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

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I disagree for two reasons.

1) Class is not just about how much money you have. Class is about how you do things, what you expect from life and how you handle what you have. My father is upper middle class. My mother was underclass who wanted to be upper middle class. Throughout their entire lives, they have had incomes that would have placed them in many different tax brackets. My mother now has much more money than my father does (they've been divorced for years) but she is not accepted by the people among whom she lives, and she is miserable.

2) It is not that uncommon for working-class families (particularly very religious ones) to have the wife at home, at least while the children are small. There are a lot of hidden costs in going out to work when you have small children, particularly if there is no extended family available and child care must be paid for. There are a lot of people who decide that it isn't worth it and a fair number of people who decide that that's not what God wants them to do. Most women at lower income levels do work outside the home (I really wish you would stop saying women who don't have jobs don't work), and it's much harder than it used to be to stay home, but I was married to a working-class man at the time that Sam was born (the early 1980s) and there was absolutely no expectation that if we had a baby I would have a job. I am not Christian, but his family was, and all the women stayed home. None of them were anything but working class. The men worked in factories and plants. The wives sewed clothing, put up food, made everything that could be made at home and shopped at low-end stores--we didn't have Wal-Mart then, but that's where they would have shopped.

Keep in mind that Sam and Dean are now adults. The economy into which they were born was not the economy of 2008. Most of my friends' husbands (I eventually divorced and never had kids) were not doing as well as John was back then, but most of my friends (Mary seems to have been about five years older than me) were not married to men old enough to have served in Vietnam. John is from a working-class background, but he went into the military, came out a mechanic and was good enough at it to start his own shop. He was not, however, in any way or sense white-collar or educated to middle-class standards, and when John lost his mind (because that's what happened after Mary died, even though it's quite understandable and it turned out that demons were real after all) they essentially became homeless (though not food-insecure, not given how big those boys are, thanks to the scams and all).

John's attitude toward the boys' education is definitely not middle-class. John's attitude toward money was not middle-class. It's entirely possible that Mary may not have been working-class in origin, especially if she married John young and he had a business--she could have married him out of rebellion even. But after she died any influence she may have had was gone anyway.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

Of course after the fire the Winchesters experienced significant downward (albeit voluntary) social mobility. But before then? Your own business and your own respectably-furnished good-sized house in a decent urban neighborhood are just not indicia of belonging to the working or lower class. Everything we see about Winchester life pre-fire indicates lower middle class or even better.

And afterwards, as you say, John lost his mind. You can't tell from the hand-to-mouth lifestyle of the post-fire years what his attitude towards money would have been if Mary hadn't died (having a mortgage is the antithesis of that, you know) and you certainly can't tell from the fact that he brought up his kids to fight demons rather than go to college that he wouldn't have wanted Dean and Sam to pursue higher education in a world without them.

(I wouldn't take Mary's absence from the workforce as definitive rather than indicative either way--you're correct that there are a group of people who have so little ability to generate income outside the home that it can't make up for the loss of the imputed income provided by their labor within it--but the fact is, John's business generates sufficient income for him to pay the mortgage and meet his family's needs without cash contributions from his spouse.)

I really wish you would stop saying women who don't have jobs don't work

"Out of the workforce" does not mean "not working." The workforce is generally defined as people available for work outside the home.

[marinarusalka.livejournal.com]

you certainly can't tell from the fact that he brought up his kids to fight demons rather than go to college that he wouldn't have wanted Dean and Sam to pursue higher education in a world without them.

And in fact, in "Dean Man's Blood," John tells Sam that before Mary died, both kids had had college funds into which John put money every month. (Afterwards, he ended up spending the money on ammunition.) So pre-fire John definitely had college aspirations for his kids, and enough income to be able to spare a couple hundred bucks every month.

The impression I get is that John started out working class, then worked his way up to middle-class, first by going into the Marines, then by owning his business.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

John tells Sam that before Mary died, both kids had had college funds into which John put money every month

Ooh, good point. I had forgotten about that.

The impression I get is that John started out working class, then worked his way up to middle-class, first by going into the Marines, then by owning his business.


If I had to choose (we don't have enough evidence to be completely sure), that's the version that seems most likely to me.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

The impression I get is that John started out working class, then worked his way up to middle-class, first by going into the Marines, then by owning his business.

I agree up to a point, but because of that, I don't really think the boys grew up as middle class or that they think middle-class.

I also think there's a definite class divide between blue-collar and white-collar and that John never crossed it. Whether you want to say blue-collar can be middle class or not I suppose is what I'm really arguing about.

[marinarusalka.livejournal.com]

I agree that the boys aren't at all middle class (though God knows Sam tried), but I think that' mainly because the fire destroyed almost all aspects of the Winchesters' previous life, including their class status.

And yeah, I do believe there's such a thing a a blue-collar middle class. I certainly wouldn't want to try and argue that John was ever white-collar.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I'm certainly not opposed to the idea of a blue-collar middle class, but if we're going to do that we need to have more distinctions than underclass, working-class, middle-class and upper-class.

Because a guy who owns his own mechanic's shop is doing better than a guy who works in a factory in some senses of the word, but he's probably not eating lunch with lawyers--and then, what class is a lawyer? Big differences between corporate lawyers, ambulance chasers, public defenders...