Middle-class Tastes Research Articles

Influencers and social media: gentrification aesthetics and prosumption through China’s wanghong economy

ABSTRACT Considering the emerging wanghong (social media and influencers) places in China that share high commonalities in their urban landscapes, I chose Dongshankou in Guangzhou as a representative case study by discussing the universalism revealed from the particularities of China, to explore the possibilities of building dialogues with gentrification scholarship to enlighten future research. By engaging with the concept of gentrification aesthetics, I first argue that what is happening in Dongshankou shows that consumers’ check-in activities – attracted by something online and visiting the place onsite – reveal the changing nature of consumers and that prosumption, rather than merely consumption, contributed digital/gentrifiable capital to Dongshankou. Based on this new feature of prosumption, I use gentrification aesthetics to contend that places with exotic urban landscapes offer a place for consumers to showcase their exquisite consumption tastes and social identities. Therefore, I extend the concept of gentrification aesthetics by arguing that it is a prosumption process, whereby Chinese consumers with middle-class tastes are consuming places with aesthetics and produce new aesthetics through their exquisite urban lifestyles. This shows that gentrification aesthetics is an aesthetic-seeking and building-up process initiated by consumers’ prosumption practices, which in the end enhances the cultural representation of one place.

Middletown Lives through Middle-Class Eyes: Hillbilly Elegy and the Problem with the “Liberal Media”

J.D. Vance does not become Senator Vance without the success of Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling memoir (and later, film) about growing up in, and getting out of, rural Appalachia. Initially praised by media critics for its ability to challenge middle-class assumptions about the “white working class,” the book assuaged both liberal anxiety and conservative outrage by providing demographically appropriate explanations for the election of Donald Trump. However, the book, feature film and subsequent political campaign are also part of a much larger, lucrative culture industry built upon the commodification and fetishization of the white working class, one driven by middle-class tastes and prejudices. This was most apparent in the promotion of the book and film by the so-called liberal media establishment, represented by the New York Times, The New Yorker, Netflix, Imagine Entertainment, HarperCollins, and Harpo Productions, to name a few. However, the reinforcement of the false binary between liberal and conservative media obscured how the corporate media system helped elect a candidate who will work most certainly against the interests of actual working people, further alienating them from each other and a shared labor platform more generally. Examining Hillbilly Elegy through the five filters of the Propaganda Model will help to explain the ideological and material effects of the corporate media’s agenda upon the growing class divide.

Gentrification and changing visual landscapes: a Google Street View analysis of residential upgrading and class aesthetics in Hamilton’s Lower City

Measuring the pace and spatial distribution of gentrification is important to developing policies to mitigate its negative consequences. Typically, this is done through an analysis of census data on demographic, socioeconomic or housing change. However, this approach has numerous shortcomings, including the homogenizing effect on differences within neighbourhoods and the infrequency of census data collection. Visual analysis, particularly when examining multiple temporal views of the same location, has the potential to render visible fine-grained detail about spatial, economic and cultural changes within the urban landscape. Google Street View (GSV) is emerging as a source of repeat photography data. In this article, we employ a GSV analysis within a number of neighbourhoods in Hamilton, Ontario. Coding and analysing GSV images between 2009 and 2021 reveals an array of specific home upgrades, as well as aesthetic changes that reflect middle-class tastes, values and lifestyles that suggest more upgrading than found within conventional statistics or dominant narratives about the city. Mapping these changes paints a complex, and fine-grained, block-by-block picture of gentrification that reveals why some areas are more conducive to gentrification than others. Our analysis is important for critical visual methodologies, theoretical discussions about gentrification and neighbourhood change theories and debates within planning and policymaking.

