Zombie states,adrenalised academics and spectral shadows: A transclass perspective on social mobility

Abstract

The over-riding theme of autobiographical social mobility narratives is the celebration of individual success. However, the analysis in Chantel Jacquet’s book Transclasses develops a very different understanding. In this article, I draw on Jacquet’s interpretation, and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, to weave into a common thread social mobility strands from writing from across the 20th and 21st centuries. First, I look at Education and the Working Class, written in the 1960s, followed by Pierre Bourdieu’s Sketch for a Self-Analysis. I interlace both texts with contemporary writing by Cynthia Cruz and Fran Lock, poets and essayists from US and UK working-class backgrounds, and my own autobiographical writing, in order to develop a perspective that recognises the salience of gender for social mobility journeys. Throughout, I draw on the concept of habitus developed in my own work, and that of Skeggs, to make links between individuals’ inner emotional worlds, their affective dispositions, and external social and structural processes.

Introduction

The objective is not to pass through the barriers of class on one’s own, but to abolish them for everyone. (Jacquet, 2023:182)

As Chantel Jacquet’s words highlight, social mobility promises so much and delivers so little. Rather, the so-called exceptions preserve the status quo. Social mobility, or what Jacquet calls ‘the transclass process’ constitutes conservative rather than transformative change, renewing reproduction through individual non-reproduction. For Jacquet (2023) the transclass phenomenon should be viewed in terms of necessity. In place of the torrent of aspirational tales of ‘making it against the odds’ (Obama, 2020, 2021; Streeting, 2023; Vance, 2016) she argues that individual aspiration and ambition are not the first causes of social mobility, or what she calls non-reproduction. She provides a much needed antidote to the meritocratic fantasy of ‘heroes freeing themselves from social determinisms all by themselves, proving to the lazy and the weak-willed that “where there is a will, there is a way”’ (Jacquet, 2022: 175). Rather, ‘understanding non-reproduction means thinking a trajectory that is not solitary, but in solidarity with a familial or social milieu that in a way prompts or authorizes it’ (Jacquet, 2023: 66).

The five tales of social mobility discussed in this article are autosociobiographies, narratives that place the lived experience of social mobility within a wider sociological context of class and inequality (Friedman et al., 2025). These examples of autosociobiography are not presented in any way as the norm. For one, they are all tales of ascent across a huge social distance. Second, I hope that all five narratives are at the extreme end of the social mobility spectrum, that a common tale of the transclass would be less painful than those I draw on. Before I read Cruz and Lock, I would have argued that my own extreme experience was shaped by the social and historical context in which I grew up – a context in which only 10 per cent of the age cohort went to university and only 28% of them were women (Egerton and Halsey, 1993). There were virtually no working-class women in universities, especially the more elite ones. Lock and Cruz’s work speaks to a very different historical and social context – an age of mass higher education but also one in which the working classes have become the pariah class, denigrated and despised. But across all five narratives, habitus can be seen to be imbued with powerful affective dispositions of shame, fear, anxiety, denial, anger, guilt and huge ambivalences (Reay, 2014).

Falling while rising: the ambivalence of ascent

The writings of Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden provide a powerful corrective to the celebratory eulogies to social mobility infecting common-sense thinking. In Education and the Working Class (Jackson and Marsden, 1966), they write poignantly about a group of nine working-class boys who, in aiming for Oxbridge, appeared like Icarus to fly too high. Seven of the nine were awarded third- or lower second-class degrees. The plummeting of academic results in the Oxbridge group was seen by Jackson and Marsden as an indicator of the waves of disturbance across much of the sample. They note that ‘this small group seem to be sensitively recording a crumbling away’ felt through much of their wider sample. A number reflected on ‘what was it all for?’, a question Jackson and Marsden (1966) argue was ‘born of the difficult and the obscure social rifts and struggles which for them had become part of the process of education itself’ (p. 169). Jackson and Marsden question whether these young men did want to move forward as successful middle-class individuals, or did they in some way want to hold on to their background. They write about an endemic ‘lost feeling for source, means, purpose; a loss heightened by an absence of the sustaining powers of social and family relationships’. They also comment that

There is something infinitely pathetic in these former working-class children who lost their roots young, and now with their rigid middle-class accent preserve ‘the stability of all our institutions temporal and spiritual’ by avariciously reading the lives of Top People, or covet the private schools, and glancing back at the society from which they came, see no more there than ‘the dim’ or the ‘specimens’. (Jackson and Marsden, 1966: 241)

Their stark message was that social mobility is not a positive process if it is accompanied by snobbery, shame and ultra-conformity. It is almost as if the young men’s originary habitus had somehow been lost in the unfamiliar field of higher education; that there had been a depleting of the self, leaving newer, insubstantial, ill-formed dispositions. Social mobility had resulted in a void that was inadequately filled. Their working-class men were growing up in the 1960s and 70s, but more recent research on working- class transitions to university (Destin and Debrosse, 2017) argues that the histories, structures, practices and compositions of many higher education institutions are firmly established in ways that perpetuate harsh challenges for working-class students. As a result, they conclude that social mobility can exacerbate rather than combat inequality, particularly in terms of well-being, emotional and physical health.

