Classism and Working-Class Characters in Fandom

[alixtii]

This post by kattahj made me think about the intersection of racism and classism in deciding who gets written in fanfiction. Now, of course I think it is silly to say that "it is really just about class" or "it's really just about race"; the two work intersectionally in complicated ways. But if we agree with kattahj that CoC's are more likely to get written if they aren't coded as working class (and I've come to this conclusion about my own writing already long ago) then it'd be interesting to see if we tend not to write working-class white characters in the same way.

I'm not including the crew of Serenity at all in this analysis, since they exist within a completely constructed fictional socio-economic system created precisely for the purpose of making the main cast's lives seem interesting, but I think we certainly do respond differently to Simon than, say, Jayne (in my part, with identification with the former and almost complete disinterest with the latter). The Weasley family, were I even to know enough Harry Potter canon to speak intelligently about them, would probably be set apart under the same logic. Similarly, I'm not including vampires or other characters that are unable to participate in the normal socioeconomic structures because they are set apart as nonhuman.

I don't tend to watch shows with a lot of working-class characters, since they are less likely to provide me the type of wish-fulfillment I'm looking for in my entertainment (which is precisely the kind of dynamic I'm talking about here), so, um . . . it's a rather short list. Please help me add to it!

Notes
By "class" I mean the sociological something-or-other (I'm much less versed in class theory than I am in gender, queer, or even race theory) which is the cumulative result of economic status and a complex system of social markers (occupation, neighborhood of residence, accent, speech patterns, education, circle of friends, etc.). I'm assuming that fandom could[n't] care less what Rupert Giles' salary as a Watcher was, but that his education and breadth of knowledge make him attractive to write; Buffy's ability to quote Sartre and Arthur Miller seemingly without effort disqualifies her from being working-class. (And yes, this assumption is itself classist in fascinating and disturbing ways, ways which I wish I knew enough class theory to be able to problematize further.)

I'm taking it for granted that our source canons deal horribly with class issues (as they do with racial ones), but that there are objectively interesting working-class characters in our canons (in the way that there are interesting female characters and interesting characters of color).

Nonwhite racial cultures are (almost?) automatically coded as working-class. I feel this is important to mention despite the fact that since all of these characters are white, it doesn't apply to any of them. But this is a reason why even if classism seems a sufficient explanation for why working-class characters of color get written less, that classism would still in all probability be racially-motivated. The way we construct the class structure is itself racist.

Feel free to criticize any of my assumptions in the comments; I'm in over my head here.

Okay, now let's get to the list. . . .

Faith
It certainly cannot be argued that Faith does not get written in Buffy fandom, especially concerning her status as only being a recurring character to has nowhere near the screentime of an Anya or Tara. Now part of this just down to Eliza Dushku being Eliza Dushku. But if we look at her character, what do we see? A character whose working-class coding and Slayerness are so caught up in each other that they interact in interesting ways. While at the beginning of her arc Faith is living her life in a run-down motel, her Slaying provides her an outlet to escape from the very beginning, as she manifests the "want, take, have" mentality (she is effectively able to rely on her Slayer capabilities to produce cultural capital), and the overall structure of her story is ultimately one of upward mobility; by "Chosen" she is still coded as working-class in terms of social markers, but she is relatively free of economic concerns and so those social markers are able to be fetishized without playing any meaningful part in the actual life of the character.

Xander Harris
Like Faith, Xander gets a lot of fic. Not much written by me, but in m/m slash fandom I know he's commonly paired with Spike. Angel, and other men.

Now Xander's family is coded as poor and in some ways working-class (and this is uniformly portrayed as a negative), but I'd argue that while Xander is made to materially feel the effect of his family lower economic status, he is always coded as firmly middle-class in terms of social markers. As a geek figure, he is an easy and deliberate audience identification figure, and speaks a language which is coded in many ways as middle-class white male. Note also that like Faith he is upwardly mobile; by the end of the series he is, however implausible, solidly middle-class in terms of not only social but also economic indices.

Cindy Mackenzie
When Mac was introduced, her class issues dominated her character: she was the perpetrator of an elaborate con in an attempt to get back at the rich kids and to get money for a new car which she desperately needed. Then the show itself went on to seriously drop the ball on these issues, never bringing up money in regard to Mac again, focusing only on her solidly-coded-middle-class computer skills, having her date an 09er, and show up at college without a word as to how she was paying for it. Mac gets a decent amount of fic, being involved in several popular het and femslash pairings.

Veronica Mars
Everything above for Mac goes double for Veronica. Veronica was never meaningfully coded as lower-class, as she spent her childhood as a honorary 02er. As the eponymous character, she features in a large share of VMars fic.

Rose Tyler
Obviously, there is a whole lot of Rose fic, by virtue of her being the female lead of the first two seasons of new Who. Just as obviously, Rose is freed from the constraints of her working-class life when the Doctor rescues her from the shop where she works while retaining several of the relevant social markers (her accent being the most obvious, I believe? British culture is not my specialty).

Jackie Tyler
I don't know how the fic writers respond to Jackie, who unlike Rose maintains her class identification until the very very end (when she and alt!Pete get together). Obviously she is written less than Rose, but exactly how much so I have no clue.

