Middle-class Discourse Research Articles

Tragic Deviation from the Comic Text: Dual Narrative Dynamics in Ah, Wilderness!

Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy Ah, Wilderness! is home to plot simplicity and witty remarks. If social background beyond the text is considered, the implicit repression exerted by the dominant middle-class discourse and the resulting female predicament continue throughout the play. Richard gave up his zeal for changing the world, swallowed up by utilitarianism and instrumental rationality. Lily struggled between the call of independent consciousness and the drag of her faint expectation of family, yet finally chose to be docile and compromised with the family. Another tragic layer deviates from the comic nostalgic motif; O’Neill’s feminist concern deviates from the seemingly male-centered surface text, hence the narrative progression of the play text. Beyond the text, the stage set of the play visualizes the process of middle-class utilitarianism devouring individuals, and the directors’ tendency in the adaptations and the actors’ interpretation of their roles prove the hidden sense of repression existent. When the evidence from the stage is applied to the text interpretation, extending covert progression to drama analysis bursts with new vitality.

The ‘Gluttonous Child’ Narrative in Italy and Britain: A Transnational Analysis

Abstract This article compares images of food as temptation, and hunger as test, in two samples of late-nineteenth century British and Italian children’s literature. It reads the narratives alongside coeval popular medical manuals on child health, examining recurring descriptions of children as natural gluttons in works dedicated to child nutrition. Putting the select fiction and non-fiction in dialogue with moral, scientific, and nation-building middle-class discourses circulating in both countries, the article finds that the ‘gluttonous child’ narrative was both transnational and transtextual.

El discurso oficial de la clase media china ansiedad, nacionalismo y populismo

Desde principios del siglo xxi surge en la República Popular de China un discurso oficial de clase media en cuya difusión los medios de comunicación han desempeñado un papel clave. A partir del análisis de noticias publicadas en Renmin Wang ([Diario del] Pueblo en Línea), la versión digital del periódico oficial del Partido Comunista Chino (PCC), se determinará la aparición y construcción del discurso de la clase media china en aras de responder a la cuestión ¿para qué el PCC promueve el discurso oficial de la clase media en China? Los resultados sugieren que el Estado-Partido legitima su autoridad en China a través de diferentes posturas basadas en un nacionalismo populista que fomenta una nueva identidad acorde a los valores neoliberales donde encaja el discurso sobre la clase media.

Prospects for and factors that militate against decolonising education in social work in South Africa

The effects of both colonialism and the apartheid that succeeded it resulted in the indigenous peoples of South Africa being displaced, marginalised, excluded and exploited. For many generations, indigenous population groups were disenfranchised, their destinies were taken out of their hands and their socio-economic status was predetermined. As colonisers tended to perceive the knowledge systems of indigenous peoples as being inferior to their own, colonised countries inherited most of their infrastructure and administrations from their colonisers, and their influence continues to be felt in many post-colonial countries even today. The discipline of social work has often been criticised for being dominated by white, Western and middle-class discourses. Although education in social work in South Africa needs to be sensitive to African world views, attempts to decolonise it and to replace Western modes of thinking, being and feeling with modes that are relevant to African cultural experiences have yielded some undesirable consequences.