The sense of emptiness evident in Jackson and Marsden’s socially mobile young people is reflected in Pierre Bourdieu’s (2008) account of his own mobility in Sketch for a Self-analysis. Bourdieu describes social mobility as ‘a very cruel unhappiness’. And we can see that cruelty and unhappiness throughout the book. So, to provide a few examples:

extreme sadness and anxiety in which I lived. (p. 47)

Invest myself body and soul in the frenzied work that would allow me to measure up. (p. 47)

the inner desolation of solitary grief. (p. 71)

frenetic work was also a way of filling an immense void and pulling myself out of despair. (p. 71)

I lived my life in a kind of stubborn fury. (p. 96)

I conceived success as a transgression and a treachery. There were many sleepless nights. (p. 109)

I had to practice a kind of semi-controlled schizophrenia. (p. 110)

These are not signs of a reconciled habitus but rather one that is profoundly at odds with the field it has striven so hard to enter. And Bourdieu (2000) synthesises all those conflicting, difficult emotions, inclinations and practices when he develops the concept of ‘the cleft habitus’, the embodiment of contrary affects that drive contradictory behaviour, evoke powerful emotions, and above all, an enduring ambivalence about the field it now finds itself in (p. 127). Yet, Bourdieu’s words also suggest the impossibility of any other future. There was no option other than to succeed educationally.

Social mobility as determinism

Following Jacquet and Bourdieu, I want to argue that there are strongly ingrained dispositions of determinism in my habitus. This is not determinism in the sense of despair and passivity but rather an acceptance that I had no choice. I was caught up in a family project of social mobility that had been decided for me before I was born. As Bourdieu (2024) asserts, ‘This was something that happened within me without me’ (p. 93). Bourdieu is not just an academic whose work personifies a tension between resistance and reproduction; there is a parallel tension between agency and structure. We socially mobile, especially those like me who supposedly personify a rags-to-riches trajectory, from coal miner’s daughter to Cambridge professor, are seen to represent the agentic among the working classes. But my propulsion was a strange sort of agency with little to do with free will and choice. I had to be socially mobile, as the first-born child; that was the place allocated to me in the family. Bourdieu (2000) argues that habitus is:

The site of durable solidarities, loyalties that cannot be coerced because they are grounded in incorporated laws and bonds, those of the esprit de corps (of which family loyalty is a particular form), the visceral attachment of a socialized body to a social body that has made it and with which it is bound up. As such, habitus is the basis of an implicit collusion among all the agents who are producers of similar conditions and conditionings, and also of a practical experience of the transcendence of the group, of its ways of being and doing. (p. 145)

I imbued a practical mutual understanding of the world that came through a family history of angry, stubborn, yet mainly powerless, resistance to the way the world was; a relationship to the world that generated dispositions of opposition, obduracy, defiance, rigidity but also those of solidarity, determination, single-mindedness and self-reliance; ‘a habitus of recalcitrance’ (Skeggs, 2004a, p. 89).

All families mythologise aspects of their history, selecting some stories over others in order to explain themselves to themselves in ways that make ‘the best’ sense of their circumstances and experiences. There was a long-standing historical rage in my family about the way the world was, and still is. But that understanding of the world was mainly communicated through select slices of lived experience, chosen for their resonance with how family members viewed their relationship with the rest of society, and, in particular, the upper classes. My maternal great grandfather went to prison in the great depression of the 1930s for punching and knocking out one of the two police constables who tried to caution him for poaching a rabbit when his family were starving. He spent 9 months in Derby jail. My maternal great grandmother was arrested for breaking the first newly installed plate glass window in the town my family lived in. It belonged to an alderman, the richest man in the town. She told the magistrate he deserved it for parading his wealth. My father once walked out of his colliery in protest at the safety conditions. His mates at work used to joke he’d gone on strike on his own.

