Bev’s Commentary

I remember things through colours, shapes, patterns so I’ve always found PowerPoints useful. When I began using PowerPoints the technology was basic but as inserting pictures became easier I found them helpful.

I often include a lot of information on the PowerPoints because they are for international audiences so I want them to have the info rather than concentrate on the translation. I always leave the presentation with the organiser of the event so they can be distributed after the lecture.

There are obviously hundreds of PowerPoints from which to choose but I finally settled on this selection as examples of genres of research. I have worked in many different areas (gender, sexuality, media, social media, economics, politics, class) but what has held these different areas together is how they all work as part of a totality and connect together. For me the connections are made through the relationship between value (economic) and values (cultural/moral). Concepts such as respectability that thread through my work cross the values-value nexus through embodiment and become evident when people encounter institutions or different classifications. Respectability began as a form of “proper personhood” promoted by state institutions, central to employment and entry into a great deal of social space. The proper is always known through its opposite: the improper which houses categories such as the “repellent”, “the abject”, etc. Proper, propriety and property always have a close relationship and those who operate as the “constitutive limit” (ie the improper) always find it much harder to access economic, social and cultural resources. Think: have you ever been pathologised i.e. defined as improper, this impacts upon the type of relationships you have, how people respond to you and the value/s you can accrue. In a world in which accumulation and property command the highest values (capitalism) the mechanisms by which people embody values that can and cannot convert into value matters.

Yet my analyses have not always been about limits, rather I try to focus on where change can come from: e.g. how people use their own culture to make their own values, so a working-class understanding of respectability is very different to the definition imposed upon them by middle-class manners. People make their own history just not in the conditions of their own choosing. Symbolic political interventions such as “queer” troubled the binary gendered understandings. But, being “properly queer” occurred when queer became an identity rather than a verb (a way of doing things) and queer space became defined by property ownership, insurance, mortgages, commodities. This is why we need to understand the making of history in terms of a struggle by people to overcome the limits, categories and value that they inherit as an “accident of birth”. Understanding the value that is attributed to people through classifications of many kinds, including occupations, alongside the value that they attach to themselves and others has always been key to understanding not just how inequality work but how to challenge it.  

The frustration with challenging power is possibly why I’ve been accused of being angry. It’s impossible not to be when we experience so much inequality and we see people starving, homeless, allowed to die, suffering with no access to health services, and then blamed for the injustice they experience, whilst the government and super rich behave like pigs at a trough, with little restraint and disregard for others. To live with such lack of care for others makes me furious and so it should. Inequality is being constantly challenged across many different sites but it is also being put back into place. This is why analysis of power always matters. Who and how can people who are subject to inequality make a challenge and how can they sustain the challenge? How is the change resisted, restored, augmented? And by whom? It’s never straightforward as the complicated entangled histories of class, race and gender show. Hence my attention to structures, institutions, relations and living inequality. I’ve moved from understanding how working-class women defended themselves against devaluation, to how software devalues and values people without them even knowing (stratification by stealth). Hence, I’m interested in how to radicalise the algorithm. I’ve recently focused on “air” and breathing as it is another way that we embody inequality by stealth, just by living and breathing. It is the things that we often do not see but which can cause our death (as has happened to at least two children in England through suffocation) or enhance our life (purify our oxygen, blood) that fascinate me.

I’ve included these PowerPoints for people to use should they wish, structured as follows:

Research Trajectory

The first details the research I did up until 2006 which provides a foundation for the rest. The second I used for a job application when I had to show how my research and experience corresponded to understandings of inequality. It was a really useful exercise to do. What you’ll see is how there is a coherence to the themes that I’ve developed over time.

Theorising

The next PowerPoints begin with the Return to Respectability (2008).I was asked to present this in Stockholm where I was taking the Kirsten Hesselgren Fellowship in the Gender Studies department. I was surrounded by amazing feminists/queer theorists. I reassessed my earlier research which was 10yrs old. The next PowerPoint refers to the development of the book Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (1997) through more recent feminist research (at the time) on Culture and Emotions – it’s a quick spin through feminist cultural theory. It shows how research can be developed.

Next, Limits to Bourdieu (2007). I had always found Bourdieu really useful for getting at the unsaid and understanding how different categorisations work with and against each other eg class and race. He had been central to my PhD in 1981-1986, when there was a small group of feminists studying education who had built up an analysis of Bourdieu. Then… along comes a whole group of male researchers who claim to have “found” Bourdieu (not Derek Robbins who has been ploughing his own unique field), who ignore all the feminist work (surprise, surprise) and make careers out of their ignorance (it is apparent in some cases that they haven’t even read very much of Bourdieu). And as a result Bourdieu becomes fashionable and spreads, mainly through the concept of habitus which for me is just too general and vague. I was working with Lisa Adkins at the time and we were so appalled by the eclipse of so much feminist work that we put together a collection of articles/book, published as “Bourdieu after Feminism”. We were unable to recruit two of the major feminist Bourdieu scholars (Madelaine MacDonald (now Arnot) and Valerie Walkerdine) but there are some great analyses included.  It’s always useful to interrogate the major theorists that you use because just like anything the more it is subject to scrutiny the bigger the problems that appear. The second PowerPoint in this section is the British Journal of Sociology Annual lecture (2013). I had just received an ESRC Professorial Fellowship to study Values and Values and this is my opening statement. You can watch the lecture on the link provided.

