed in relation to the key gender identity markers of what is acceptable and normative. So, while post-structural feminist theorising conceptualises gender as ‘fluid, negotiable, and created through repeated performances rather than as fixed or innate’ (Gardiner, 2005: 45; see also Paechter, 2002), there are definite limitations. We do not discount how masculinities and femininities are separated from the body, and how gender is performed and deterritorialised as subjects engage in practices to reaffirm or redefine normative expectations in relation to time and space. Furthermore, we would argue the degree of fluidity and normativity inform how socially mobile individuals negotiate the differences between working-class and middle-class gender norms (Stahl, 2014, 2017).

Returning to working-class masculinities and how they come to be in relation to social class, we highlight how research on the ways masculinities are regulated during periods of liminality has already included attention to rites of passage often in relation to the institutional norms of schooling (Kingsman, 2021). Before we draw on contemporary scholarship, we acknowledge Willis’ (1977) work alluded to both regulation and de-regulation as the ear’oles in his study were able to not succumb to the pressures of social reproduction representing what Voyer (2018) calls a ‘decoupling of class background and “classed behaviour”’ (p. 568). This is also present in work by Brown (1987) on working-class orientations to school with his typologies of getting in (lads), getting on (ordinary) and getting out (swots; see also Brozsely and Nixon, 2023).

Since Willis and Brown, regulation has featured prominently in studies of masculinities in education; after all, schools are regulatory institutions focused largely on conformity (Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Martino, 2000a, 2000b). Though, for our purposes, we foreground liminality in relation to regulation. In considering the identity work of boys at school, Phoenix and Frosh (2001) emphasise how hegemonic masculinity is integral to the production of boyhood where it works as a ‘method of social regulation amongst young men’ (p. 27), informing the degree of variation young men can engage in when performing their subjectivities. In a similar study, Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli (2003) draw on what they call mestizaje masculinities where the term mestizaje ‘refers to people who negotiate being in-between, inhabiting a border space constructed by multiple hierarchical and often dichotomous social systems of identification and categorisation’ (p. 4).

Upwardly mobile working-class masculinities

In delineating some of the tensions involved in becoming socially mobile, Bourdieu portrays it as both a gendered and classed process where he draws on his own story to highlight how his participation in rugby during his youth was a way to not only assert his masculinity but to critique the working-class masculine norms he grew up with. In Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, Bourdieu (2004) writes,

Little by little I discovered, perhaps mainly through others’ looks, the particularities of my habitus, such as a certain propensity to masculine pride and ostentation, a confirmed tendency to quarrel, often slightly dramatized, a propensity to get indignant about ‘small things’, all appear to me now to be tied to the cultural particularities of my region of origin, which I have perceived and understood best by analogy with what I have studied about the ‘temperament’ of linguistic or cultural minorities like the Irish. (pp. 114–15)

What Bourdieu’s words highlight is how the experience in sport raised his ‘class antennae’ (Sayer, 2005: 15), leading to certain realisations not only about his own positionality but his own masculine performances.

Researching a Men’s Group in 1970s/1980s Birmingham, Tolson (1977) writes, ‘To some extent the lives of working and middle-class men are similarly structured. Both classes of men have inherited the patriarchal culture of the past and both experience the erosion of patriarchal privilege by capitalist expansion’ (p. 81).² When we consider the lifeworlds of working-class and middle-class men today, both patriarchal privilege as well as capitalism and labour continue to be structuring forces – yet these are mediated by class. In Morgan’s (2005) conceptual scholarship he posits how ‘class contributed to both a unified sense of masculinity and more diffused, perhaps more conflictual, models of masculinities’ (p. 169) and that ‘class experiences and practices pointed to different ways of being men, different ways of being constituted as effective social actors’ (p. 172). Morgan’s words suggest both fragmentation and cohesiveness where there is liminality as he contends masculine subjectivities are performed in reference to pluralities.