Children are often the unwitting voice of their parents’, and grandparents’, frustrated desires. I believe my disposition to resist, to refuse to compromise or comply with the traditional reproductive path laid out for me, is rooted in an historical family habitus characterised by righteous indignation and defiance, engrained not only in my parents’ generation but generations before (see McKenzie, 2015 for a similar family history). As Jacquet (2023) points out, children become the avengers of the suffering of their forebears, a suffering created by being seen to be ‘less than nothing’ (p. 64). My family history haunts me but its effects are not ephemeral and shadowy but powerfully tangible. I have written extensively of habitus as history (Reay, 2022), and Bourdieu (2000) asserts that:

in each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed. (pp. 78–79)

One of earliest articles attributed to Bourdieu is called ‘The dead seize the living’, while almost 200 years ago Karl Marx (1852) was writing about how ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’.

Thumping policemen, breaking the windows of capitalists, organising a one-man strike, are part of a family history of opposition to the way things are, that has had a searing impact on the way I am. Yet, any heroic impulses are constantly undermined by conformist, compliant tendencies, by desires to be accepted and recognised by middle-class society, while simultaneously finding assimilation intolerable.

Bourdieu argues that the subject is not the instantaneous ego of a sort of singular cogito but the individual trace of an entire collective history, and I would argue that the traces of a collective history are evident throughout my life. Bourdieu (2008) writes of having to practice ‘a kind of semi-controlled schizophrenia’ and I want to argue that many of those of us from solidarist working-class backgrounds who become academics are engaged in the constant ‘conciliation of contraries’ that generates Bourdieu’s cleft habitus (p. 110). Once I experienced the class struggle between the dominant and the dominated as one in which I was clearly positioned on one side. Now it has become as internal struggle in which I am at war with myself, or as Jacquet (2023) argues, I have become my own enemy (p. 123).

The impotent fury of my ancestors still reverberates in my head; the bitter tears of my maternal grandfather at the ignominious death of his mother in the workhouse, the defiant sullenness of my paternal grandmother, taking in washing with a dram of whiskey in her apron pocket, my father’s constant anger at the exploitation of workers like himself, and my mother’s simmering resentment at her lowly status on the council estate where we lived. I became my family’s collective, long-gestating refusal of reproduction. And despite the common response of the socially-immobile middle and upper classes to my attempts at understanding my biography, this is no attempt to eulogise my trajectory as heroic. Clawing my way up a steep, broken, slippery social ladder involved a great deal of cheating, mental distress and lying both to myself and others, although not nearly as much lying and cheating as I was accused of over the course of my social rise. As Jacquet (2023) concludes, ‘the transclass is not so much a solitary hero as a herald conveying personal and collective aspirations’ (p. 73). As a consequence, like Bourdieu (2008), they often have to become fanatically single-minded, and desperately driven. They are also, despite their social mobility, the embodiment of social failure because their solitary rise through the classes is inevitably about individual success at the expense of solidarity, and the raising of the entire class. They may be ‘heralds conveying personal and collective aspirations’ but those collective aspirations are never realised, while the solidarity is lost. As Jacquet (2023) succinctly contends, ‘solidarity is the poor person’s money; and there is nothing surprising about it being less widespread in the affluent classes, who can do without it’ (p. 149). Yet, for many of us who move upwards out of the working class, the loss of that solidarity results in a constant ache, a permanent sense of bereavement. If I am unrecognisable to the people and community I have come from, how then can I recognise myself? Shame, grief and guilt are constant dangers. Like Ernaux (2022) I am inhabited by anger and impotence in the face of the chasm between the social classes, and the lack of any political solution to mend it.

Shame and melancholia in non/passing

The howls of rage and righteous indignation that reverberate down the generations of my family find a contemporary echo in the work of Cynthia Cruz and Fran Lock. Lock (2022) writes about her ‘dangerous rage’ (p. 69), while Cruz (2021a) describes how she became ‘filled with a rage she could not contain’ (p. 42). The rage of refusal Cruz and Lock frequently return to in their writing is tempered by melancholia. Melancholia is a form of severe depression characterised by profound sadness and despair. We see traces of melancholia in Jackson and Marsden’s working-class boys, and in Bourdieu’s admission of ‘inner desolation and despair’. However, melancholia is much more vivid in the work of Cruz and Lock. As Cruz (2021a) writes,

Melancholia is the unconscious desire to return to our origins, whilst simultaneously a revulsion, a parallel desire to stay away. (p. 154)

Their melancholia is underpinned by an overwhelming sense of alienation. The discarded past working-class self represents both a loved object and a hated one. The result is an ambivalence that prevents any grieving process, giving rise to guilt but also the impossibility of any resolution. Cruz (2021a) writes of her past working-class self as ‘a spectre, the ghost left behind’ (p. 2).

