I’d become involved in lots of media teaching organisations and was asked to produce a textbook. I wasn’t really a media scholar but had always been interested in ideology and representation. I asked a proper media person to join in and this is what we produced. I look back and think some of it is still good (the model for understanding Rupert Murdock’s empire helped with enjoying Succession!) and the chapter on racism and Arab representations is still relevant.

This came out of my PhD. No publishers wanted a book on class or an ethnography. It was the time (mid 90s) of the rise in “theory” with a big T. I’d always read lots of theory, which is after all only an explanation of a phenomenon, but never felt that it always worked alone without some connection to people’s lives – hence my interest in ethnography. So it was turned into a firstly a theory book (post-structuralism, Althusser, Foucault, Bourdieu), then feminist critiques (Butler and all the anti-racist critiques of Theory). Each chapter takes on a theory and uses ethnography to interrogate, challenge and try to explain how the world works. I’m guessing this is why it has had longevity. We celebrated its 25^th anniversary last year and it was absolutely wonderful hearing how it has been put to use to help explain other people’s lives. Over the years I’ve had lots of lovely letters thanking me for it or telling me it made them cry (sorry), or angry (good). I cannot express how much these communications meant to me – they made it feel worthwhile when I was feeling worthless. In retrospect I realised that conversations with and against my mum had shaped a lot of the analysis. She was a very typical working-class woman (cleaner, dinner lady, heavily invested in femininity and heterosexuality) who wanted the same for me. She considered me going to university to be the biggest disappointment of her life.

It was my first proper academic teaching job at Worcester College of HE and we did lots of what is now called “engagement” and this was a book to which I contributed about learning about work life. I’d been reading lots about vocational and voluntary employment and so fed in on that level although the critiques of the time about labour and masculinity, which I loved e.g. “learning to labour” by Paul Willis which had a less significant place. As did the “new” debates about the gendering of the term skill. I’d always been interested in the history of ideas and having to put this together sent me down the rabbit hole of the gendering of labour categories and the debates about the sexual division of labour, which then get developed in Formations and inform my thinking throughout.

The published version is actually the first draft manuscript. We were expecting it to be returned with reviews and proposed edits (we had a few we knew we needed to do) but it went straight into publication with the exact same cover as another book. It is the result of lots of argument between the team, mostly healthy and definitely challenging. But I feel you can see the joints where the different positions and styles exist. The research team was truly brilliant and a proper example of interdisciplinarity research (sociology, law, literature and criminology). I was also part of a Queer reading group in Manchester at the time which informed the analysis, which was also the space for great arguments. Putting Bourdieu, Foucault and feminist legal theorists together generated what I think are still great concepts eg “propertising”, “affect appropriation” which I now use extensively and the research itself shows how ontological security and comfort are major issues in how structural inequality is lived.

I was working on the Violence, Sexuality and Space book alongside this book which enabled me to develop the idea of propertising, of how we use culture to add value to ourselves. Ironically it is a Theory book! And it turned into a book about the middle-classes, which was not its intention. It’s in this book that I develop ideas about the modern “possessive individual” and its constitutive limit: abject self. I’ve always worked with ideas of moral value: how can you avoid it if working on motherhood and femininity? But I wanted to connect the economic to the cultural to the moral and this is where I try and work it out and show how some can make use of their cultural resources as if culture is a form of property that can be accrued, where others just become a source and position from which to take and move. It’s a detailed exposition of how culture works as a form of capital via gender, sexuality, race and class, not just as a metaphor. Hence, it’s a study of the modern middle class accrue, exclude, generate authority and are legitimated in the world.

The conceptual ideas developed in Class, Self, Culture are applied to empirical research and developed through the engagement with different audience groups. The research for this book began as an ESRC funded project on the moral economies of reality TV with Helen Wood. We were both outraged by the treatment of working-class women on RTV, used and humiliated for cheap entertainment (after the privatisation of a great deal of TV production) which I discussed on Woman’s Hour. Because Helen was a proper media scholar we argued lots about what to focus on/develop eg narratives vs social relationships, format vs affect, but the debates proved to be really fruitful as we interrogated the programmes in depth with our audiences. Recruiting audience groups was not easy and applying Helen’s method of watching with them presented significant challenges but like all research it was the problems that proved to be the most analytically revealing. Joint writing is always hard but I think we both learnt lots from the process. Many articles were produced from this project, one which explores the value of relationships I especially like can be read here.