An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, by Gregory Vargo

Reviewed by: An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel by Gregory Vargo Chris R. Vanden Bossche (bio) An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, by Gregory Vargo; pp. xiv + 278. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $99.99. The rising of the middle class has loomed so largely in studies of Victorian literature that the study of class itself, especially the working classes, long received scant attention. What criticism we have has often focused on representations of class, primarily in what is deemed middle-class literature. Fortunately, scholars such as Louis James and Martha Vicinus have introduced Victorianists to working-class literature, and the modern editions of Ian Haywood and others have made it widely available. The result has been a growing body of critical literature to which Gregory Vargo's An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel is a valuable new addition. Vargo's book makes two interventions that build on and extend important developments in recent criticism on Chartist writing. First, rather than measuring Chartist writing in terms of assumptions about what it should envision—a fault of some early criticism of this work—it treats this work as a form of social action and asks what it attempts to achieve on its own terms. Second, it does not treat this work in isolation but instead examines the ways in which working-class and middle-class writing respond to, adapt, and revise each other. Among the first books to take this approach were Sally Ledger's Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007) and Sambudha Sen's London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic (2012), both of which investigated the ways that Charles Dickens's novels engaged with and borrowed from radical literature and discourse. The project of these studies, as I take it, is to treat ideological formation not as the dissemination of a predetermined set of doctrines but as a process that novelists engage in as they seek to come to terms with their social condition. My own Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867 (2014) applied a similar approach to other middle-class authors while also investigating movement in the other direction by examining [End Page 469] writing produced by radicals and members of the working classes. Vargo's Underground History shifts the focus even further toward radical literature. While there are discussions of Harriet Martineau, Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, he digs deeper into the archive and devotes more space to radical literature with analyses of William Cobbett, Thomas Cooper, Thomas Martin Wheeler, Ernest Jones, and others as well as non-literary texts from the radical press such as The Book of Murder (1839) and commentary on empire and post-1848 refugees in the Chartist press. Vargo's concern is not only to examine middle-class novelists' engagement with radicalism, but also radical fiction's engagement with middle-class discourse and narrative conventions. In particular, he examines the ways in which Chartist fictions rewrite the narrative conventions of melodrama and the Bildungsroman. Whereas the middle-class forms of these genres locate agency in the individual—in particular the melodramatic villain as the source of evil and the self-making individual of the Bildungsroman—Chartist fiction focuses on the social order itself. The villains of Chartist melodrama are no longer aristocratic rakes but institutions such as the marketplace or the patriarchal family. Vargo's analysis of the ways in which working-class writers and radicals shifted the locus of social evil from individuals to the social system is insightful, but also fits a familiar paradigm. Indeed, while he suggests in passing that Dickens "typically traces crises to the wrongdoing of specific characters," citing the example of Merdle in Little Dorrit (1855–57), many would argue that by the time of his late novels Dickens had himself shifted toward a systemic, rather than individualistic, conception of social evil, villainy in Little Dorrit residing not in Merdle but in the institutions the banker represents and their corollary in the Circumlocution...

Claiming status and contesting sexual violence and harassment among community health activists in Delhi

Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork in an urban poor area in Delhi, this paper examines how Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) experience and critique sexual violence and harassment in the city. Inherent in these women’s critiques is blaming of urban poor men who belong to their social class, resonating with middle-class discourses emerging in urban India. Simultaneously, in their accounts of sexual violence in domestic spaces, women invoked notions of romantic love and familial success. I argue that this discursive tension around urban poor men is linked to women’s attempts to assert and claim higher social status and respectability in the context of highly divided and gendered city. ASHAs made claims and asserted themselves in the multiple arenas of urban life, as their work on women’s health required cultivation of knowledge and engagement with public spaces, intimate spheres, and cultivation of familial roles propagated by the public healthcare programme. Through a reading of de Certeau’s concept of tactics as limited trajectories of claims to urban environments developed among the powerless, I show how access to urban spaces can be revisited as a negotiation and a claim, rather than being shaped only by existing social status. And, I show how responding with readiness to multiple conditions of urban poverty involves negotiation of those claims pertaining both public and private spaces and spheres.

The middle class as a culture structure: rethinking middle-class formation and democracy through the civil sphere

This paper proposes a new cultural link between the middle class and democracy. In comparative democratization, scholars remain strongly wedded to economic-materialist understandings of the middle class. They define the middle class by income or occupation, but disagree on its role in democratization and weakly explain middle-class formation. In contrast, this paper reconstructs the cultural structures that intertextually link the language of class to the language of democracy. Middle-class discourse is undergirded by a stable set of binary codes through which social actors establish creative links to the discourses of the civil sphere. Embedded in the civil sphere, middle-class discourse takes on three institutional functions—specifying the terms of solidarity and exclusion, intersphere translation, and civil-regulatory power relatively independent of the civil sphere’s own institutions.

