Hell, I may not be in Buffy fandom but I have crazy adoration for the show! (I don't really know why I'm *not* in Buffy fandom, except that when I was most obsessed with it I didn't have the internet.)
I think your analysis is pretty valid, here; I articulate this difference by comparing cultural to economic capital. You can be immersed in a semiotic web of class culture without having access to its material privileges (the cushion of parents who can support you, say -- have you heard the Pulp song Common People? Note that the speaker meets the woman at St Martin's College; they share a semiotic web but they are very clearly of a different class!), and you can have material privileges without the higher-class semiotics. Of course, one often 'buys' the other, but not necessarily.
a certain class culture which isn't in harmony with his actual class status on a variety of socioeconomic levels I would tend to call this a disjunction between economic and cultural capital -- and such class confusion/alienation is definitely something that draws me to characters, because it's been my experience so often. That's why it made me so angry when they gave Gunn his class upgrade in Angel S5 -- as though everything about him had to change in order for it to be possible that a working-class black man could change classed milieu! Grrr.
So yes, I totally agree with your read of Buffy, Xander and Faith, even if I might label it differently. I do think that the kind of cultural capital that accrues to geek texts is really different to that which attaches to Sartre et al, though; the former, even with mainstreaming, are subcultural and/or popular and don't, I think, ping 'upward' in the same way, they don't give full-on cultural capital and access to upwardly-mobile privilege in the way that fluency with philosophy, canonical literature, etc do.
I agree with your description of Wesley's narrative, but I wouldn't frame it in class cultures. I would say the fluencies he develops take him outside of regular class cultures altogether at times; I guess it's possible to call what he develops working-class and he keeps his upper or upper-middle fluencies (I am sure he would still identify that way if he were asked), but he definitely doesn't become middle class.
Re: comment of great density the second.
I think your analysis is pretty valid, here; I articulate this difference by comparing cultural to economic capital. You can be immersed in a semiotic web of class culture without having access to its material privileges (the cushion of parents who can support you, say -- have you heard the Pulp song Common People? Note that the speaker meets the woman at St Martin's College; they share a semiotic web but they are very clearly of a different class!), and you can have material privileges without the higher-class semiotics. Of course, one often 'buys' the other, but not necessarily.
a certain class culture which isn't in harmony with his actual class status on a variety of socioeconomic levels
I would tend to call this a disjunction between economic and cultural capital -- and such class confusion/alienation is definitely something that draws me to characters, because it's been my experience so often. That's why it made me so angry when they gave Gunn his class upgrade in Angel S5 -- as though everything about him had to change in order for it to be possible that a working-class black man could change classed milieu! Grrr.
So yes, I totally agree with your read of Buffy, Xander and Faith, even if I might label it differently. I do think that the kind of cultural capital that accrues to geek texts is really different to that which attaches to Sartre et al, though; the former, even with mainstreaming, are subcultural and/or popular and don't, I think, ping 'upward' in the same way, they don't give full-on cultural capital and access to upwardly-mobile privilege in the way that fluency with philosophy, canonical literature, etc do.
I agree with your description of Wesley's narrative, but I wouldn't frame it in class cultures. I would say the fluencies he develops take him outside of regular class cultures altogether at times; I guess it's possible to call what he develops working-class and he keeps his upper or upper-middle fluencies (I am sure he would still identify that way if he were asked), but he definitely doesn't become middle class.