Dean and Sam Winchester
I don't watch this show, and thus don't know anything about them (except that Sam makes a really hot girl--I do read the genderswap). I know, of course, that there's a massive amount of fic written about them.

Kendra, Normal, Sketchy, and Other Dark Angel Characters
Do these even get written at all? I'm not really familiar with the fandom, but my impression that the main white characters to get written were Logan--obviously not working-class--and Jensen's character (who probably falls under the nonhuman exemption). Lydeker's not exactly working-class either (although his coding is rather complicated).

Conclusion (tentative since the preliminary sample size is so small)
There does seem to be some interest in working with characters who still carry the social markers of a working-class identity, as in the cases of Faith and Rose Tyler. (How deep and accurate these social markers are, both in the source text and in fic, is a question I am not qualified to answer, although I think there are meaningful ways that both characters do begin to act in accord with a middle-class ideal as they become upwardly mobile economically.) Re-reading the comments to my March 2007 post linked above, it seems fandom is perfectly willing to play with characters who are coded as working-class in what heyiya calls a UK discourse of class, in which "class is experienced as written and performed in the body," but less eager to do so according to what she calls the American discourse in which class is more closely linked to cultural capacity and thus "is experienced as mobile: you get educated, you become middle class." (I'm condensing a lot of thought here; heyiya, is there something crucial I've missed or misrepresented?)

I do think that fandom is less likely to write working-class characters, in general, than middle-class (and upper-class) characters. My intellectual and emotional responses to how problematic this is are somewhat in contradiction.

Even if the true nature of their working-class status is in dispute, it does seem that enough working-class white characters do get written to be able to say that they get written more often than working-class characters of color, and thus classism in fandom is not a sufficient explanation for why working-class characters of color are not written as much as one would otherwise expect. This conclusion shocks approximately no one.

Comments

[nwhepcat.livejournal.com]

Interesting. The characters I write far more than any others are Faith and Xander, and I think a lot of their appeal has to do with their class background. I grew up working class (neighboring poor) and in some ways the problems of the very privileged played out in fiction make me think boo fuckin hoo. I have a little bit of a chip, I'm sure.

I wonder if characters of color who are working class get so little written about them because caucasian fans are hesitant about getting them "wrong." You do want to be more careful when wading into a world you don't know intimately -- that's also true of characters who are from an altogether different continent or who are transgendered.

I've written a tiny bit of Gunn, but from someone else's POV, and I have written some Meldrick Lewis and Al Giardello from "Homicide" (though it's Meldrick who feels truly working class to me). That's an interesting show in terms of how characters of color "code," since to me, they're not at all characters on the same class scale. Frank Pembleton is very much the dandy, and Jesuit-educated -- Mike Kellerman is way more working class than him, and I'd say so is Kay Howard. I'm actually not exactly sure why Gee feels not so working class to me -- the Italian neighborhood he grew up in probably is very working class. I think it's his bearing, somehow. (What makes all this really interesting is knowing that these characters -- or a good bunch of them -- are based on real people, and some of them are white. Maybe all, it's been a helluva long time since I read the book the show was based on. Though I suspect the model for Gee seemed to have no problem at all being re-envisioned, since he shows up on the show a lot, while the model for Bayliss reportedly was very unhappy that his character wound up bisexual.)

/yammer

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I grew up working class (neighboring poor) and in some ways the problems of the very privileged played out in fiction make me think boo fuckin hoo. I have a little bit of a chip, I'm sure.

That's the other thing I'm unsure of--the class dynamics in fandom among the actual fen (as opposed to the characters) has the potential to be radically different from the racial dynamics. Obviously this being the internet, which often isn't free, and fandom, which is grounded in obsession towards media sources, serves to create a certain homogeneity which wouldn't be found racially (other than where racial distinctions parallel class distinctions), but I think that can be overstated. But in any case one doesn't see the sort of polarization that is constantly going on in discussions of race--but that may just be because there aren't as many discussions of class actually going on.

I wonder if characters of color who are working class get so little written about them because caucasian fans are hesitant about getting them "wrong."

I think that's certainly part of it. Also part of it would be the fact that for certain ends, such as wish-fulfillment, working-class characters just might not provide the same punch--and this could be a motive for both working class fen (who have enough of their own troubles in their own lives) and middle-class fen.

Procedurals--which I really don't watch at all, in part because I have a huge civil liberties infringement squick and in part because they're usually just too realistic to give me what I want from television--would certainly provide the more interesting data to analyze, here.

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

Interesting ideas! As far as your main point goes, I suspect that there's a heirarchy of differences in play: a white, middle-class writer would be presumably reluctant writing a black character, and reluctant writing a working-class character, and therefore doubly reluctant to write someone who's both. The next part of your analysis could be whether black middle-class characters (Season 5 Gunn, Dr Foreman, Martha Jones, etc) get written about the same, more, or less than the white working class ones you've looked at here...

A few minor points:

Buffy's ability to quote Sartre and Arthur Miller seemingly without effort disqualifies her from being working-class.
The 'working class intellectual' is itself an established stereotype, at least in Britain... traditionally such people would be pillars of the Labour movement, or in modern times avant-garde artists or similar. Buffy doesn't really fit eith of those categories, though (quite apart from all her other markers of being upper-middle-class).