Middle-class Meritocracy and Neoliberal Technologies of the Self at an Indian Business School

We examine the intersection of Indian middle-class discourse of merit with neoliberal technologies of the self among MBA students at an Indian business school. This middle- class discourse of merit propelled by familial expectations, invokes hard work, educational achievement and global aspirations. Neoliberal technologies of the self manifest as rationality, responsibilization and enterprising selves. These technologies of the self intersect with and animate discourse of merit to produce a hollowing-out of individuals and cultures of hyper-masculinity and ethical somnolence. In doing so, we contribute to critical management education by illustrating how discourse of merit is deployed to justify and normalize moral indifference and aggression among the soon-to- be professional managerial class. We also contribute to understanding the discursive registers by which Indian middle and upper classes shore up privilege and the role of business schools in the reproduction of widening social inequalities.

1980년대 중산층 담론과 호모 에코노미쿠스의 확산 : 시장은 사회와 인간을 어떻게 바꿨나?

1980년대 중산층 담론과 호모 에코노미쿠스의 확산 : 시장은 사회와 인간을 어떻게 바꿨나?

Caught in the Middle? Welfare State Legitimisation and Problematisation in German and Swedish Middle-class Discourse

When it comes to evaluating social and political developments, the category of the middle class takes a central position in public debates. The same holds true for welfare state research which assigns a vital role to the middle class, especially when redistributive measures have to be stabilised and legitimised. However, in these debates, it is largely overlooked that the middle class is an ambiguous concept which can bear a variety of meanings and argumentative functions. Against this background, this paper does not want to investigate what the middle class is, but rather how it gains meaning in discursive practices in different societies. Empirically, we compare German and Swedish media debates in regard to how meaning is attributed to the middle-class category as well as regarding the latter’s role in the legitimisation and problematisation of the welfare state. The analysis reveals that while in the German discourse the middle class’ well-being is considered to be the major aim of the welfare state and for the benefit of the whole society, the Swedish discourse is split into two threads: one which criticises the middle class for furthering social gaps and a second one which accuses the universal welfare state for constraining the autonomy of middle-class members. We argue that these differences between (and within) both discourses are due to different interpretive schemes which are anchored in the respective sociocultural context. The analysis thus demonstrates the additional value of an interpretive perspective which helps understanding the specific ways in which the welfare state becomes the object of political debate in different societies.

Lost in Hong Kong

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how a neo-liberal nationalist discourse of China imagines the spatial identity of the post-1997 Hong Kong with reference to Lost in Hong Kong, a new Chinese middle-class film in 2015 with successful box office sales.Design/methodology/approachTextual analysis with the aid of psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies and semiotics is used to interpret the meaning of the film in this study. The study also utilizes the previous literature reviews about the formation of the Chinese national identity to help analyze the distinct identity of the Chinese middle class today.FindingsThe discussion pinpoints how the new Chinese middle class as neo-liberal nationalists take Hong Kong as a “bizarre national redemptive space”. While Hong Kong is cinematically constructed as such a national other, this paper argues that the Hong Kong in question stands not for itself but in a form of “reverse hallucination” for pacifying the new Chinese middle class’ trauma under the rapid neo-liberalization of China in the 1990s.Originality/valueThis paper shows the new of formation of the Chinese nationalist’s discourse, especially the new Chinese middle-class discourse on Hong Kong after 1997.