Melancholia frames experiences of losing one class but failing to fully gain another. As Cruz (2021a) reflects,

by the time I knew I would never be accepted into a middle-class world, it was too late, who I was had gone. (p. 85)

Melancholia comes, not just from having a reactionary function in the wider structural scale of things, but also the misunderstandings, and misattributions of the motivations and imperatives that drive the social propulsions of those, in particular, who come from solidaristic sections of the working classes. Many do not wish to rise alone, but to have a role in abolishing class barriers for everyone. Yet, there is always the risk within autosociobiography that the focus on the individual journey will ‘immobilize rather than transform the class order’ (Twellmann and Lammers, 2023: 54).

Bourdieu’s (2000) cleft habitus, evident in many contemporary autosociobiographical texts (Eribon, 2013; Ernaux, 2018; Louis, 2024), is also apparent in the work of both Lock and Cruz. In Fran Lock’s (2022) poetic polemic White/Other, she writes that

The living poor, rejected, become ghostly, spectral . . . this wound and the haunting . . . afraid of forgetting, exhausted by the impossibility of forgetting: doubled, split, hopelessly divided in my failed attempts to become someone else. (pp. 3–4)

Lock talks of being doubled, hopelessly divided. Cynthia Cruz (2021a), too, writes of a doubling in The Melancholia of Class where she describes the impossibility of assimilation, the inevitability of dissociation for the socially mobile, creating a pathological state in which two or more distinct personalities exist in the same person. She goes on to write that

We can either separate ourselves from middle-class society or we can become split – doubling, becoming zombie, existing as the living dead . . .:

We end up split, doubled, caught between the world of our origins and the middle class world we now live in . . . ghosts, existing between worlds, a haunting. (Cruz 2021a: 9)

While the divided habitus is a theme in both Fran Lock and Cynthia Cruz’s work, I am not sure that either would identify their work as autosociobiography. Lock (2022) describes White/Other as a shapeshifting work of feral lyric riff combining poetry, polemic and coruscating rant to grapple with the complexities of living and mourning as a working class ‘other’ within mainstream middle-class culture. Cynthias Cruz’s (2021a) The Melancholia of Class is part memoir, part cultural theory, and part polemic, and is subtitled ‘A Manifesto for the Working Class’, that might enable the working classes to resist assimilation, and carry their working-class origins and communities with them as they break down the barricades of middle-class society. But alongside the poetry, cultural critique and polemic, both authors are powerfully situated in their texts. There is a disparaged ‘I’. Women writers from working-class backgrounds constantly end up having to explain themselves in their texts. And, as Beverley Skeggs (2004b) argues, such processes of self-explaining are not empowering, and certainly not for the author. Rather, as Lock (2022) makes clear, they operate to reinscribe inferior positions in the academic field.

But domination within the dominant field is always preferable to being dominated from outside it. Both Lock and Cruz write about being haunted, a haunting that is enmeshed with the horror of being returned to the place they have left. For both, haunting embodies an unmet longing running alongside a fear and revulsion of what poverty entails. Lock (2022) writes of her background as a wound that never heals:

What wound? I am asked: be more specific, more detailed, more ‘particular’, more ‘precise’. What was it like? Tell us what happened. Little misery memoir. All artifice that pretends to memory. Traumatic memories are fragmented, I explain, difficult to describe. They are inconsistent, inaccurate, lacking in contextual details; they – what trauma? I am interrupted. People can accept that poverty creates and exacerbates the conditions in which traumatic events occur, but they struggle to see poverty itself as traumatic, to see poverty as trauma . . . the spectre of poverty that hovers over the living poor and is everywhere rejected. (p. 3)

What we learn from Lock’s text is that for the socially mobile, working-class individual to pass as middle class is a privilege but also a cause of shame, trauma and loss. Lock (2022) writes of the ‘profound instrumentality of “passing”, and the fear that incubates inside of it’, of having a hyper-visibility, yet to always also be missing (p. 78). Cynthia Cruz (2021b) in a recent poetry collection, Hotel Oblivion writes that

Truth is the antidote

to shame and shame

is what I carry with me

everywhere. (p. 29)

As Jacquet (2023) argues, ‘shame is one of the most constant affective markers in the career of transclasses’ (p. 128). Shame has many potential sources for the socially mobile. Initially the shame of where you come from, but that is superceded by the shame of pretension, of selling out, and for many, the shame of not standing up more strongly for the working classes, reinforced by the shame of a social distance that can never be traversed. Chronic shame has its roots in the cultural politics of exclusion and inclusion, where the constant fear and anticipation of social rejection, just as much as the actual experience of rejection in upper- and middle-class fields, causes stress. Increasingly, medical research is demonstrating (Dolezal and Lyons, 2017) that shame is toxic.