Nonwhite racial cultures are (almost?) automatically coded as working-class
I think this is more an American thing... to quote a friend of mine speaking just today, "All Asians on British TV are either shopkeepers or terrorists." Shopkeeper is not a working class occupation... (I'm not so sure about the class stereotype of terrorists, but part of it does seem to be 'university-educated'.)

{Faith:} by "Chosen" she is still coded as working-class in terms of social markers, but she is relatively free of economic concerns and so those social markers are able to be fetishized without playing any meaningful part in the actual life of the character.
Well, she's living in somebody else's house at their expense, and apparently they're getting most of their provisions by looting the abandoned town around them... not really that upwardly mobile. :-)

while Xander is made to materially feel the effect of his family lower economic status, he is always coded as firmly middle-class in terms of social markers.
Hmm. I'd say he's firmly coded as skilled working class... though as you say, he's upwardly mobile and by season 7 is in management and thus middle class. Even so, his job in construction involves getting his hands dirty, which is a big indicator of working class status. Maybe this is a UK/US divide in how class is viewed?

Just as obviously, Rose is freed from the constraints of her working-class life when the Doctor rescues her from the shop where she works while retaining several of the relevant social markers (her accent being the most obvious, I believe? British culture is not my specialty).
Rose is the classic cliché of the working class girl who takes up with an upper-class man who turns her head with all the finery he offers, leading her to drift apart from her salt-of-the-earth family.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

The 'working class intellectual' is itself an established stereotype, at least in Britain...

I can think of British media which reflects this, but I don't think American culture really has the equivalent. Other people might disagree with me, of course.

Nonwhite racial cultures are (almost?) automatically coded as working-class

I think this is more an American thing...

I think that's fair, at least to a point.

Hmm. I'd say he's firmly coded as skilled working class

I'd agree that, in terms of occupation, he's still solidly working class. But by most of the other social markers, he isn't. I was mostly thinking of the way he might come off to a stranger outside of work, plus of course his home and circle of friends. (And Sunnydale is coded upper-middle class in general, but with the caveat that many of people can probably only affect the upper-middle-class lifestyle they adopt because the property values are so low, so sociological and economic class are already radically divorced. . . .)

Thanks for giving your two cents. It's sometimes hard to see that point where my own prejudices are useful sociological data, and where they are just my random uninformed bias. . . . (And as my conversation with heyiya last March underscored, my approach and attitudes really are quite unconsciously American.)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, she's living in somebody else's house at their expense, and apparently they're getting most of their provisions by looting the abandoned town around them... not really that upwardly mobile.

But she has, to some degree, at least, assimilated into the group of women living at that house, which manifests a dominate middle-class culture regardless of how they're keeping themselves fed. Which doesn't quite make her middle-class, but . . . I think that the best analysis is that as a Slayer, she is a member of an underclass who shifts from displaying a purely working-class class culture to a more middle-class one, especially once she is required to assume the mantle of authority. And while I don't treat the comics as canon, and I haven't read No Future for You yet in any case, my understanding is that it complicates all that even more.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I'd say that both Gunn and Faith are underclass rather than working class, and in a sense Gunn sells his soul a second time precisely to become upper-middle-class. I mean, Xander's initial working-classness is expressed by having to be on a construction site every morning. Faith didn't work the graveyard shift in a factory, f'rex.

nwhepcat: it says a lot about USian culture that the model for Bayliss was more upset about his fictional character being bisexual than the model for Gee was upset about his fictional character being assassinated! (Although it's possible that you don't consider the movie to be canon.)

[nwhepcat.livejournal.com]

I hadn't done any reading about Gary D'Addario's reaction to the movie, and the info I got on RL Bayliss was from a book that came out during the 6th or 7th season. But I assumed GD'A was fine with his portrayal since he appeared in the series and the film.

I think of Xander as being firmly working class, even when he was in high school, because that's his family background (as far as I'm concerned).

comment of great density the first.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

Okay, unsurprisingly I have tons to say here.

The first and main thing, I think, is just to remark that I don't think there *is* class theory in the same way that there's race and gender and sexuality theory. There's theories of class formation and conflict and of class as process, but I really kind of think that class as identity category isn't often theorized in a way analogous to the other formations. I can think of exceptions, but I don't think 'class theory' is a body of work in the same way. However, if I were to imagine a body called 'class theory' I think the most crucial part of it would be a distinction between consensus-based and conflict-based models of class.

When I say consensus-based, I mean an understanding of class stratification that sees different classes as necessary, people as comfortable in their class identity, class as something that just is. Conflict-based is seeing class as something that comes out of, well, conflict. The wealth and leisure of the upper strata comes off the back of the lower strata, etc. Of course, as someone deeply influenced by Marxist theory I am powerfully on the conflict side myself; but I know it's more complicated. Marxist theorizing about ideology and hegemony (Gramsci, especially) is basically about how the working classes come to consent to their own exploitation, to perceive working for someone else's profit as something that benefits them.