Extending this, Mac an Ghaill and Haywood (2013) assert there is a need to be cautious and guard against ‘a simple one-dimensional product of these young men’s cultural context’ as the analysis needs to ‘capture the complex interweaving of multiple categories of being’ (p. 33). These pluralities, which differ depending on location and glo/local histories, contribute to the difficulty involved in comprehending the blurred boundaries between contemporary middle-class and working-class masculinity and – we would argue – subvert and complicate what socially mobile young men understand by the identity markers of a ‘job’ and a ‘career’. Furthermore, the skills required for most paid labour today involves post-compulsory forms of training or education (e.g. a mechanic must be able to handle advanced computer data, etc). Certainly, thinking in liminal terms, there are many examples today of the blurring of the class borderlands from what is required of a small business owner to white collar short-term contracts.

We return now to the affective experience of social class (Friedman, 2016; Reay, 2013). Where internalised class pathologisation was mentioned in early work by Tolson (1977), contemporary research focused on upwardly mobile masculinities has continued to highlight the hidden injuries of class (Sennett and Cobb, 1972) and emphasise how becoming upwardly mobile is a deeply affective process. For example, Ackers (2020) explored the life stories of working-class men in the wake of deindustrialisation, highlights how fathers pressured but communicated ‘“double messages” to their sons that suggested they should move up without forgetting the values of their working-class backgrounds’ (see also Adams & Coltrane, 2005: 892). Goldthorpe (1987), and others, have reported upwardly mobile males ascribing their successes to their own efforts where ‘the dominant reality for these upwardly mobile men . . . is that of the careers that they had “made for themselves,” in their present professional, administrative and managerial occupations’ (p. 234). This compliments research by Miles et al. (2011), drawing on a segment of data from The National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom, which demonstrated how upwardly mobile men – when reflecting on their lives – recognise their individualised ‘success’ yet endeavoured to represent themselves as modest which reflects traditional working-class solidarist values. In more recent studies of upwardly mobile men, there is evidence of them othering (or pathologising) men from similar backgrounds who, in their view, did not take advantage of opportunities available to them (see Giazitzoglu, 2014). The continual theme is the affective nature of working-class men becoming socially mobile; these are relational journeys where modesty and pride are in constant tension and where, borrowing the words of Butler (2001), there is a ‘desire for recognition’ and validation. Ackers (2020) refers to this as ‘authentication’ emphasising how the role intergenerational dialogues contributes to ameliorating the pains of social mobility as it works to orient individuals during what is a disorienting process.

Now we turn to considering the identity parameters of working-class masculinities and what modifications may be required in order to preserve working-class respectability while facing pressures to adapt to middle-class manhood (Stahl, 2022). Nixon (2009) calls our attention to how ‘Being working class can be a source of respectability and pride for men and it has been through carrying out particular types of work that this pride and respectability has been generated’ (p. 309). This type of work is often manual and has an important generational history; the discursive space around working-class masculine labour is one of strength, humour/camaraderie, protector/provider and stoicism. These forms of labour are where working-class men reaffirm their own identity often through othering masculinities that they consider to be non-normative (Stahl, 2017; Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012). In considering what facets of the self are required to be altered to become socially mobile, we focus on the recapitulation of strength and dominance. There continue to be prevalent notions in society of what it means to be a man, where embodying masculinity as masculine power ‘is largely exercised through self-regulation and self-discipline – a process of continual “identity work”’ (Whitehead and Barrett, 2001: 17). However, while upwardly mobile men may identify strongly with dominance in their upwards trajectory, reaffirming normative aspects of gender while modifying their class status (see Giazitzoglu and Muzio, 2020), this has also been heavily problematised (see Gater, 2024; Roberts, 2013, 2018).