The Forks Market: Cosmopolitan Canopy, Conviviality, and Class

This article contributes to scholarship on the varieties of co-existence expressed in urban public life by providing an analysis of cosmopolitan conviviality as it surfaces in the branded public space of The Forks Market in Winnipeg, Canada. Recently renovated to create an intimate food hall, the Market is framed as a “commons” to encourage sociability among patrons. It is also configured as an inclusive space where an urban multicultural clientele can gather and share in a variety of foodways. Drawing on empirical observational research, and paying attention to the Market’s material affordances, I argue that Forks Market patrons co-perform a kind of cosmopolitan conviviality comprising two key components: (a) convivial sociability, and (b) cosmopolitan openness. Exploring tensions between inclusivity and exclusivity, however, I maintain that such conviviality is marked by ambivalence linked to the Market’s operation as both a “cosmopolitan canopy” and a branded space with an emphasis on consumption. In particular, I consider how the “look” of the Market conveys a sense of authenticity with an “upscale” design oriented toward middle-class tastes.

Hearing Global Britishness on the BBC's Commonwealth of Song (1953–1961)

AbstractPart of the United Kingdom's national reconstruction following the Second World War was reforming its self-image as a global power in light of imperial decline. This recasting took place across political and cultural spheres and emphasized the Commonwealth, idealized as a friendly collection of current and former colonies linked by British culture. In this article, I demonstrate how music broadcasting functioned as a site of diplomacy, using white, middle-class taste for light entertainment to reinforce British values at the Empire's twilight. I focus on musical depictions of the Commonwealth on the BBC radio programme Commonwealth of Song. Using archival records, I reconstruct debates concerning Commonwealth representation and its importance to British citizens. I argue that Commonwealth of Song was a site of testing and reformulating new sonic constructions of globally minded ‘Britishness’ in the 1950s, yet conflicting messaging about what musics and people should represent the Commonwealth led to a lukewarm reception.

Fashion victims and patriotic consumers: clothing consumption and its political and gendered issues in Lebanon during the French Mandate

ABSTRACT In Lebanon during the French Mandate, clothing consumption was linked with issues of economic nationalism, commercial and urban patterns, and transnational commodity and cultural flows. As clothing items and trends were massively circulating from Western countries, habits and appearances modified and created social and political reactions in the public opinion. This article analyses the gendered dimension of the politicization of this consumption through conflicting representations and norms of women purchasing clothes: caricatures published in the magazine al-Dabbūr (The Hornet) echoing the social anxieties around the perceived changes of feminine public presence and consumption, and articles from the women’s press calling for a moderate attitude towards fashion. The practical application of ideals of patriotic motherhood and middle-class taste are examined through articles aiming at educating to taste, managing the home and family’s consumption in aspects related to clothing, and the women’s movement support to national industries and handicraft. The crossed analyse of these conflicted representations and normative discourses shows how women are constructed as key purchasing agents and as inflecting fashion. Their position in clothing consumption is either elaborated as a curse for the nation or as an occasion to prove their patriotism and thus advance their claims for citizenship.

How place shapes taste: The local formation of middle-class residential preferences in two Israeli cities

This article studies the preferences of middle-class residents for old or new neighborhoods in two Israeli cities, and describes the ways local social space mediates the translation of the habitus into generative preferences. Most sociological studies either ignore questions of place or explicitly reject the role of place in shaping class tastes. While a number of recent studies have demonstrated the role of place in shaping class tastes, the mechanisms underlying the role of place have yet to be investigated and conceptualized. This study addresses this lacuna. Based on a mixed-methods comparative design, the article first presents the relationship between spatial and class processes underlying the particular social space of each of the two cities – that is, the local association between old/new neighborhoods and different populations, symbolic boundaries, and expectations regarding the future of different neighborhoods. It then shows how local social space is reflected in local narratives and patterns of distinction, which are interwoven with residents' accounts of their choices and preferences. The study argues that middle-class tastes are formed locally by a process of “emplacement,” in which social actors find their socially designated place in specific urban settings and develop the tastes and dispositions associated with these areas.

‘Who likes fish? And I don’t mean fish fingers!’ Taste education, culinary capital, and distinction in a rural middle-class primary school

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how middle-class distinction is produced in a primary school by focusing on four different ‘scenes’. Using Bourdieu’s notion of distinction, this paper shows how children are educated on matters of middle-class taste. I argue that privilege is produced through food education in different formats. This taste education goes beyond what one should merely eat and consume. It is situated within a middle-class nostalgia for rural ‘villageness’. While this type of distinction is not in and of itself problematic, this paper discusses the implications for when these ideas are taken up in policy, and expected of all schools. I argue educators need to be aware of how these values are being rolled out as universal values, expected of schools in diverse areas. Educators should pay attention to how middle-class distinction and privilege is produced and reproduced in schools, in order to create a more inclusive food education.