I'm not sure that classism is analogous to racism and sexism precisely because, to me, some kind of consensus-based view is a precursor to understanding class as analogous with race and gender (and anyway I'm not exactly convinced of that analogy's universal validity either :) ). Then again, a deep analysis of race and gender sees them as conflict-based systems powered by hegemonic systems that produce consent, too, in many ways, so perhaps it's more useful than I'm inclined to think.

Okay, I guess that's my theoretical standpoint on class. More in a second! (I have an insanely long comment to break up in chunks here...)

Re: comment of great density the first.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

I'm not sure that classism is analogous to racism and sexism
I think the most important difference has to be that people can change their class, and successful social systems are dependent on class mobility to some extent so they will always incorporate the possibility in some manner. By contrast, the more intentional and oppressive forms of racial and gender prejudice are not only dependent on the immutability of race and gender at the individual level but actively incorporate methods of preventing any blurring of the boundaries. Any analysis that ignores that distinction would strike me as flawed.

(Also hi, nice to cross paths with you again :o)

comment of great density the second.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

The next thing is that I feel like your definition of 'working class' and 'middle class' and mine are really different. And I think this is a very American-vs-British thing, and also a feature of our differing class-status-of-origin. Let me put it this way: if I were American, I would probably describe myself as middle class. I'm not, and I don't; if I did, I suspect my class analysis would probably look fairly different (the famed complexities of the British class system are extremely different depending on the position within it that you're socialized into). I don't think Xander is solidly middle-class by the end of Buffy, for example; carpentry is a working-class occupation, and he may be have employees but he still doesn't have the cultural capital to be comfortable in a middle-class milieu. But he seems to grew up in the same social milieu as Willow, Buffy and Cordy, which complicates his family's class status to me from the start. (Then again, I grew up in a city where class status was very much defined by which neighbourhood you were from.)

To go back to my point, it is my empirical observation that Americans want to define themselves as middle-class as much as possible. I'm teaching a comp class themed on race and class right now; my students are willing to name only the direst poverty as middle-classness, whereas I see any manual or relatively-unskilled wage labour (and, of course, unemployment) as working-class work. But working-classness is also something I understand as defined by the communities into which one is socialized, one's cultural competencies and preferences, etc: and that is doubtless because I come from a place where there is a strong history of clearly definable, if not always encouraged, working-class culture. Class in the context in which I learned it almost maps onto ethnicity; that's why, I think, there is such a strong sense of class as consensus rather than conflict-based in parts of UK culture. (Not that I ever experienced it as other than conflict-based myself, but then I've always been just off the edge of the map.)

If you want to see contemporary British working-class/underclass culture on TV, btw, find a way to download Shameless. I have only seen a couple of episodes, but it rings very true to the environment I grew up in, although my family was in the same economic but a more privileged cultural position within that.

It's because class is cultural that economic status and educational uplift don't leave it behind, in my native discourses. My learned discourses of power and privilege let me see how one does, of course, leave much of the effects of one's class status behind, how mobility is in and of itself a change in class -- that distinction accounts very nicely for my experiences of being rejected by working-class people who thought I was a snob and fetishized/not taken seriously by higher-class people who didn't quite understand how someone with my background could exist in their milieus. (Yeah, I have a chip on both shoulders.)

I think that class cultures are clearly present in the US too, but they aren't often acknowledged. When lower-class cultures are shown, they're uncomfortable: British working-classness can be fetishized, but US working/under-classness makes the distinction between haves and have-nots too clear. Especially because the difference in the US is actually a lot bigger, given healthcare differentials and the comparative lack of social housing and the absence of a decent welfare system. I think it's very hard to hold a consensus view on class in the US, if you actually open your eyes; I wonder whether this has an effect on the willingness of middle-class-identified people (and I think the push to middle-class-identification, the sense that anyone *can* be middle class, is the way the maintains a consensus class understanding) to see those who are undeniably have-nots as fully human.

Re: comment of great density the second.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify: when I say class maps onto ethnicity, I mean that one's class identity is understood in a similar way to an ethnic identity, not that particular ethnic groups are classed in a particular way. I mean it in the opposite way to the way I talk about race mapping onto class in the US below! *headdesk*

last comment of great density for one evening!

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

All this is without getting into the intersection of race and class, which map onto one another so powerfully in the US. Because I am from a white working class background, and because every nonwhite person I knew as a child was clearly higher-class than me, my native inclination is to separate the two very easily. I've learned not to (just living in LA, the mutual imbrication of race and class is so intensely clear) and I teach my students the Stuart Hall quote "race is the modality through which class is lived" (and Hall, of course, is British, which just goes to show how my own experience is very far from universal, and very raced). I think that it may be in communities of color, in particular immigrant communities, that your US-based mapping of class and education could fall down; anyway, I know highly educated people on both sides of the Atlantic who have worked low-class jobs and live working-class lives because of the particularities of their immigrant status and their subjection to racism.

But I think I've commented enough for one day, and I have to go do my actual work now. FYI, I am really interested in your response, but I probably won't reply to it right away unless my work magically ups and does itself.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

You mentioned class - watch the Brits flock to your journal ;o)

That, in itself, tells you something about the British class system.

