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question is, when women become more detached from traditional family
roles as a result of movement into the labour market over a lifetime, how
does this effect class society? What are the cultural forms and the wider
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146 The Uses of Cultural Studies
repertoire of meanings which seek to give shape to, and retain control over,
new gendered hierarchies? Is it the case that through the prism of individ-
ualisation, class differences are reinvented, largely within the cultural and
media field, so as to produce and reproduce social divisions now more
autonomously feminised? Does the move into the workplace displace the
masculine inflection of class values with a wide range of more feminised
meanings? Perhaps it was an easy mistake for feminists to make, to assume
that the gains of feminist success in terms of the winning of certain free-
doms (to earn your own living, to be entitled to equal pay and so on) would
bring with it, for women, an extension and enlargement of feminist values
of collectivity and equality. Female individualisation is, then, a social
process bringing into being new social divisions through the denigration of
low class or poor and disadvantaged women by means of symbolic
violence.
Let me consider two illuminating journalistic moments, each of which is
indicative of a social dynamic which reiterates these specifically feminine
modalities of symbolic violence, as processes of class differentiation now
thoroughly projected onto, and inseparable from, the female body. From
now on the single mother will be understood to be an abject person, a social
category, a certain type of girl whose bodily features and disposition betray
her lowly status. This too marks a reversal of the language of liberal welfare
values for whom the teenage mother was someone to be provided with
support. A new virulent form of class antagonism finds expression through
the public denigration of the bodily failings of the girl who at a too-young
age embraces motherhood. Thus Christina Odone (Deputy Editor of The
New Statesman) provides a more serious-minded (if inevitably laced with
some irony) version of this recent form of boundary marking practice by
writing that  top range women . . . prefer to leave reproduction to the second
eleven . . . a bump risks becoming as clear proof of a working-class back-
ground as the fag hanging from someone s lips . She goes on to say that a
teenage mother produces a  socially autistic child with little expectation
and even less talent (Odone, 2000). In the same vein, but this time emerg-
ing from within the heartland of tabloid pop culture, one of the girl singers
formerly from the pop band Atomic Kitten (Kerry Catona) finds herself
widely referred to on the Popbitch website (www.popbitch.com) as  pram-
face , that is, she is deemed to look like the kind of poor, low-class girl with
a baby in a pushchair. Other derogatory forms of female social classification
include  minger (or  pig as the Sun labelled runner up for 2002 s Big
Brother television contest, Jade Goody).
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 Needs and Norms : Bourdieu and Cultural Studies 147
What does pramface mean? A kind of girl. What kind of girl? Not dressed
for work, therefore not earning an honest living. But not a student. With a
baby, but looks single, that is, not sufficiently attractive and presentable to
attract a long-term partner. She must be unmarried and dependent on ben-
efits. As a seemingly recognisable social type, it is assumed there must be
many like her. The insult is thus indicative of a renewed practice of social
re-ordering. The bodies of young women are to be understood according to
a scale running from impoverished single maternity marking failure, to
well-groomed slim, sophistication marking success. The pramface girl who
is poor-looking and with a child in a buggy, is in sharp contrast to the  A1
girls who can spend a disposable income on themselves and aspire to full
participation in consumer culture, and through this differentiation class [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]