The role of education for socially mobile working-class men

Zweig (2000) posits that class is ‘not a box that we “fit” into, but rather it is something reflected in the role we play, as it relates to what others do’ (p. 11). So, while class and gender do exist in our psyches (Reay, 2002; Skeggs, 2002), and we often unconsciously reproduce these class and gender structures through routine social practices (Nixon, 2009), we also must acknowledge class is not totalising. After all, Jackson and Marsden’s (1986) study of 88 working-class children who made their way successfully through the educational system to become middle-class remains notable scholarship in the study of social mobility and education. Or, as Reay et al. (2005) assert, ‘The old binary between working and middle class has never explained enough about the myriad ways in which social class is acted out in people’s lives’ (p. 5; see also Brozsely and Nixon, 2023).

In delineating the borderlands between a working and middle-class manhood – and what this means for upwardly mobile working-class men – our focus is on how masculinities are classed and how they come to be in reference to education. After all, education has always been a key aspect in studies of social stratification and social mobility. Historically, a middle-class masculinity has always been closely linked with academic success and investment in post-compulsory education. Tolson (1977) writes,

Middle-class masculinity, throughout its development, remains oriented towards the culture of the school. The ideals of achievement held out to the middle-class boys are usually defined in terms of academic success and the values of the school are internalized by boys themselves. (p. 34)

In contrast, it remains well documented how working-class masculinities have often found their educational experiences to be confining and uncomfortable (Stahl, 2014; Willis, 1977).

Clearly, the global economic changes of the past 40 years has led to a situation in most Westernised countries where young working-class men are more likely than before/ever to continue education and training beyond compulsory schooling. This has occurred alongside a robust neoliberal discourse which promotes the imaginary of aspiring beyond one’s circumstances where all opportunities are for the taking which may often sit uncomfortably with working-class males (see Cornwall, 2016). Social and economic change has led to new arenas for working-class men to perform their masculinity, mainly service sector work (McDowell, 2012; Roberts, 2018) as well as the gig economy (Holtum et al., 2023) requiring little or no formal education or training. What underpins these developments is how – when opportunities for traditional forms of employment are significantly reduced – we see working-class males negotiating a new liminal landscape which compels them to think about education/training and their aspirations differently (Asplund, 2021; Stahl, 2022; Stahl et al., 2017; Asplund, 2021).

In his ethnographic research documenting how low-socioeconomic-status boys in the Bronx navigate their education, Alexander (2017, 2019) suggests that a ‘future neoliberal masculinity’ based in gathering financial and symbolic capital resonates with his participants whose ‘partial and multiple narratives of future selves’ (Alexander, 2019: 40) are informed by such a conception. In this work, Alexander illustrates the strategic nature of working-class young men, who operate with limited capitals, as they perform their version of neoliberal selfhood (e.g. competitive, highly aspirational) which often masks an internal labour. Or, to put it more specifically, those struggling to successfully embody this performance are versed in appearing as successful neoliberal subjects. In terms of a liminal transition (van Gennep, 1960 [1909]), many of his participants felt guilty about leaving their local communities and they rationalised this guilt with a sense of wanting to do better, and to ‘give back’ to the Bronx once they were successful. This is significant departure from Giazitzoglu’s (2014) research where he emphasises how the upwardly mobile working-class men in his study often pathologised their home communities.

What is important here is how traditional working-class values inform how one becomes socially mobile (Reay, 2013; Skeggs, 2004b); these values are formed during the primary socialisation of working-class men though are not always brought to the fore in the same way. Scholars such as Connolly and Healy (2004) and Reay (2002) have shown how closely working-class boys’ behaviours and dispositions are tied to their communities compared to boys from the middle classes who are much less bound to their geographical location. We know one significant foundation to the construction of working-class masculinities is a loyalty to their community; within this, a sense of belonging to a particular place and local community can restrain working-class males’ educational and future career aspirations (e.g. Asplund & Goodson, 2022) in a way that is largely absent in the lives of middle-class males. Here, we connect back to scholarship emphasising working-class males and their anti-education stances. Research by Corbett (2007, 2009), and others, has demonstrated that for working-class males in rural areas who have educational aspirations, transitions from lower to higher levels of education often means the necessity of leaving the residential community. While wanting to maintain close connections with their community, these men tend to experience conflict and mixed emotions over these disparate goals. Therefore, according to Corbett, it is not that many working-class males reject formal schooling; instead, they make a conscious and rational decision to stay in a community in which their social and cultural capital is located and appreciated.