I think one of the most interesting places in fandom to watch the interplay of race and class has to be in the contrast between Rose Tyler and Martha Jones. For myself I found that demonstrated - as if I could ever doubt it - that my class prejudices are huge whilst my racial prejudices are relatively small, since when they changed companion I flipped straight from not being able to identify (with Rose) to identifying hugely (with Martha). Not that this is any sort of universal for Brit culture of course since a lot of the antagonism towards Martha's character has been expressed in racial terms. But I also know that my experience was not unique.

Class is such an important subject for Brits, but not a topic that we are afraid to discuss. So whilst in some ways I think it has the same dominant position in social interactions as race has in the US, in another way it is approached in a different manner entirely. As heyiya has said, class is negotiated and to some extent flexible, and thus far more a source of pride in identity than of conflict between groups. It also has a more complex pattern than the relatively binary racial divide in the US (with apologies if that contributes to further marginalising the people who do not fit easily into any binary description of race, but as a description of the general pattern, I think it says something worthwhile) which makes it hard to interpret in the relatively binary terms that most of these discussions develop for race, gender, sexuality etc.

Oddly enough, I was just pondering yesterday what the culture of LJ would be like if it was UK dominated rather than US dominated. It may reflect my own preferences, but I was considering the different slants we would get on political and social issues would be one of the most marked changes.


Anyway, to actually address your post. I find it very hard to identify with working class characters of any nationality. Since upper class characters are largely absent from the sort of drama I watch, I do not have the contrasting experience of knowing if I would identify with those of a higher social class than my own. However, my own writing covers a wide range of social classes. But what is noticeable, and worrying to me, is that, whilst I write working class characters all the time and upper class characters occasionally, the principle canon characters that I have adopted are now written as middle class, regardless of their canon class. So that my working class and upper class characters are all OCs - which gives them lower status in fanfic terms - and essentially only exist as descriptive colour and plot devices.

But none of this surprises me. I'm British, it would be beyond weird if I didn't have class prejudices dripping from my fingertips. In some ways I feel that class prejudice doesn't need to be discussed because it is all so obvious.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Does Donna have a clear class-identification? I feel like I was reading her as working-class in The Runaway Bride but am reading her as middle-class in season 4.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

The Weasley family, were I even to know enough Harry Potter canon to speak intelligently about them, would probably be set apart under the same logic.

The Weasley family are so obviously upper-middle-class who are downwardly mobile (that's why the antagonism between Lucius and Arthur erupts into fisticuffs in the bookshop: Lucius hates Arthur for letting the side down). Contrast the attitude to Denis and Colin Creevey or Stan Shunpike, all of whom fall off Draco's class radar as beneath contempt, to his attitude to Ron.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

Agreed 500%. I meant to say this in my comment: the Weasleys are definitly not working class, they're another example of genteel poor (and not even all that poor - they own a big rambling house in the country, for goodness' sake!)

Even Ron's attitude to money, which drives me crazy, is very upper-middle-class: it's so clearly the attitude of someone who feels they've been denied the economic capital to which their class status ought to entitle them.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Something has occurred to me, which whilst slightly off topic I bring up here because it may provide part of the answer to a question that I know has puzzled you and others for some time.

In the US, racial issues are interpreted as a divide, which must be battled.
In the UK, racial issues are interpreted as a harmony, which must be preserved.

Both situations naturally arising from our different histories and the blunt statistics of race they have produced.

That is not to say that Brits believe the racial situation in this country to be entirely harmonious, but that they do see the overriding sense as one of harmony, and that that harmony is fragile and can be disrupted by ill considered actions. This perhaps explains why so many Brits are resistant to a US analysis of British racial problems since by their very existence such analysis can be seen to be risking the disruption of the harmony. When you add that on top of the expected annoyance at members of a country with so many racial problems presuming 'to tell us what we should think', the inevitable confusions arising from lack of personal knowledge of the situation in one another's countries, and the differences in national discussion style between the two countries, perhaps the old problem of Yanks complaining that Brits are denying all racial problems becomes a little more explicable.

And why am I talking about this? I'm supposed to have given up discussing race. It's like picking at a bloody scab! Still, you can be flattered by yet more evidence that I consider your journal a safe environment. ;o)

[sangerin.livejournal.com]

This makes a lot of sense. I think the interesting thing in Australia at the moment is that we're straddling the two approaches you've described: for many, many years, we ("we" being the intelligentsia, I guess) were all about multiculturalism and how grand (and fragile) that was. (Witness the small-l liberal reaction to Pauline Hanson, the anger at Bill O'Chee for being a member of the National party while having an ethnically Chinese background, etc.) "We're" still clinging fairly hard to the "multiculturalism is good" banner, but the Howard Government (the right-wing intelligentsia and not-so-intelligentsia) were battering away at it.

Okay, so my analysis sucks and is totally incomplete and I ought to just have stayed with "Your post made so much sense to me, especially in the context of why I get seriously annoyed by a lot of the US-centric race discussion in fandom. Even though I am American. But I don't live in that context!"

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I tend to think that (a) white working class has its own "mythology" and romanticism attached (b) a lot of the time working class/blue collar/lower class isn't necessarily portrayed very realistically on tv.

The Winchesters and Veronica Mars strike me as example of shows where the writers wanted the working class mythology/flair but didn't portray any downsides. Here the implication of working class is just supposed to be "not spoilt" rather than doing a realistic portrayal of the lack of education and other downsides that come with it.

