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category of belonging. For Southerton social class was not the only source of
identification showed by the groups. For example, while the Lonsdale group could
all be categorised as middle-class, they showed internal incoherence by differently
using 'I' or 'We' in their sense of 'Us'. For Southerton, geographical mobility
accounted for these differences because it impacted on respondents' relationship to
cultural resources and had an effect on their senses of belonging. They had different
ways of describing their cultural sense of Yate: established respondents in Lonsdale
highlighted shared cultural refinement and community responsibility in reference
to their sense of 'we'; whereas newcomers, who spoke in terms of 'I', placed more
focus on the local frames of reference and mentioned more easily discernible criteria
- such as embodied social differences - for distinguishing themselves.
There are further studies which emphasise the importance of cross-cutting
variables in contemporary modes of identification. In
Formations of Class and
Gender
(1997) for example, Skeggs argues for a return to class analysis, yet she
insists on the importance of locations of gender and race. Structured by the terms
offered by Bourdieu's concept of capitals, her topic argues that we are born into, 'an
inherited space from which comes access to and acquisition of differential amounts of
capital assets' (1997, 8-9). We occupy designated positions of class, race, and gender
and the meanings and different forms of knowledge assigned to those locations.
Capitals exist across the inter-relationship of these social arenas and bring, 'access
to or limitation on which capitals are available to certain positions' (Skeggs 1997, 9).
For the white working-class women of Skegg's study, femininity is a form of cultural
capital. However, in the context of a society where whiteness and masculinity are
valued forms of cultural capital, the young women had only meagre capital assets to
trade. Feminine capital could only be transformed into limited material gains through
a dwindling labour market. Their chances of gaining wider institutional power were
severely limited - interpersonal relationships, secured through heterosexuality
and marriage were the only forms of power these women could hope to access.
Providing a feminine appearance was a means to secure better chances of exchange
on the marriage market, but more importantly, femininity afforded a pathway to
respectability.
The women of Skegg's study did not articulate working-class identification;
rather, they made 'multitudinous efforts' to dis-identify, refuse and deny being
working-class. These refusals of classification are understandable, Skeggs argues,
given the history of institutional representations of working-class women as dirty,
valueless and pathological. Recognising that to be working-class was pejorative,
the women used 'imaginings of the respectable and judgemental middle-class'
(Skeggs 1997, 74) as a yardstick with which to assess themselves. Focusing on the
relationship between positioning and identity, Skeggs argues that the women of her
study experienced class as a form of exclusion; they simply lacked access to the
capital resources to 'be anything other than working-class' (ibid.).
Skeggs examines how the women occupied the lived experience of class day-
to-day. Providing a distance between themselves and working-classness could be
achieved by attempts to improve the self. One route to improvement is to attempt to
bolster the conversion potential of cultural capital by making it tradeable beyond the
local. Educational caring courses gave them 'caring capital' to trade on the labour
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