How Not to Aim the Camera Downward. Representing the Feminized Working Poor

Abstract

The identity of the working-class woman is a particularly precarious one, as stereotypical western feminine ideals are not associated with any of the archetypical trades of the working class, which has instead embodied the masculine ideal of the manual, industrial labourer. In this essay, I argue how the struggle of working-class femininity extends to gender roles of the (former) working class more generally, investigating how this becomes apparent in photographic representations of council housing communities in contemporary art, taking Richard Billingham’s body of work Ray’s a Laugh (1996) and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work The Notion of the Family (2001-14) as case studies. Both Billingham’s and Frazier’s work deal with the identity of the working poor from the inside: they represent the decline of the working class and the demise of blue-collar communities, lacking investment and falling prey to the dismantling of the welfare state. The image of the post-war, post-industrial (and post-feminist) underemployed female has been analysed principally by sociologists and media studies researchers in relation to reality TV programmes, which produce and represent the working class female body as abject. I will therefore employ cultural theory as well as sociological research studies by Beverly Skegg, Imogen Tyler, and Angela McRobbie to identify stereotypes of working-class femininity in visual culture to then assess their relationship to lens-based artistic representations of the working class. The analysis of working-class masculinity and its place in the post-industrial, precarious labour market has been even more limited especially regarding art (let alone photography), with the exception of Angela Dimitrakaki’s essay "Masculinity, Art, and Value Extraction" (2019). The article draws on her discussion as well as on Norbert Trenkle’s "The Rise and Fall of the Working Man" (2008) to investigate Frazier’s and Billingam’s depictions of male family members and show how the decline of the working class, through deindustrialisation, precarisation, and the dismantling of the welfare state, has impacted the image of working-class masculinity.