In that sense I think Rose, Faith and Xander are comparatively more realistic portrayals (Rose and Faith were often uncouth, Xander showed the way being blue collar can limit your options in life). Incidentally, I have met a lot of people who were particularly deeply attached to just these characters because they saw them as realistic portrayals of slightly less upper class life and they saw themselves in it deeply and were glad to finally see themselves be represented properly on tv.

As for race/class. I think it's often more a question of education rather than money. That the tilting point is more about seeing a character of color in an inherently familiar setting, whether it is high academics or nice little house and family middle class or acting as the boss of their own company as enterpreneurs. Maybe there is also the implication that if you have a character of color who has gone through a certain amount of education that they have somehow bought more into our value system (maybe some sort of creepy "being tamed" association? Or just the idea of education as the great equalizer).

I don't think that there is just one stream of fans that either flock naturally to lower class or middle class or higher educated/academic characters. Rose's lower class background might be the specific appeal for some. While precisely Martha's middle class being pitted against Rose's lower class migth have resonated with others. Just like academics are yet again a specific attraction for others. Or the same kind of temptation might exist in the same person. Attraction to academic characters becaus they are academics themselves. Attraction to middle class/lower class conflict or middle class/upper class confict because that's where they find themselves at the moment. And attraction to lower class because it might be something they recognize from their youth or family background. [and of course working class romanticism as its own attraction just like upper class romanticism a la The OC and similar soaps exist]

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Maybe there is also the implication that if you have a character of color who has gone through a certain amount of education that they have somehow bought more into our value system (maybe some sort of creepy "being tamed" association? Or just the idea of education as the great equalizer).

With regard to Francine (and to me Francine is more interesting than Tish or Martha for several reasons) I don't think we're talking about "a certain amount of education" or even about having "bought more into our value system". It seemed clear to me that whatever circumstances had brought Francine as a small child to the UK (which, given her age and the dating of mass Commonwealth immigration into the UK, seems the most probable scenario) this will have included a severe class degradation from the position which she and her parents enjoyed in their country of origin (wherever that is supposed to be). The initial reason she attacks "the Doctor" is that he seems - as well as being inherently dangerous (about which she is not wrong) - to be jeopardising Martha's chances of getting back to the class into which Francine was born, by messing about with her exam chances. Her difficulties with her husband's affair stem largely from the fact he's thrown her over for a common little tart. The Master puts her into maid's uniform not merely for the RTD kink factor (all women in the Whoiverse under the age of 60 get shoved into either maid's gear, nurse's gear or bondage kit sooner or later) but because it's so bleeding obvious that she comes from the class that hires help, rather than is help (and I come from a long, long line of charwomen and domestic servants).

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

Sam and Dean are coded working class. Very much so. And they are homeless, although they have a car and they manage to live out of cheap hotels, mostly because they are scam artists. Sam was on the verge of breaking into the middle class through education and scholarships, but he gave that up to return to the hunt.

It's very frustrating too because I think a lot of the stuff they say that academic fandom calls "misogynist" isn't really, but it is the way working-class white people talk.

[thete1.livejournal.com]

I think it would be a terrible, terrible mistake to even *hint* at the idea that misogyny is okay because 'that's just the way it is for that class.' A) It's never okay. B) It says nasty things about the class in question. C) It's deeply analogous to all of that skanky, awful crap about how Black people can't succeed in the academic/financial world because they're just not built that way.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I also was the person in Katta's journal who was agreeing with her, and the thing is, I think that it's when you specify that someone is from the ghetto that they become much harder to write well if you have no experience of that. I'm thinking specifically of Foreman (I was really irritated that the House writers chose to Go There, because is it really necessary that every African American professional have a past that includes petty crime and "breaking out of the ghetto"?) because I know that's one of the reasons some people are nervous about writing him; they have absolutely no experience thereof, even if they know perfectly well what it's like to be working-class.

I know perfectly well what it's like to be poor, but I know what it's like to be poor as a generally white-identified person in West Virginia and Kentucky and Ohio. (Growing up in West Virginia, I was completely unaware of racism against Hispanic or Asian people. I also was never recognised as being potentially of mixed race background there. In California a lot--I don't know if it's most or just some--of people do not think I am white, they think I'm Latina or possibly mixed Asian, I get that one a lot too--people are surprised I have a totally whitebread last name, except in the Jewish community. I'm not Latina and I don't know if I'm hapa or not as I am adopted...but the point is where I grew up there were two categories, black and white, and I seemed to be white most of the time, although my dad--who is quite racist--used to tell me that if anyone said I wasn't white, I was not to worry, of course I was, which is ridiculous, because he doesn't really know either!)

[truwest.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom and you mentioned West Virginia, which motivated me to comment fwiw....I have a friend who's Chinese American, in her 40s, grew up with her (newly immigrated) family in West Virginia (I'm not quite sure why the heck they ended up there....her family's all in California now).

Her memory of West Virgina race relations in the 1960s-70s is that people thought her family was some weird type of black people. She says (white) WV people seemed to assume, based on appearance, that her family couldn't be white, so they "had" to be black (the only other racial category that existed). She remembers dealing with some racial slurs in grade school from kids needling her about being black.