Old Buddies and Same Old Stories: Argentina and US relations in the Trump Era

Old Buddies and Same Old Stories:Argentina and US relations in the Trump Era Mónica Farías On January 25th 2017 the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, issued Executive Orders 13767 and 13768. The former commands Customs and Border Patrol to "secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border." The latter enhances immigration officers' power to initiate deportation proceedings. Two days later, on January 27th, Trump issued EO 13769 suspending the refugee program as well as the entry to the United States of America of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries. On the very same day, Trump's Argentine counterpart, President Mauricio Macri, issued Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia 70/2017 (DNU - Decree of Need and Urgency) that reformed Argentine immigration statutes, lowering the requirements for the deportation of foreign residents while expediting the deportation process. This simultaneity could very well be just an unfortunate coincidence but what should call our immediate attention is that the content of these measures—the xenophobic targeting and racialized stereo-types [End Page 176] that they mobilize—are strikingly similar. According to the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), Macri's DNU 70/2017 reinstates the same criteria that existed under the 1976-1983 Argentine dictatorship. Under the Law 22.439, also known as the Ley Videla (after de facto president of Argentina Jorge R. Videla) in place until 2004, undocumented immigrants were denied access to social services such as education and health care, both free and public in Argentina, and the right to legitimate legal defense. At the time of its implementation Congress had been dissolved and national security doctrines "justified" the establishment of a system of control and sanction of the immigrant population. But what can possibly justify a measure like this under a democratic government, where it is the prerogative of the Congress to legislate on immigration issues? According to CELS, DNU 70/2017 was neither justified on the basis of need, nor of urgency. "Immigration" was not a central issue of Macri's political campaigns neither as Mayor of the city of Buenos Aires, nor for President of Argentina. Yet, Macri's xenophobia is not new. During his tenure as the Mayor of Buenos Aires (2007-2015), he and members of his administration made several remarks linking immigration from neighboring countries with delinquency of all kinds, from petty crime to illegal occupation of land and drug trafficking. Furthermore, Macri, just like Trump, won his campaign and has built his policies by tapping into deep-rooted fears and grievances. For instance, his campaign tapped into middle class discourses about a lack of law and order in an urban space increasingly perceived as dangerous and ungovernable. This is not the only similarity between the two presidents. Macri's association with Donald Trump goes back to the 1980s when he and his father tried to close a deal with him in New York. In a 2005 interview Macri said of Trump and himself: "we remained buddies. Every time I go to New York, I visit him, and I have lunch with him and his wife" (Página 12 2016). That said, Macri did not support Trump's candidacy and instead bet on Hillary Clinton's continuation of Obama's diplomatic and economic policies. Yet, the morning after the election, Macri congratulated Trump on twitter, arranged to have a phone call that took place on November 14th and tried to secure a visit to the United States. In a public opinion poll undertaken a few days prior to the announcement of DNU 70/2017, the pollster Poliarquía (http://poliarquia.com/encuesta-nacional-sobre-politica-migratoria/) reported that the level of approval for at least two of the measures—the banning of immigrants with a criminal record and "deportation express" procedures—surpassed 80 percent. But this is not new, either. In Argentina, migrants have been scapegoated for the lack of jobs and the critical economic situation at multiple points throughout the 20th century (Grimson 2001, 2006; Guano 2003). For instance, in 1902, the Ley de Residencia (Residence Law) legalized the deportation of...

Taking the Multitudes Abroad: Dinah Mulock Craik's Travel Narratives in Victorian Family Magazines

This essay discusses travel narratives by bestselling nineteenth-century novelist Dinah Mulock Craik. I examine Craik's literary professionalism as a contributor to periodicals and explore the ways in which she articulated middle-class discourses about foreign people and places. Her travel narratives published in Good Words (1867, 1884), Saint Paul's Magazine (1870), and the English Illustrated Magazine (1884, 1885, 1887) demonstrate that she found it difficult to maintain an open spirit toward the sites and people she observed.

Out the back: Race and reinvention in Johannesburg’s garden cottages

The domestic worker’s room, or ‘maid’s room’, was ubiquitous in apartheid-era white South African suburbia. In the post-apartheid era many of these outdoor rooms have been reinvented as so-called garden cottages. Their histories of racialised labour have ostensibly been erased by a middle-class discourse in which garden cottages are rented to people who are seen to legitimately ‘belong’ in the suburbs. This article uses a combination of historical material, contemporary advertising texts and interviews to discuss the transition from maid’s room to garden cottage, considering how these spaces have been (in some cases literally) whitewashed. It argues that this discursive shift masks a continuation of the exclusionary politics of identity that have long motivated white South African suburban dwellers’ collective attempts to police the boundaries of the suburbs.