The loss of one’s working-class identity induced by social mobility, entails assuming multiple other performed identities for both Cruz and Lock. It also leads to Bourdieu’s ‘semi-controlled schizophrenia’, and his total, slightly crazed investment in his academic work (Bourdieu, 2008). Lock elaborates on multiple identities, and the extent to which assuming multiple identities is a gendered process, when she writes:

Something working-class girls learn to do early on in our lives is to switch registers; we are far more dexterous than boys at pin-balling back and forth between modes of speech; between restricted and elaborated language codes and the social roles that engender them . . . This gives us a superficial social mobility, but it also condemns us to daily acts of self-induced schizophrenia, to multiple improvised and competing ‘performances’. (Lock, 2021b: 10)

As Lock points out in her PhD thesis, the socially mobile have to live contradictions of which those who remain in their original class are blissfully unaware:

when i started out, i mean, those fucking fucked abyssal days, the rain, crisp scent of failure. why? i was oddment, figment, born all wrong. yes. i chased things, misremembered, courted the seared maze of my blood with tiny violence. (Lock, 2020: 166)

Female academics from working-class backgrounds who hold on to their working classness are frequently reviled, often ejected from the academy. (I can name at least three that I know personally.) This is also the case with celebrities – look at what happened to Brittany Spears and Amy Winehouse. Those of us who are more cowardly, recognising the power play in the field, attempt assimilation. We seldom completely succeed. My career began with an excoriating demolition of my work by two white male academics critiquing research produced by university education departments (Tooley and Darby, 1998). It led to Chris Woodhead, Head of Ofsted at the time, lambasting the ‘dim dross’ blighting educational research (Reay, 2000). More recently in Winzler’s (2021: 1114) trenchant critique of my academic work, and its ‘blind-spots’, I am described as having a ‘working-class turned parvenu trajectory’, and positioned as an upstart who has deformed Bourdieu’s theory (p. 1109). Even after 30 years in academia, I am aware that my texts too often veer too close to the real, are too laden with emotion, that I often fail to achieve the ‘right’ tone, and never ‘the ease and effortlessness’ of those Bourdieu (2000) describes as furthest removed from necessity.

The celebrated success stories of social mobility find a persuasive counter-narrative in Lock and Cruz’s texts. All the so-called uplifting, aspirational accounts of wonderful mentors, supportive patrons, all those out-stretched hands helping to lift the socially mobile up that populate mainstream social mobility tales, and even those narratives that take a critical stance (Louis, 2024) are predominantly male tales. The stories Cruz and Lock tell are very different. There is no recognition of value, no promotion by more powerful others, just a litany of ‘you can’t’ (Cruz, 2021a: 44). It is clear that Bourdieu (2008) was not subject to the degree of gate-keeping Lock and Cruz were subject to; he, unlike Cruz (2021a), was not constantly told he was ‘incapable’ (p. 47). Gender plays an under-estimated part in defining social mobility experiences, as does the fraction of the working classes you grow up in.

I have written about my own habitus of recalcitrance (Reay, 2022) but it also emerges powerfully from the writings of both Lock and Cruz. Fran Lock (2022), speaking of her PhD experience, writes:

I entered the academy by stealth and by assault, by treachery and trespass, and no small measure of bloody-mindedness, to slither into their world through the eye of a needle, through the eye of a storm. (p. 18)

Beverley Skeggs (2004a) has argued that

We also need to be able to understand the habitus of recalcitrance, of nonbelonging, of no-caring, those who refuse to make a virtue out of necessity, the ‘f*** off and ‘so what’ of utterances, the radical emptiness of the habitus, one that does not want to play the dominant symbolic game and accrue any value? (p. 89)

But also, as Lock’s, Cruz’s and my own narrative reveal, always simmering beneath the surface of recalcitrance is a desire to have somewhere to ‘feel right’. I suggest that Lock’s words conjure up the battlefield that academia too often becomes for the working classes, but also the prohibitions we face, the illicit nature of the academic enterprise for those who are seen to not really belong. In the process we usually have to engage in a form of psychic self-mutilation, culling the excessive, still working-class parts of ourselves, or burying them deep inside so they are no longer visible in middle-class fields. But in the process we lose vital connections, that I for one have never stopped yearning for. As Arlene Geronimus (2023) writes,

We tend to think of social mobility as moving up to something better. But whatever moves you up to opportunity also moves you away from things that give your life purpose and meaning, and the people who validate your view of the world. (p. 1)