Downplaying class with style: Middle class anxiety and the aesthetic performance of role distance

Discourses on middle class taste, lifestyle and ‘aesthetics’ have emphasized how middle class agents orient to mark their position by appropriating ‘legitimate’ cultural goods and practices and eschewing ‘illegitimate’ ones. This paper examines what could be learned, if the analytical perspective is broadened and shifted from the sociocultural distinction games between collective class agents to actual situated performances, and the stylistic and expressive means, with which middle class agents relate themselves also to their own class and to its – sometimes troublesome – cultural, aesthetic and moral conventions and expectations. We formulate one version of such a reflexively relational approach to the complexities of middle class agency and its performative enactment. By utilizing analytical tools originally developed by Erving Goffman, and applied here to analyze some excerpts from the film American Beauty, we demonstrate how aesthetic performativity oriented to the ‘downplaying’ of class distinctions can be used by middle class agents to pursue authenticity and to resist, and gain experiential distance from, the agonizing middle class roles, expectations and ‘principals’ readily surrounding them.

Clutter and the Clash of Middle-class Tastes in the Domestic Interior

Abstract Interior design offered new members of the Victorian middle-class a means to demonstrate their success. Yet the choices they made in decorating domestic spaces could be harshly judged, in particular by self-proclaimed taste-makers who, though middle class themselves, came from a newly professionalised group of critics, artists and architects. The styles most hated by these arbiters were those designed to express wealth and status, often through new manufacturing techniques that promoted effect over craftsmanship. This article seeks to examine middle-class taste on its own terms and reveals how it evolved under the influence of the Aesthetic or “Art” Movement of the 1870s. Though ideas about what constituted “good” taste were more widely disseminated after this period the Victorian love of clutter continued unabated.

Becoming fit to be a mother: class, learning, and redemption in Supersize vs Superskinny

The UK Channel Four reality television programmes Supersize vs Superskinny and Supersize vs Superskinny: Kids present their viewers with a stark, and supposedly educative, reforming of food practices. Pairing participants defined as underweight with others defined as morbidly obese, the programmes are premised on a so-called ‘diet swap’, in which participants consume their foils’ (either meagre or excessive) meals in order to face the supposed follies of their ways. While the programmes include both male and female participants, in-depth content analysis reveals that their televisual storytelling has gendered underpinnings, centred on the theme of ‘fitness’ to mother. Notably, this ‘fitness’, as the programmes frame it, entails reforming women’s food consumption: from ‘perilous’ working-class eating and feeding practices, which ‘threaten’ women’s and children’s bodies with obesity, to ‘appropriate’ middle class tastes and choices, poised to foster trans-generational wellbeing. Thus, presented as ‘public pedagogy’ that implicates both participant and viewer, Supersize vs Superskinny evokes classed abjection and shame to cast population obesity as the outcome of maternal ‘failings’. We argue, then, that at the core of Supersize vs Superskinny’s focus on ‘balanced diets’ lies a neoliberal prescription for women’s moral citizenship as anchored in upwardly mobile, middle classed, responsibilised motherhood.

Reading ‘Race’ in Bourdieu? Examining Black Cultural Capital Among Black Caribbean Youth in South London

This article extends Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital in relation to ‘race’ and ethnicity by exploring the significance of black cultural capital among middle class black Caribbean young people in a large state school in south London. Black cultural capital is here defined as the appropriation of middle class values by black ethnics. Based on a 14-month-long ethnography, with specific attention to three focus group and 13 in-depth interviews with middle class black Caribbean young people, this piece outlines the benefits of and backlash to black cultural capital that students encounter from white middle class teachers for deploying black middle class tastes and styles in the classroom. The findings suggest that while black middle class pupils draw on black cultural capital to access advantages in formal school settings, they are also invested in challenging the terms of class privilege that marginalise the black working classes.

Contemporary Chinese Print Media: Cultivating Middle-Class Taste, by Yi Zheng. London: Routledge, 2013. xii + 119 pp. £85.00/$145.00 (hardcover).