This rejection of formal schooling could also be read as a resistance of liminality which can be disorienting space. These arguments complicate and reaffirm aspects of Willis’ (1977) work where his lads knew their rebellion offers ‘the inferior rewards, undesirable social definition, and increasing intrinsic meaninglessness, of manual work’ and how performing these behaviours only works to secure their position ‘at the bottom of a class society’ (p. 1).³ If Willis’ (1977) lads are resisting liminality, then they are active in not engaging in ‘a state of suspense, a moment of freedom between two structured world-views or institutional arrangements’ (Thomassen, 2014: 7). However, in another reading of this, we call on van Gennep’s (1960 [1909]) approach which foregrounds rites of passage where the lads are passing from one identity state (or status) to another – boyhood to manhood – and how they are actively reaffirming of working-class masculinity.

Highlighting another dimension of liminality, specifically in reference to a refashioning of gendered expectations, we are seeing examples in educational research complicating what we understand about the relationships between working-class masculinities and educational engagement with literacy (Asplund and Prieto, 2018; Scholes, 2019). In research by Asplund (2021), the motivations and practices of Robert, a working-class man living in rural Sweden who is an avid book collector with nearly 10,000 books is captured. Robert’s book collecting becomes an act of re-appropriating a bourgeois written culture in ways that are socially acceptable within the working-class community in which Robert lives; furthermore, it is an intergenerational bonding activity between father and son. Robert’s way of engaging in literacy through collecting and displaying books in his shed (a space traditionally associated with working-class masculinity) allows a smooth alignment between middle and upper class and his masculine rural working-class habitus. When we draw on a social anthropological approach and theories associated with liminality, Robert enlivens the borderlands between a working-class and middle-class subjectivity; his actions could be interpreted as not only a re-appropriation of working-class masculinity but fluctuating between two different class practices simultaneously.

In other research on working-class masculinities, Ward (2016) presents a case study of one individual named Jimmy illustrating how socially upwardly working-class men, when entering a liminal time/space, often have to ‘chameleonise’ their masculinity, ‘a constant practice of code-shifting’ alternating between multiple masculinities. This ‘chameleonisation’, which is central to their upwards mobility journeys, leads to ‘challenges and conflicts’ which ‘accompany the multiple performances of masculinity’ as Jimmy invests heavily in finding ways to ‘decrease the risk of becoming alienated’ (p. 236).

Discussion: liminality and aspirations for upwardly mobile working-class men

This conceptual article has focused on themes in the historical and contemporary scholarship regarding working-class masculinities with a specific emphasis on upwardly mobile working-class masculinities in an effort to delineate aspects of the borderlands between a working and middle-class manhood in contemporary times. We acknowledge that masculinity is ‘a crucial point of intersection of different forms of power, stratification, desire and subjective identity formation’ (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill, 1996: 21). In our discussion, we draw on a social anthropological approach to liminality to problematise the identity work which occurs at the borderlands between working-class and middle-class masculinities as well as notable limitations framing research on upwardly mobile working-class men.

When it comes to the ‘blurring’ of working-class and middle-class male subjectivities, we acknowledge how the global industrial changes since the 1970s have fostered new arenas for working-class men to perform their masculinity; furthermore, the majority of these new avenues are education-based (e.g. many traditional working-class manual jobs and vocational training schemes require more various forms of micro-credentialling). Linking back to Willis (1977), many working-class men may still prefer and affirm their masculine identity through manual employment though increasingly these jobs require more advanced literacy skills to be able to execute these jobs. So, to use Willis own words, they are more and more involved in ‘mental work’ than ever before. In our information society’s increasing demand on literacies, working-class men today are also more involved in diverse literacy practices – arguably, for example forms of digital literacy bring working-class masculinities into contact with middle-class lifestyles.

