In all the research I have conducted in the UK I have found one consistently repeated issue in relation to identity: the women who would be defined by almost any sociological measurement as working class resolutely refuse to make an identification with the term working class. For them class is a category loaded with negative connotations, a category by which they believe they are mis-recognised and from which they dis-identify. The ethnography Formations of Class and Gender documents this process in detail. The point of this paper is to show how identity is a slippery term always associated with visibility and value, and it is to the evaluation of identity categories that attention should be focused.

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