Re: Xander (because I've been reading a lot of Spander recently)

[miriam-heddy.livejournal.com]

It's probably worth thinking not just about one character's class but also about the pairings, especially as any given CoC may be the only one on the show, surrounded (often) by middle class white men.

Thinking about Xander... he's supposed to be working class, and I'd argue he's marked as working class (in an American sense) based not on his income, per se, or his early fast-food jobs or his house, but based on his alcoholic parents and what happens after Buffy and Willow go to college and he's left behind.

Spike, with whom he's so often paired, speaks with a "mockney" accent and his look is a pose, at odds with his education and pre-vamp class, but as a vamp., and especially post-chip, he becomes entirely dependent on the charity of the Scoobies, and he's always an outsider

And I think fans' reading of Xander as working class is part of the reasoning in his being paired up with Spike (well, aside from the pretty).

[caladria.livejournal.com]

here via metafandom.

So - just to clarify what you're trying to say for my own understanding - upwardly mobile working class Americans seek to become middle class themselves, whereas the upwardly mobile working class British seek for their children or grandchildren to become middle class?

(It makes me wonder whether Americans don't cling to class as much as the British because Americans have nationality-of-origin as proof of their roots, and the British don't, but I'll be the first to admit that I know nothing).

Although Martha, from Doctor Who... I've always wondered if she self-identifies as working class or middle class. Yes, she's a doctor (near enough) when we meet her, with white coat, stethoscope and answers. But the accent and family don't code as middle class so much to me, for various reasons. And accent has a lot to do with it, despite the London medical school.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying anything at all about the ways American or British seek to be upwardly mobile; I don't have the experiences to generalize and I'm in way over my head, but feel free to soak in as my knowledge as you can from the comments, as I am doing.

I do mention in my post heyiya's argument that British conceptions of class are less fluid than American ones, which I think led into someone making a comment similar to what you state above.

But mainly I was just trying to look at how fandom treats its working-class white characters. With rather spectacular unconclusive results. (If only there were more middle-class CoC's with which to compare them!)

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

Re: the Winchesters: John Winchester owned his own business and a large and nicely-furnished house in a reasonably-sized city (Lawrence isn't Chicago but it's not Moose Jaw, either). That house doesn't mean what it would mean in, say, certain California suburbs, but it's not meaningless as an indicator of assets. Mary Winchester also does not appear to have worked (we've never heard or seen any reference to her career). The Winchesters were middle-class by U.S. standards before the fire. (The only indicator we're lacking is John's education, but service in the Marines can serve as a respectable equivalent for an ambitious young person.)

I wrote a post a while ago about the way that many in SPN fandom used to argue that the show depicted working-class America while it in fact featured many, many more well-off/educated people than actual working-class people, at least in S1 (I didn't do a survey of S2). I hear a lot less of that now--I think the show's stopped gesturing to it even halfway.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

My first husband's mother never worked outside the home--I assure you both she and Mary Winchester worked--and they had a house very much like that (in West Virginia)--I assure you they were working class.

[redsnake05.livejournal.com]

I have to say, I love Ron Weasley, and write him in about 80% of my fics. Part of the attraction is his working class background - something I know intimately, and spent a few years reclaiming it in my early twenties, after having it nearly bled out by efforts to pass as middle class at my middle class school in my teens.

[thete1.livejournal.com]

Fascinating post! I'm looking forward to seeing more people expound on it for their fandoms, because, at least in terms of Gunn, many of the people who were talking about why they didn't write him spoke in terms of class issues, and fear of stepping on them.

Those class issues were *obviously* entwined with race -- I think he would've been a lot more popular in fic if he had been played by a White actor, but... yeah. Class had a role, there. Sorry that I don't have anything intelligent to say. :(

[skywardprodigal.livejournal.com]

Very cool post, and very interesting discussions in the mix. I'm excited by the notes and the various characters too. !!!!

[sabonasi.livejournal.com]

Dean and Sam Winchester
I don't watch this show, and thus don't know anything about them (except that Sam makes a really hot girl--I do read the genderswap). I know, of course, that there's a massive amount of fic written about them.

Dean and Sam - and really, hunters in general - get coded as being working-class/lower-class/Southern/Mid-Western/redneck/rural/take-your-pick. The coding has always struck me as being definitive and deliberate enough to matter but vague enough to non-regionally-specific and thus allow for the greatest amount of identification.

Also, TPTB have talked in an interview about coding Bela, a new antagonist, as upper-class and how that was a subtext in her antagonism with Dean and Sam.

Unfortunately, the show, depending on the episode, does anywhere from shakey to just plain bad with racial and gender issues, which is disappointing.

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

(Here via metafandom)

Cindy Mackenzie
When Mac was introduced, her class issues dominated her character: she was the perpetrator of an elaborate con in an attempt to get back at the rich kids and to get money for a new car which she desperately needed. Then the show itself went on to seriously drop the ball on these issues, never bringing up money in regard to Mac again, focusing only on her solidly-coded-middle-class computer skills, having her date an 09er, and show up at college without a word as to how she was paying for it. Mac gets a decent amount of fic, being involved in several popular het and femslash pairings.

