Clutching the Vacuum

Abstract

A scholarship recipient within a private upper/middle-class and primarily white space, Coffee experienced high school as a process of unlearning and regulating herself and her social class embodied literacies (Jones and Vagle, Educational Researcher 42(3):318–339, 2013; Jones, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 56(7):525–529, 2013). In this chapter, Coffee describes a moment when she was cleaning a classroom as part of her work-study responsibilities. Coffee examines this flashpoint attuned toward the histories that orient bodies to objects and spaces in particular ways, meritocratic educational narratives and hierarchies that rely on particular labors becoming background, and the powerful resistance and wisdom that resides within the body. In this moment, braced, mind racing, clutching the vacuum, her body knew and struggled within the impossible contradiction it was tasked to inhabit.

People often judge others (and themselves), and are judged by others, based on perceived social class and economic status . These judgments might be based on where someone lives, what someone does for a living, how someone talks, what that person wears, where she or he goes to school, etc. One is not “born” with the classist sensibilities necessary to position folks into hierarchical slots, but we are all immersed in hierarchical discourses from the time we are young, and most of us unwittingly engage those discourses to make sense of ourselves and others we see in the world (Jones & Vagle, 2013, p. 4).