Class

The subject I’ve been working on all my life. Symbolic classification is integral to everything I do (even when I try to ignore it) so I’ve included a first-year lecture on the idea of class(ification) which offers an entry point to the debates. The second PowerPoint is a tribute lecture to John Westergaard at Sheffield University who was a pioneer of class analysis. It is (2021) is the closest to a full articulation of my position. I’m currently working on developing this further. The third PowerPoint shows how the methods we choose re-make class in the encounter. This is why I am always cautious about using interviews unless they are part of a careful multi-method plan. Because interviews encourage people to ‘perform’ and that performance is always based on the social relations that people inhabit. Methods are not objective, neither is the research encounter. To analyse the power of the encounter has always been a feminist maxim for research and here we show how it works.

Intersectionality

I’ve included this because it has never been published. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the concept because of the way it became applied to everything other than class. Although not at the beginning. To me it felt like a very liberal gesture that starts in the wrong place – with categories and representations- rather than the processes that make those categories and representations. I know it has been a very important concept in law and to NGOs. And historically it was exceedingly important in getting Black and lesbian lives to be recognised by the state and feminist politics at the time. Crenshaw is a crucial intervention. I’ve always written against “the politics of recognition” and “identity politics” because when working-class women are ‘recognised’ it is usually connected to their devalued representation as pathological (as my Formations research showed). When I’m trying to understand class, race, gender and sexuality together I am guided by Harold Wolpe and Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation which analyses the way the categories entangle, how and why. It takes into account how history always shapes the present (the current conjuncture).

Care & social reproduction

Social Reproduction: underpins all our lives. It is the liquidity that infrastructures everything we do. Yet it is ignored in major debates about the economy. Even when expansive models of the economy are developed it is often included under the singular category “household”. But sustaining others is not just confined to women and the family. It is essential to living. A huge amount of paid work is based on emotional labour- on getting people to work well and together. Care is often a shorthand for this labour but as a term it is also too restrictive. However, we have had to use it as a shorthand to begin the conversation. Every time I applied for a research grant with the concept social reproduction inevitably a referee would ask for it to be defined. It always was – the labour that enables all social relations to exist and life to proceed.

Time to care/ Global care:  I was invited to join the formidable “Care Collective” on their trip to Oslo. They were presenting on their Care Manifesto (an essential read for all those who have benefited from care – everyone!). I’d just formed the “Global Economy of Care” research theme at the LSE, for the Atlantic Fellows programme, and had started working on finance and care after the death of my mother where I’d been shocked by the extent of privatisation (that was 2015 and it has proceeded apace). I began working with the New Economics Foundation who were doing great work on childcare, and Oxfam who have relentlessly exposed the unrecognised global labour of women. I began my academic career studying care labour and the formation of a caring subjectivity yet I’d argue the conditions are now so much worse. The more I researched the topic the more horrified I became. As you can see.

Media & Representations

The first PowerPoint ‘Theory’ is developed from our research on queer space. Whilst we were carrying out our research in Manchester’s gay village the TV series Queer as Folk was being filmed. Unsurprisingly our respondents’ responses were remarkably similar to the TV dialogue. We wrote many papers from the ESRC Violence and Sexuality Project (link research projects) on the significance of place and space in the making of queer identity.

The next PowerPoints are an extended analysis of the moral economy that is developed from the symbolic classification of people on reality TV and how this classification process is understood by different groups watching reality TV. It highlights the role of emotional/labour in the assessment of TV participants. I’ve included it because it shows how audiences engage on very different terms based on their race, class and gender position and how they construct their own “selves” be it an accruing subject that draws value to itself or someone who just wants to fill time. These are radically different orientations to watching TV and the moral economy it tries to promote.

The Pits and Perverts (2014) PowerPoint is a presentation given to an audience at Birkbeck College, London University, to discuss the film “Pride” – listen to presentation here. I was absolutely delighted to be invited as I’d been involved in the miner’s strike 1984 the time where the film is set and it offered a significant moment of hope. Solidarity across difference is possible. The kindness of the stranger was incredible – we were given accommodation and money for the miner’s right across the country. At the time we believed things would really change and we could instigate that change together. Little did we know of the plans that had already been laid in place by the government to destroy the working class: The Ridley Report (1977) commissioned for the Thatcher government prior to the strike details how the strike was promoted and controlled. Then later Section 28 enabled the significant hate campaigns around AIDS (see Russel T Davis). I urge everyone to watch both It’s a Sin and Pride. It changed lives for both good (alliances) and bad (destruction of whole communities, areas), but it shows what is possible when people join together to challenge injustice. Ten years later (after the event and 31 years after the Miner’s Strike) and the development of social media (See social media and protest) we explore what difference software makes to protest.