But for so many of us it is also what we have powerfully desired and striven for. Most of those of us who are socially mobile when young cannot leave our working-class past fast enough. Yet, looking back, there are myriad regrets, a longing to make contact. But perhaps that longing is made possible by the impossibility of any return, as a vast social distance is opened up by years of moving away. Bourdieu (2008) writes of his ‘confused dream of a reintegration into my native world’. But, as Cruz and Lock make clear, you cannot reintegrate once you have become estranged from your past:

Habitus as a system of dispositions to be and to do is a potentiality, a desire to be which, in a certain way, seeks to create the conditions most favourable to what it is. (Bourdieu, 2000: 150)

This process, Bourdieu argues, is guided by ‘one’s sympathies and antipathies, affections and aversions, tastes and distastes’. But for the socially mobile who often feel lost and at a loss in strange middle-class fields, it is the aversions, antipathies and distastes which predominate both in terms of how we feel, and how we are received. Social mobility always carries with it the risk of rendering you unrecognisable, both to yourself and those you have left behind, of becoming ‘lost in transition’ (Jacquet, 2023: 144). The work of both Lock and Cruz speak powerfully to such loss.

‘I can’t slow down for no one: the motion keeps my heart running’

(from Keane ‘Can’t Stop Now’)

Time works very differently if you are working class, it has to be clawed back, illicitly stolen as if you don’t have a right to your own time. And that relationship to time still exists for many of the transclass, particularly women. Cynthia Cruz (2021a) writes that the middle class are allowed leisure, while the working classes are not. The sense that you should always be striving, making as much effort as possible permeates Bourdieu’s ‘self analysis’ as well as the work of Cruz and Lock. Cruz and Lock’s writing is characterised by an almost febrile agitation, with words in constant movement, racing the reader across the page. That constant movement, a state of ‘running in place’ (Cruz, 2021a: 110), and ‘manic energy’ (Lock, 2021a) evokes another recognition. Part of my social mobility legacy is the inability to stop working. Bourdieu distinguishes between those who only have to be what they are and those who are what they do (Skeggs, 2004b:19). Yet, Keane’s lyrics in ‘Can’t Stop Now’ – the words of a public school boy – made me sob the first time I heard them. I think they were written about an ex-girlfriend, but they evoked guilt-laden images of my grandmother and my parents, and the recognition that although I tried to bring them with me, I left them behind:

Though I know I said I’d wait around ’til you need me

I have to go

I hate to let you down

But I can’t stop now

I’ve got troubles of my own

’Cause I’m short on time

I’m lonely, and I’m too tired to talk.

In an interview with Stephen Patrick Bell (2024), Edouard Louis speaks of wanting to leave his childhood as fast as possible. He said ‘I couldn’t stop running and running and running and running’. But this is a different sort of running to that of Cruz, Lock and myself. He is running towards a bourgeois life he then embraces in a way I have never been able to. This is not a judgement but rather a recognition of different dispositions both of our originary habitus and our new privileged ones. I would argue it is more difficult to leave a solidarist working-class background where there was at least a little space to feel proud of being working class than the more fractured, despairing, working-class milieu Louis grew up in (Louis, 2019). I also suggest that difference lies partly in gender, and discuss that in more detail in the following section.

There is no just being in my life – I am in a permanent condition of striving, doing, – to live is to work in which any leisure time is instrumentalised; going to the gym, watching films, reading books, jogging round the park, are all in the pursuit of being able to work better. Social mobility has literally consumed my life, I no longer know how to be still. I have been on an incessant treadmill of self-improvement all my life, desperate to achieve more. As Bourdieu (2000) writes,

To be expected, solicited, overwhelmed with obligations and commitments is not only to be snatched from solitude or insignificance, but to experience, in the most continuous and concrete way, the feeling of counting for others, being important for them, and therefore in oneself, and finding in the permanent plebiscite of testimonies of interest – requests, expectations, invitations – a kind of continuous justification for existing. (p. 24)

There is an absurdity in writing academic critiques of meritocracy and aspiration, as I have often done, when my whole life has been one long aspirational journey to prove my worth. The socially mobile can rarely just be, when their entire existence is one of striving for recognition. Incessant activity, the inability to stop, is also evident in Bourdieu’s (2008) self-analysis; he writes of frenzied activity a number of times in the text, as do Cruz and Lock:

I continued to write every evening. I flung myself totally, oblivious to fatigue or danger, into an undertaking whose stake was not only intellectual. (p. 40)

I am co-author of an article called ‘The Still-Moving Position of the “Working-Class” Feminist Academic’ (Wilson et al., 2021). And being in constant movement seems to characterise the narratives of many of those who have been socially mobile. There is no arrival, no final destination, but rather a life in permanent transit, a life of perpetual motion (Jacquet, 2023).