The cultural studies debates from Birmingham’s CCCS which I’d loved during my PhD were being revived in a “popular” form – to make it available to a wider audience. There was a huge amount of enthusiasm and energy. I became involved because it seemed so exciting and a good thing to do: making popular culture political. It was a huge learning experience. We travelled to this enormous house in Tuffnell Park for our editorial meetings which had real art on the wall and food that I didn’t even know existed. I was enthralled by the intellectual space in which our debates happened and also the debates themselves. My cultural capital increased radically. I learnt how to write in columns, how to distribute (or fail to distribute) publications, basic issues such as storage, how to manage subscriptions, etc. The huge amount of labour was incredible. It wasn’t just about the writing. In fact that was the easiest bit, or at least that’s what I thought until I was told that it was amazing I’d made it so far without knowing how to write and I had too many ideas (is that possible?). I felt just like my research participants in Formations. The expectations of me were so low for this upper middle-class interlocutor that she had to tell me how exceptional I was. She’s continued to do so throughout my career and it hurts. But it led to a great research questions “Why do the totally priviledged feel so threatened by the working-class who are doing them no harm? Why do they feel compelled to tell them?” As Bourdieu notes, it says more about the person making the statement than the one on the receiving end. But why did it silence me? The magazine fell apart through lack of distributors.

When I got a job at Lancaster University as the first
Women’s Studies appointment in 1992 I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, even
though I was quite terrified of the cultural capital of my colleagues. I was
intrigued by how they approached the same issue with very different
perspectives. We had an incredible reading group which made these differences
apparent, and this book is an attempt to show why we turn to particular
research topics, ideas and theories. I love this book and still think it’s
relevant for how we approach issues. It’s out of copyright so can be
downloaded here.

We held a conference at Lancaster Women’s Studies in 1997 that was remarkable. The speakers were the best in the world at the time (and still). It began as a small project but kept expanding as people heard about it. We had to publish some of the papers for posterity and even though it was really hard work as we carefully edited each paper trying to make each one “readable” (as we had been accused of being inaccessible as post-structural feminists), it was really worth it. It took two years to get some sort of order as we were trying to keep the Women’s Studies centre running under the ever-present threat of closure. The papers in my section on affect are still amazing, as are most, and it should be a book without a date as most of the arguments were agenda setting and most of the contributor still stand (R.I.P Lauren) and are brilliant.

A group of feminists had been interested in Bourdieu for some time, since the early 1980s in some cases, and we had used his analyses in our PhDs. Foucault was the man in fashion at the time, but we also wanted to put Bourdieu on the agenda, yet also show his limitations re gender and sexuality. Judith Butler had engaged with Bourdieu and we felt we could extend the debates. It was interesting to see how some of us were critics who took what we needed from Bourdieu and others were disciples. I did read everything he’d ever written in English for the book and still feel outraged when people use his work who have never engaged with his writings at all. I did write some caustic paragraphs on that issue in my introduction, but Lisa very diplomatically edited them out (for which I am still grateful). We wrote two introductions as we wanted to focus on different issues. Each chapter is available through the journal The Sociological Review.

We had organised many events on our research and knew that there was a lot of good stuff out there. This was a matter of pulling it all together and putting it in one place. It was also at a time (was there ever another time?) when people were decrying the significance of class when a great deal of culture had an amplified obsession with the working-class (eg Chavs). Likewise, Reality TV had simultaneously intensified the spectacularisation of working-class representations. At the time of the research few people wanted to pay attention to such a “low value” genre. It was only when Trump was elected that “serious” journalists and political commentators started to pay attention. We’d liked to say if these serious commentators had not been so snobbish, they could have possibly saved lives and not amplified the blame of working class for voting for Trump and Johnson and intensifying the divisions that were being radically redrawn through culture. It is a great set of writings that informed a series of radio documentaries made in 2023. Helen is following through the debates on labour, care and abuse in her AHRC project.

What a labour of love. We began the book in 2013 with a list of all the topics (160+) we wanted covering, a list that kept expanding. We didn’t want a traditional handbook but something that captured all the interesting new stuff that we knew about. We were all also teaching the Marxist Theory course at Goldsmiths and had very different perspectives on what was interesting. The book became an administrative albatross as editing that many chapters, finding people, finding reviewers, reading everything, trying to generate consistency, became impossible. We were all living big life dramas at the time. Both my parents were dying whom I had to care for (2015/16) and three children were born to the others. Goldsmiths began its extraordinarily destructive behaviour and as a result two of us decided to change institutions, and one needed to finish her PhD. I thought I’d try a very different type of job and entered a very difficult space. Holding everything together became impossible at times. Yet now I’m enormously proud that we did actually bring it to fruition. I’d write my chapter again but hey….there’s some amazing genius contributions in the handbook. Working with this team was a delight. For Svenya’s logistics we will always be grateful. I learnt so much. Sarah Farris’s analysis of gender is one of the best, as is she. Alberto is always superb , his analysis of different forms of fascism, especially as “non-exceptional” is superb.