Necroeconomics: killing people to enhance profit

Necroeconomics and Covid (2020/2022) I include these because they build on all my previous research, social reproduction (above) and my own personal life after the death of both of my parents, whose lives were deemed not worth saving by state apparatuses (eg government, NHS, welfare, media). They died before Covid, but the pandemic amplified the attitude to the disabled, elderly and ill, the people considered to be “unproductive”, a cost to the state. But as crafty as capitalism always is, profit could be extracted from the privatised services that they required (eg care, death).

I was doing research with two groups at the beginning of the pandemic: one was with care workers and the other was a regional BME medical/health/community group. I watched in astonishment as a complete lack of care was revealed by the government towards certain groups (guess who?). Much earlier research (eg Pits and Perverts, Reality TV, Class, Self, Culture) had shown how those categorised as unproductive were rendered into representations of waste and pathology. Now this process was blatant and writ large, and directly fed into who was allowed to die. Some politicians even calculated who was worth saving, and how much the government could save on pensions. All my anger and frustration (I couldn’t stop people dying) was put into these interventions which culminated in these presentations. The first was given at the Westermarck Memorial Lecture. Finland, in Nov 2020

The second PowerPoint was written with my colleague, Fran Coin, for our MA on “Capitalism and Crisis”. She was also very upset. She had elderly parents too. The levels of corruption in government (the VIP lane) are now being revealed (massive thanks to The Good Law Project and Open Democracy for putting pressure on the government for an inquiry). It wasn’t totally transparent at the time but as the Covid Inquiry shows that the analysis we make is accurate. These issues transport into climate change now as we see how some groups are just left to die, workers are expected to work in conditions that are likely to kill them, and people live in mouldy houses that kill their children. Class, race and age cohere into categories of “unproductive” i.e. not turning a profit for someone, whilst gender operates to keep people alive in conditions likely to kill them. We no longer exist in a world with liberal sensibilities about protection of citizens but in a brutal necro economic political system where avoidance of death is going to become one of the most significant measures of inequality. These PowerPoints were turned into the `Necroeconomics’ paper, as I realised killing people was designed into economic policy. And then I was diagnosed with Breast cancer. I thought that was it but…

Software Research

I was invited to a conference on “Algorithms for Her “. It was wonderful. All these super smart people working on gender and software. I learnt so much. And we had a superb feminist comedian/computer scientist to bring the conference to a close: Olga Koch. It gave me hope and this is the paper I gave which is also published in Feminist Media Studies.

The second PowerPoint was given online to Australia after I was invited in 2023 to join a great group of researchers working on FinTech. They were working on how young people are being seduced (by stealth) at a very early age into debt through the apps they use. They wanted to further explore how different gaming techniques are built into and understood by users. This presentation to address the issue about software that I considered to be most pertinent: the design, which I think is seriously understudied. I also think the political economy of software design is a significant weak link a lot of research as designers are paid less and less to do work as a result of global labour platforms. My interest in radicalising the algorithm lies in identifying where and how these labour practices impact upon what we get in front of us when we use apps. I was quite ill at the time with the cancer treatment but the team were very patient and kind with me. 

I’ve included comments about health as I think we all work in difficult conditions, sometimes crisis, and often with little support. These social conditions of our labour are rarely recognised in the outputs we produce. When, with a team of 3, we were editing the Marxism Handbook (3 volumes 120 submissions, plus doing our full-time jobs, trying to continue with our research and writing and editing academic journals, organising conferences) we all had a significant amount of care labour and experienced between us 3 deaths in our families, 3 births, one serious illness and one employment/country move: all extreme time consuming activities of social of reproduction without any recognition.

Feminist Encounters with Marxism

I’m sorry this has taken so long (after giving this as a presentation in Turku in October 2024). I’m also sorry if I have forgotten key people.  I know I have but brain fog is a killer when the people you want to cite are in pamphlets from the 1980s. I can never do justice to all the people I have learnt from in my long and strange academic career. But I specifically wanted to fill the void of the history of Marxism and feminism in the UK and how it existed amongst anti-racist and queer theory and politics. When many feminists turned to psychoanalysis in the late 80s/90s and others to social policy, a small group of us moved towards culture and were strongly influenced by the work of Stuart Hall and colleagues at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham. Elsewhere I’ve written about how cultural studies reshaped Sociology in the UK and Stuart Hall has documented the effect of feminism on cultural studies.