Adrenalised anorexics: a gendered take on the transclass

Recent research published by Kim et al. (2023) found that groups that experienced upward mobility reported more depressive and academic distress symptomatology than groups that remained in their class. Challenging the common myth that people who succeed in moving up the social ladder will be happier, they found that both upward and downward social mobility come with psychological costs, including depression and academic distress. They conclude that the changes that come with social mobility, such as changes in social class-related identity, worldview and discrimination, may pose risks to mental health (Kim et al., 2023: 396). Islam and Jaffee (2024), in a systematic review of 21 studies of social mobility and mental health, found that the socially mobile had more mental health problems than those who had stable high-class positions but fewer than those in low stable class locations. However, while the research produces varied findings (see also Chan, 2018), all the narratives I discuss in this article focus on loss, trauma and dislocation.

However, in the work of Fran Lock and Cynthia Cruz, gender is intersected with class in an analysis that foregrounds the unacceptability of the working-class female body in middle-class fields. I think that is why I am drawn so powerfully to their poetry. Like me, Lock and Cruz are both recovering anorexics, and I recognise the brutality they describe in which social mobility can only be achieved through a wiping out of one’s identity – ‘a shedding of the self’.

I have written a number of articles on social mobility, for example ‘The conflictual legacy of being a coal miner’s daughter’, and ‘The perils and penalties of meritocracy’. Most refer to, and describe aspects of, my own experience, but are always governed by a sense of what it is acceptable to say. What we who were once working class learn, the hard way, is that our anger at our treatment is not taken seriously, but rather redefined, if we are lucky, as ‘a chip on the shoulder’, but more commonly, as irrationality or ‘a persecution complex’. My own fear of unacceptability meant that I have often started and never finished writing an array of papers on the embodiment of social mobility. Variously entitled ‘the adrenalized academic’ to ‘fear and loathing in the academy’, they mapped an affective, embodied trajectory from working-class coal mining community to the middle-class field of the elite university.

Social mobility taught me to be guarded. For many from working-class backgrounds, surviving in middle-class fields requires a hyper-vigilance, a constant guarding against threats and micro-aggressions (Ferguson and Lareau, 2021). Interestingly, this is one of the dispositions Cruz (2021a) attaches to anorexia. She argues that anorexia is both disciplined and vigilant.

Medical research is increasingly making a link between shame and eating disorders (Swan and Andrews, 2003). Both Fran Lock and Cynthia Cruz write often of a longing to be smaller, thinner. But for both this is less about the body, more about the threat of what may become embodied. As Lock (2021a) writes, ‘starvation was the language of my self-and-world-disgust’. The stereotype of the anorexic is of a middle-class, high-performing, white, perfectionist female. But there is a different literature which reveals the pervasiveness of eating disorders among the ethnically-diverse, male and female, socially mobile (Cheng et al., 2019; Huryk et al., 2021; McLaren and Kuh, 2004). Cruz, Lock and I are included in that number:

Anorexia is experienced as a ‘safe space’ that allows sufferers to ‘live through distress’, through effecting a viscerally felt ‘shield’ from the outside world. (Eli and Warin, 2018)

The moment I entered academia I became aware of my excesses – I was too loud, too emotional, had too much physicality to fit into the field. I could not find anyone like me to be friends with, but neither could I find any social others who considered me acceptable enough to befriend. I experienced an overwhelming sense of vulnerability in the hierarchical social world of the university. Despite all my striving, I was returned to the position of the abject inferior from the coal mining council estate. The unacceptability that framed my university experience is there in Dennis Marsden’s (1968) account of his time at Cambridge as a working-class boy (p. 119). He wrote,

‘I didn’t make many friends. I was snubbed in the cruising club – and heavily patronized by the club steward there who soon saw I wasn’t like the other gentlemen. I had to wait three years for admission to the swimming club’.

His rather depressing conclusion was that ‘from being at school one of nature’s chosen few I had become overnight at Cambridge a C-streamer.’

I am not sure what happened to Marsden when he went back to his family and community in the vacations, but trying to fit in at university rendered me unrecognisable to myself, and the community I had come from. When I went back in the holidays, my school friends who had all left school at 18 or earlier shunned me. As one said much later at a school reunion, ‘We were all so worried about you, you weren’t yourself, just like a pale shadow. We decided you were on drugs’. The consequence was that, while I had no cross-class friendships with middle-class female students at university, I also failed to retain friendships with working-class girls from school.