Geographies of Whiteness and Wealth: White, Middle Class Discourses on Segregation and Social Mix in Flanders, Belgium

ABSTRACT:While policy makers in different parts of the world are worried about the supposedly negative consequences of spatial concentrations of ethnic minorities and/or disadvantaged people, researchers continue the debate about the desirability and feasibility of social mix. In this article, we add to this literature by focusing on the often neglected, but crucial practices and discourses of the privileged in urban and suburban neighborhoods. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 74 white, middle class residents of eight different neighborhoods of the Ghent urban region in Belgium, we demonstrate that few middle class whites actually want to live in a mixed neighborhood. We also make it clear that those living in diversity do not necessarily take up the roles they are expected to take up by the advocates of social mix policies. Drawing on these findings, we propose to broaden the research agenda of studies on segregation and social mix.

Locating China’s Middle Classes: social intermediaries and the Party-state

The middle class has emerged as a political phenomenon in China since 2002 through a state-sponsored discourse that sees it as a universal and universalising class. Although the evidence from other countries suggests that the growth of middle classes leads to regime change, this seems to be an unlikely outcome for China. In the first place, China’s middle class discourse has uncertain sociological foundations. Secondly, where the middle classes are identifiable they still probably constitute no more than 12% of the population. Thirdly, China’s middle classes have a very close relationship to the Party-state. Most of the professional and managerial middle classes are part of, or closely associated with, the Party-state; and the entrepreneurial middle class has either emerged from within the Party-state or has been incorporated into it.

Bourgeois tourism as a discourse of inclusion and exclusion - the tourist gaze in late 19th century Germany

Questions of possibilities to distinguish oneself from other groups of society and to define one's own identity often lay at the core of middle class discourse. This is especially true for the end of the 19th century and for the German Burgertum. One means of defining and developing this identity was the special, if not peculiar, behaviour of tourists. This behaviour included perceiving landscapes, processes, and even animals and human beings in a way that removed them from their primary character and be reduced to the quality of mere events for the observer. This 'tourist gaze' (Urry, 1990) and the underlying discourse enabled the bourgeoisie to differentiate themselves from those who were not able to experience this particular perception. When factories were newly considered tourist sights at the end of the 19th century, this distinction increased even further because factory workers were not only unable to be tourists, but became themselves the very object of tourist attention.

‘A Reading People?’: Global Knowledge Networks and Two Australian Societies of the 1820s

This essay is primarily concerned with two Australian societies of the 1820s: the Philosophical Society of Australasia, 1821-22, and the Useful Book Society, around 1828 to 1831. The problems faced by both societies were exacerbated by the geographical isolation of New South Wales, but the 'tyranny of distance' should not disguise the fact that they were an extreme instance of the general case of the relative scarcity of books directing human behaviour. Moreover, both societies self-consciously keyed themselves into the 'uneven global network' that linked colony and metropolis in an evolving middle-class discourse of improvement (Lester 24). Given that at least one of the founding members of the South African Literary Society, John Fairbairn, moved from the literary and philosophical society in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to the association in the Cape, explicitly bringing his experiences in the one to bear in the other, one might nuance this picture by insisting that not everything went through the metropolis (Botha 8- 9, 27-28). If debates about improvement constituted key sites in middle-class identity formation that were starting to challenge traditional aristocratic power in the early nineteenth century (Johnston 16), then the creation of networks that did not necessarily route through London was a key part in this process."

Threads of Life: Matilda Marian Pullan (1819-1862), Needlework Instruction, and the Periodical Press

Charting the life and career of needlework instructor and periodical contributor Matilda Marian Pullan (1819-1862), this essay demonstrates the importance of examining Victorian women writers' professional trajectories in the context of their private lives. Biographical research reveals a profound disconnect between the middle-class discourse of domesticity and respectability that Pullan adopted in public and the unconventional circumstances, events, and choices that shaped her private life. Pressed to generate her own income, Pullan cleverly responded to the market demands of the mid-Victorian periodical press by becoming one of its most prolific contributors of needlework patterns. A quintessentially feminine accomplishment, needlework enabled Pullan to support herself through early widowhood, illegitimate birth, and spousal separation without losing her genteel status.

Book Review Symposium

Book Review Symposium