Feeling working class: affective class identification and its implications for overcoming inequality

Katie Beswick

doi:10.1080/14682761.2020.1807194

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is a provocation, discussing the ways class measurement is complicated in efforts to understand participation and barriers to access for working class people. I explore class as a structure of feeling, emerging as a not-yet-worked through aspect of the theatre experience. I ask what would need to happen in theatre institutions if we took seriously people’s self identification, rather than relying primarily on external measures, and suggest ways that doing so might offer strategies for overcoming inequality.

Highlights

According to a 2016 survey, sixty percent of the United Kingdom’s population identify as working-class (Evans and Mellon 2016)
CONTACT Katie Beswick K.Beswick@exeter.ac.uk Drama Department, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK. Categories such as race and sex, is not fixed but fluid – with class boundaries changing across relatively short periods of time, and economic inequality exacerbated by gaps in wealth, taste and social networks in the changing social and political context of the twenty-first century (Savage 2015, 1–10)
Class inequality is inherently intersec tional, always entangled with injustices related to race, gender, sexuality and disability, to the extent that it is difficult to understand the lived experiences and stigmas produced by distinct identity positions as separate from class

Summary

Introduction

According to a 2016 survey, sixty percent of the United Kingdom’s population identify as working-class (Evans and Mellon 2016). In theatre studies and cultural policy scholarship dealing with arts institutions, finding methods to measure class has been an important means of making visible how inequal ities relating to the distribution of capitals intersect with protected characteristics such as race and sex to create barriers to participation for cultural workers and audiences (O’Brien 2018).

Results

Conclusion