At university, adapting became a process of shrinking myself, paring myself down in a failed attempt to become acceptable. It also meant becoming anorexic. Anorexia is an attempt to lose the body. At age 20, when I was at my lowest body weight, I wrote in my diary ‘it’s great having a body that doesn’t really exist, a mausoleum of decreased feelings, no longer able to detract from the purity of living inside my head’. Anorexia is theorised as an individual psychiatric illness but, I want to argue, it should also be viewed as the embodiment of painful social circumstances. You give up on the world, set yourself apart, because you have already been set aside by more powerful others.

But anorexia is much more than the passivity and conformity it is associated with in mainstream discourses. For Cruz (2021a), the anorexic is ‘rage made manifest’, but also a form of principled refusal (p. 16).

For female working-class women like Cruz, Lock and myself, the enforced liminality that comes through class exclusion finds a new different expression in the chosen liminality that comes with being anorexic (Eli, 2018a). But, liminality threads its way through all the texts I have analysed. It develops as a response to exclusion from both new and old fields. It grows as a defensive reaction to the terror of dealing with unfamiliar worlds where everyone seems to have more power than you, and is able to exercise power over you. Liminality saturates the texts as a state of disconnecting from a social world experienced as painful and excluding – an ambivalent suspension between working- and middle-class worlds – the refusal Cruz and Lock write of.

After I gave up on being purely cerebral, a necessity if I wanted to live, I was bulimic for 13 years. They were 13 years of day after day swallowing my rage and anaesthetising myself from the pain of having to live an indigestible life. Lock (2021a) writes eloquently of her own rejection of an indigestible world:

In refusing to eat, I was making myself empty and clean. By refusing food I was refusing their world. I wanted nothing from it. It could not sustain or nourish me. I would not let it keep me alive.

Lock, like Cruz and myself, was seeking to escape ingesting the alien values being imposed, as well as trying to avoid internalising the shame generated by her treatment in middle-class fields. Anorexia is about a stubborn refusal, living on a diet of rage, while bulimia is the desperate attempt to expel that rage, the impossibilities of compromise, and a horror of swallowing submission to the status quo (Eli, 2018b).

Conclusion

The transclass represents a double failure – on a personal level, the failure to fully pass into a different social class. But there is also the failure of wider inequitable structures to change in the face of working-class agency. It is little wonder there is so much musing and mourning being done from our new vantage points. Perhaps that is why the transclass can often only explain themselves through exposure. Jacquet (2023) offers some consolation, arguing that

The transclass is not to blame for being where she is. Her situation is the result of combined external and internal forms of determination – and it would be mistaken to think that she could have been different, given her history. For that, she and her environment would have had to be different from what they were. Consequently to conceive oneself as a miracle survivor of destiny, a lucky escapee or terrible traitor is always to be mistaken out of ignorance at the determinism at work in non-reproduction. (p. 160)

Yet, it is not the working-class individual who should feel compelled to change; individual agency is no answer to structural injustices. If becoming middle class involves the extent of self-mutilation and shrinkage it has necessitated in working-class women like myself, Cruz and Lock, we need to radically rethink social mobility. Far from a social good, it is a social ill that both depletes working-class communities and a significant number of socially mobile individuals. In order to survive and prosper, the working classes should not need ‘to kill themselves off’ (Cruz, 2021a: 46).

There also needs to be a recognition that the social exclusion, stigmatisation and marginalisation experienced by socially mobile, working-class individuals in middle-class fields, and the shame and distress that causes, cannot be separated out from ‘measures of successful individuality and “good citizenship” that made middle class participants feel worthless’ (Eli, 2018a: 490). There is a negative relationality between women and girls’ actual lives and ideals of femininity.

The degree of inner satisfaction . . . depends on the degree to which the mode of functioning of the social world or the field in which they are inserted enables habitus to come into its own. (Bourdieu, 2000: 150)

Habitus is not only about how the past is embodied in the present, it is also about how contemporary inequitable structures, like the class system, become internalised, sedimented in the individual psyche in damaging and destructive ways.

What needs to change? Well, I don’t want to change any more, to accommodate to the status quo. I want revolution, a tearing down of current structures, and a flattening of economic and social hierarchies. I want to end not with Bourdieu or Jacquet, but with Marx and Cruz. As Marx (1852) wrote, ‘The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing at all’, while Cruz (2021a) ends The Melancholia of Class with a call to arms:

Is it not possible for us to navigate together, in an act of resistance against a system that would like us dead, or, if not dead, alive, but just barely? Is it possible in other words, for a retreat – an act of communal negation – one in which we say no to assimilation and instead, come together? (p. 196)

We need to fight for a world in which social classes, and all the exploitation, oppression and misery the class hierarchy brings with it, would no longer exist.