Abyss-mal Sites: Representation and the British Working Class

Abstract

In her Self, Class, Culture (2004), Beverley Skeggs argues that class formation is a dynamic process ‘produced through conflict and fought out at the level of the symbolic’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 5). Seen this way, class is constituted in large measure through the power of representations (see also Kirk, 2003). The gist of Skeggs’s argument is that the inscribing of class in culture and the symbolic accrues value — those able to profit are generally those better placed to invest in and control such processes, hence inequality marks the variable sites of class construction.