Veronica Mars
Everything above for Mac goes double for Veronica. Veronica was never meaningfully coded as lower-class, as she spent her childhood as a honorary 02er. As the eponymous character, she features in a large share of VMars fic.

The only one of the recurring characters in VM that struck me as working class was Weevil. Veronica is definitely middle class, seeing as her dad is a P.I. and the same goes for Wallace whose dad is a cop. We never find much out about Mac's parents (that I remember anyway), but as you say, she seems pretty middle class in how she's written throughout the show, and even though her first episodes have many class issues, that's easy to dismiss given that the kids she (and Veronica for that matter) compare themselves to, are filthy rich upper class kids. Their families can easily be middle class and still not have a very high income.

[the-willow.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Mac was working class on some levels. But then it got revealed that she was actually an 09'er baby who was switched at birth and that her working class family got a huge settlement out of it, but elected to keep the child they'd raised.

And there was a bit of play in how the girl Mac hated the most in HS, was the girl who'd been switched with her. A girl who wasn't interested in books and knowledge the way her parents were or her little sister was (with whom Mac bonded instantly).

Once the secret was out, not only about how it was Mac's parents could have money for her to have a laptop, high speed internet and to take family vacations easily enough - there was never a mention referenced again as far as I know (I only watched up to S2. S3 was just too full of wtf) of her working class roots -except- maybe for the part where in because she wasn't 'fake' her insane 09'er bf couldn't bring himself to quite go insane on her.

[scrollgirl.livejournal.com]

I rambled quite a bit on Sisko, Bashir, and O'Brien from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine over on kattahj's journal (http://kattahj.livejournal.com/388526.html?format=light) and I hope you don't mind my continuing to do so here! Not that I've anything insightful to say about class -- I'm no academic, just a Trek fan :)

O'Brien is the only main character who is enlisted -- everybody else is a commissioned officer. He's the Everyman, a regular Joe with a blue-collared job, wife and kids. But how are we to make class distinctions when money is obsolete, education is free, and the main characters are Starfleet? But I'd argue the PTB wanted us to read O'Brien as different from the "middle-class" officers.

IMHO, O'Brien being Irish definitely factored into the blue-collar background, especially since they play up the odd couple relationship between O'Brien and upper-class Englishman Dr. Bashir. O'Brien trained as a classical musician and could've made a career out of that, but he signed up for Starfleet instead. IIRC, O'Brien's father was upset with his decision -- perhaps because his father saw becoming a classical musician as a way for O'Brien to break out of the family's blue-collar status?

I don't know if O'Brien's "blue-collar" background the reason he's got less fanfic than Bashir. Certainly Bashir's accent, prettiness, and slashability made him very popular. But O'Brien's marital status means he gets story-lines dealing with family, not romance -- which means not as much 'shipper fic. (And Bashir/O'Brien is the biggest O'Brien pairing, anyway.)

One problem is that I can't tell whether we're just imposing our 21st century views being imposed on the Trekverse, or if class is still a factor in the lives of (human) Federation citizens. Another question is, whether or not class is still an issue among humans/the Federation (I'm not counting alien-on-alien friction, eg Cardassians looking on Bajorans as servile by nature), does that even matter to us in fandom? Or does it only matter how we perceive it? (Corollary being, does race still matter? Sisko says yes, but perhaps he's not the majority.)

I perceive Sisko as middle-class (if such a thing exists) and Bashir as upper-class based solely on their accents. Accents probably aren't an accurate indicator, but the writers use this kind of shortcut with Bashir's parents. His dad has a working-class English accent, which matches his struggling employment situation and general "loser" characterisation, while his mom's English has an Asian accent (which UK viewers might read as immigrant/foreigner, educated, a hard worker) and she's portrayed much more sympathetically.

[Oooh, brain flash! If Bashir is indeed "upper-class", it's a recent move upward. What if we read Bashir feeling like a "fraud" over his genetic engineering as a stand-in for his move from working-class to upper-class? He's shed his former self (Jules) and taken on a new persona (Julian). His family fakes his background, moves to a new city, and presents him to the world as bright, successful, upwardly-mobile. Julian distances himself from his working-class father and immigrant mother, gets educated, and moves to the far reaches of the Federation. But while he enjoys his new status, he can't ever forget that what he is now is manufactured, not come by naturally. Hmmm...]

I don't have stats on how much fic is written for each character, but Bashir is definitely more popular than O'Brien or Sisko. The latter two are probably about the same? Not sure. I keep stumbling across new fic for both, which makes me very happy of course! *g*

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I rambled quite a bit on Sisko, Bashir, and O'Brien from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine over on kattahj's journal and I hope you don't mind my continuing to do so here! Not that I've anything insightful to say about class -- I'm no academic, just a Trek fan :)

Oh, you're more than welcome! There's a lot of different discussions going on here and they are all fascinating and I'm glad to host them all, but I wish there were more comments like yours, talking about our cannons and how fen respond to them, since I really have so little data at the end of the day.

So the can-pass-as-white upper-class character gets written most, while the middle-class CoC and working-class white character are about the same? That seems to fit our general assumptions. (Although it passes over the distinction between main and supporting characters.)