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsContemporary Chinese Print Media: Cultivating Middle-Class Taste, by Yi Zheng. London: Routledge, 2013. xii + 119 pp. £85.00/$145.00 (hardcover).Shuyu KongShuyu KongSimon Fraser University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 74July 2015 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/681744 Views: 58Total views on this site Copyright 2015 by The Australian National University. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Classy looks and classificatory gazes: The fashioning of class in reality television

Abstract Reality television has spawned a proliferation of programmes that feature ‘ordinary’ people. Often this notion of ordinary not only means non-celebrity but is also a synonym for working-class. Class, however, is typically unacknowledged and unspoken in the narratives that unfold in the genre, while the programmes themselves construct class and perceptions of difference, largely through fashion and appearance. Although there is an increased representation of working-class subjects in the reality genre, this visibility is not matched by an access to control of media platforms. Therefore, it is argued, what is often found in the representations generated by these programmes is a kind of class tourism that involves Othering. A substantial branch of reality TV that deals in narratives of transformation and foregrounds fashion and the body as signifiers of classed taste is introduced, and it is posited that cultural hegemony might be identified in the framing of middle-class taste as good taste in this subgenre, not only for those surveyed on-screen but also for the audience watching at home. Snog Marry Avoid? is analysed in relation to the performance of classed femininity it offers within this context.

Book review: Contemporary Chinese Print Media: Cultivating Middle-Class Taste

Book review: Contemporary Chinese Print Media: Cultivating Middle-Class Taste

John Bull, Angelica Catalani and Middle-Class Taste at the 1820s British Musical Festival

This article examines the contentious relationship between the prima donna Angelica Catalani and the British musical festival in the 1820s. The inclusion of Catalani, the most famous soprano of her generation, at the great musical festivals in this decade, such as those of Birmingham, York, Derby and Manchester, among other places, was a sign of the aspects of spectacle festival producers thought necessary to capture the middle-class audience. At the time, contemporaries assumed this audience was increasing in number and importance. Catalani attempted to use her fame to dictate musical and aesthetic terms to festival committees, particularly by transposing arias within performances of Handel'sMessiah, and interpolating Italian sacred music by Pietro Carlo Guglielmi and Pio Cianchettini into the same. The British musical press responded by invoking the figure John Bull to roundly condemn Catalani: the allegorical everyman, crying ‘cant’ and ‘humbug’ was used to portray the singer as a tasteless and ‘foreign’ other while at the same time forwarding the education of the middle-class audience into aspects of the nascent concept of ‘the composer's intentions’. The condemnation of Catalani was also an attempt to integrate the middle classes into the cultural life of Britain, while denigrating the purported taste of the British aristocracy, which made star turns such as Catalani's possible.

The Custom of Main Street: Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, and Middle-Class Taste

The Custom of Main Street: Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, and Middle-Class Taste

Contemporary Chinese print media: cultivating middle class taste

Contemporary Chinese print media: cultivating middle class taste

Tasting the Ethical: Vegetarianism as Modern Re-Enchantment

There is, as Andrew Rowan dubs it, a "constant paradox" in the way we treat, relate to, and consume animals in our everyday lives (Arluke and Sanders 4). This paper examines this paradox in relation to the rise of vegetarianism as a new taste and consumer culture in the West. The first part of the paper, drawing upon Bourdieu, argues that vegetarian "taste" is fundamentally a social practice linked to class and gender. It then offers a preliminary theoretical sketch of the sociological drivers and consequences of vegetarianism in latemodernity, drawing on social theory. Having established the theoretical framework, the second part of the paper turns to an empirical analysis of the moral motivations and experiences of a selection of Australian bloggers. The key argument is that the bloggers narrate vegetarianism as a taste practice that entangles self-care with a larger assemblage of non-human responsibility that works to re-enchant a demoralised consumer modernity.

“Cheese and Chips out of Styrofoam Containers”: An Exploration of Taste and Cultural Symbols of Appropriate Family Foodways

“Cheese and Chips out of Styrofoam Containers”: An Exploration of Taste and Cultural Symbols of Appropriate Family Foodways