Returning to gender, as upwardly working-class men encounter different spaces, each with their own gender logic, they enter a period of liminality when their subjectivities are both fluid and contested. This can result in accepting new gender norms and expectations or reaffirming gender norms more aligned with previous generations (Stahl, 2017). In terms of class, when working-class males move outside their class position, and enter a liminal space, they are compelled to negotiate affective aspects (e.g. feeling shame, disloyality, etc) which sit alongside certain dispositions which were inculcated in their working-class masculinity prior to their social mobility journeys. These challenges may differ in affective intensities depending on the circumstance as well as the socio-cultural history. Furthermore, what research highlights are, during these periods of liminality, social mobile working-class men draw upon a variety of strategies to cope/handle/endure their affective social mobility journeys (Giazitzoglu, 2014; Giazitzoglu and Muzio 2020). Another strategy may be to re-appropriate certain practices traditionally associated with the middle classes (see Asplund, 2021). And finally, another strategy may be to rationalise the ‘guilt’ or feelings of disloyalty with a sense of wanting to do better, and to ‘give back’ to the community, once successful (see Alexander, 2019; Stahl, 2021).

This article is in no way an exhaustive review of the study of working-class masculinities or the various theories underpinning the field of research. We note how substantial work in the field of working-class masculinities has occurred in the United Kingdom and how there is a lack of international comparative research. We were unable to locate significant literature which captured the gendered and classed identity work of working-class males who had moved transnationally in order to become more socially mobile. Certainly, the role of the armed forces, national service, welfare provision (e.g. NEETs) can be important though are often country-specific. Furthermore, we acknowledge the article has not engaged with theorisations regarding individualisation in late modernity and intersectional factors other than gender have not been taken into consideration.

Conclusion

In some ways, we saw this article as an updating of Haywood and Mac an Ghaill (1996) ‘What about the boys?’: Regendered Local Labour Markets and the Recomposition of Working Class Masculinities which focuses on working-class masculinities as multi-dimensional social subjects discursively produced in relation to socio-economic conditions. In terms of the discursive production of working-class masculinities, our survey of the research suggests that identities are performed within shifting social and economic patterns. These patterns usher forth liminal performances and influence our understanding of the borderlands as well as the affective dimension of social mobility. Morgan (2005) posits that ‘one of the key features of a class system, as opposed to feudalism or a caste system, is its relative openness and the degree of mobility, both social and geographical, that is allowed’ (p. 171) and one could argue upwardly mobile masculinities are becoming more common-place as advanced industrial societies transform into knowledge-intensive societies in which ‘ever-increasing levels of formal education are considered the necessary foundation for career and life-course success’ (Lehmann, 2009: 143). While aspects of the old binary distinctions between a cerebral middle-class masculinity and a manual continue to endure, liminality allows us to consider the complexity regarding what constitutes working-class masculinities and how demarcations are becoming increasingly blurred.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Garth Stahl

Stig-Börje Asplund

Notes

Author biographies

Garth Stahl is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, educational reform and gendered subjectivities.

Stig-Börje Asplund is an Associate Professor at the Department of Educational Studies at Karlstad University in Sweden. He holds a PhD in Educational Work, and his main research interest is on classroom interaction and life history approaches, with a special focus on processes of identity construction, rural boys’ and men’s reading practices in and outside school. Another research area is the teaching and learning processes that take shape when teachers and students interact in vocational school work shop settings.

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Beyond Mental and Manual: Investigating the Historical and Contemporary Borderlands Between Working-Class and Middle-Class Masculinities

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Working-class masculinities in times of economic and social change

Liminality, class and gendered subjectivities

Upwardly mobile working-class masculinities

The role of education for socially mobile working-class men

Discussion: liminality and aspirations for upwardly mobile working-class men

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

Author biographies

References