alixtii | Classism and Working-Class Characters in Fandom

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Classism and Working-Class Characters in Fandom

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.

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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.

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*

I think, too, that because class is so vague and not talked about in the US, people really don't know, so if you ask them what is middle class, they are just guessing. I mean, I honestly have no clue. Is it by income? Education? Profession? Is it, these days, having a computer and internet access (which seems to be the reason why fandom is assumed to be middle class)? I've heard all of these things, and yet the answer for each one could put you in a different class.

I grew up thinking of "working class" as paid-by-the-hour, and "middle class" as being salaried. ("Upper class" is either able to live off non-work-related income like dividends, or has a really big salary, and various status bits to go with that.)

Now, we have a new divide among working class: Hourly-with-benefits vs. "temp/part-time worker," which can extend for years, no benefits, no job security, next step up is not a raise or promotion but a guarantee of hours.

That's not a complete description, but it goes a long way towards a general overview.

I would not think of it as computer ownership, I know some VERY working class folks that own computers back home in West Virginia.

I can usually tell class background by how people talk when they're tired and the way that they dress when they're not at work (or sometimes when they are). But I sure couldn't tell you what the rules are. And I can only really do that with white or white-identified people.

I grew up with the blue collar/white collar distinction more than the working/middle class one. Blue collar is manual jobs--mechanic, plumber, factory worker. White collar is office jobs. It's not a distinction based on wage/salary, or on education or skill level, and it doesn't exactly map onto the "working"/"middle" class distinction.

I don't think social class is defined by amount of money earned, by possessions owned, or by type of job. It's related to economic class, but not synonymous with it (I know tons of college students and recent college grads who are living at poverty or lower class level economically but who move in middle class circles and have traditionally middle class tastes). I think it's primarily defined by your values, tastes, and the people and situations you are comfortable with, but that's...well, very hard to firmly define. Which I think is a lot of why it's so hard to talk about class, even aside from the vast gulf between American and British class systems, for example.

Guaranteed access to healthcare? Can a person be considered middle class if they do not have full access to a basic need?

I think the U.S. class system ends up looking the way it does partly because of the overlapping systems of local, economic, religious, regional, rural-vs.-urban, and race and ethnic identity, all of which mingle as much as they are distinct, combined with an odd way in which public rhetoric regarding "equality" has led to more reluctance to discuss inequity than to practice it.

Class in the U.S. also seems to be constantly in flux (even though economic mobility is significantly lower than in, say, the U.K.) -- not long ago, it was possible for a unionized "working-class" worker to be making more than a "middle-class professional", with the class distinction based on education, ideology, and race/ethnicity (with some types of "white" being more middle-class-"appropriate" than others, and with anyone not white operating under a continual assumption of working-class status); now, with the decline of unions, income seems to be more strongly correlated with class. Income itself, though, is responsive to a person's adoption of (class-, regionally- and racially-marked) ruling-class self-presentation, language and ideology; to the point that there's an endless stream of self-help books devoted to cultivating an ownership-class persona (though it's never framed in those terms -- the focus is more on justifying the class gap).

After thinking about this, I think there may be three discourses of class going on; the UK one, in which class identities are fixed; the American one, in which mobility is possible but tied to economics; and Alixti's own idiosyncratic system, in which mobility can be downward but is usually upward and tied to education.

Part of what pings for me in a character as a quality which is often mapped onto education but doesn't have to be; Buffy can mention Sartre and Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett intelligently (if not continue on about them fluently; her cultural literacy is enviably broad but nonetheless quite shallow) but hasn't completed so much as two years of college and hasn't completed high school for a significant portion of the time the show covers. It's this classed (and raced, but not particularly gendered as far as I can tell) web of linguistic signifiers Buffy is at the center of I was mainly calling "class," because I don't really have another word for it

But Xander, despite being working-class in all of the ways people mentioned in the comments, in terms of income and occupation and even hobbies, is at the center of a semiotic web not all that different from Buffy's at the end of the day, if with less emphasis on highbrow texts and more emphasis on geeky ones (but geeky enough texts to bespeak a certain type of privilege in their own right, if you know what I mean?). So I do see Xander as belonging to a certain class culture which isn't in harmony with his actual class status on a variety of socioeconomic levels

Faith, on the other hand, is at the center of a semiotic web so radically different--she would have no fewer signifiers than Buffy or Xander, although she manifests fewer on the show as a result of the middle-class college-educated writers not really being fluent in her type of semiotic web--as to make the attempts at communication between working-class Faith and middle-class Buffy quite literally disastrous.

Wesley's tale is that of someone who is traumatically shifted (from upper- to working-class) to a lower class in economic terms but only slowly becomes downwardly mobile in terms of class cultures--and once he has done so, becomes bicultural in that he can shift between registers whenever he needs to do so, which becomes a valuable skill (and that results in a sort of overall middle-class identity?).

Sorry about talking so much a show which isn't one of your fandoms, but I think this makes what I'm trying to discuss more clear. Not class per se, but something more closely linked to class than any other vector with which I am aware, and isn't as closely linked to race as one might at first think.

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.

the UK one, in which class identities are fixed

Whoever said class identities were fixed in the UK? I think you'll find the British people on this thread stating that they are complicated not that they are unchanging; class mobility was the great safety valve of Victorian society; it was one of the things which Marx and Engels got spectacularly wrong, and it was the principal reason that not only wasn't there a revolution in 1848, there never was one at all and it was left to Russia to lead the way (where there really wasn't the safety valve).

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Classism and Working-Class Characters in Fandom

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Defining middle class

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