Class: A Question of Economics, Gender, Race, Etc.

Viewing class through more of a cultural than economic lens (6), Elizabeth Langland claims in Nobody's Angels that "bourgeois women were both oppressed as women and oppressors as middle-class managers" (18). Following Bourdieu, she views "class as representation" for two reasons. The first of these reasons, she continues, is because it allows for the agency of women in reinforcing or challenging the dominant patriarchal and bourgeois ideologies at work in Victorian society. And second, it allows for the performative aspect of subjectivity construction, viewing the activities involved in bourgeois household management, including dress, manner, speech, etc. (17). She then goes on throughout the book to analyze various Victorian guides and novels for the ways in which they reinforce or resist/question Victorian ideology and its construction of female subjectivity.

I find this view of class and Langland's critical use of it very interesting. It confirms Thompson's view that class is always in the making either through the reaffirming or questioning of reigning ideologies at work in a given society. I like Bourdieu's own general formulation of class (quoted by Langland on p. 17), which sounds like he views it as a tendency or potential rather than a concrete construction. I also found Langland's (and Bourdieu's) discussion of class applicable to work that I'm interested in. One potential example would be the 1954 film Salt of the Earth in which the wives of striking miners actively contend with a restricting and exploitive patriarchal ideology reinforced by their own husbands as well as an expoitive capitalist ideology represented by the mine owners and managers. Throw in an ideology enforced by racism--viewing the miners and their wives as second-rate humans because they are Mexican--and you have a pretty comprehensive example of how fluid class determinations can be.