[Commlist] CfP: 25 Years of Formations of Class & Gender

*CfP: 25 Years of /Formations of Class & Gender/*

*24 June 2022 – University of Lancaster*

In 2022 Beverley Skeggs’s Formations of Class and Gender (1997) will 
celebrate its 25th birthday. Skeggs’s book has not only become a true 
classic and one of the most germinal works in British Sociology, but it 
has also reverberated widely across many other disciplinary fields , 
from Gender Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Political Economy, 
Anthropology, Education, and Politics. The book has led to a rich body 
of exciting intellectual interdisciplinary work that re-animates and 
politicises the frontline battlegrounds of class and culture.

Building on Marx, Bourdieu and feminist theory, Skeggs’s work has 
fundamentally changed the ways in which we understand the concepts of 
class and gender, and how they are mutually produced. Gender 
subjectivity is an empty abstraction if detached from class, Skeggs 
argued. But to understand gender as a ‘classed formation’, gender roles 
themselves need to be interrogated as moral codes that work to imprint 
their marks upon classed bodies.


One of the most powerful legacies of Skeggs’s book has been its enduring 
lesson that social class cannot be understood as a mere economic 
category with which we can locate individuals into their windows of 
opportunities, but rather that class is lived and felt in and through 
sensuous constellations. In classed and gender formations the body 
itself (its shape, smell, styling, gesturing etc.) functions as a proxy 
for class, which has powerful lived effects.

Through in-depth extensive ethnography which focussed on white-working 
class women in the neoliberal UK, Skeggs’s book highlighted how 
working-class women’s bodies are always coded as in excess and 
pathological. Usually associated with the “lower unruly order of bodily 
functions” and connected to moral codes of vulgarity and lack of taste, 
the working-class gendered body signals class through moral euphemisms 
which are not named directly, but work through ideological associations. 
This is documented in the everyday moral class battles these women 
endured, where middle-class representatives of state institutions 
(welfare, education, law) repeatedly pathologise working-class women.

Twenty-five years later, Skeggs’s poignant analysis rings as powerful as 
ever. Scholars continually apply her conceptual tools to make sense of 
how inequalities are reproduced and re-legitimised along moral and 
symbolic lines: from discussions about Brexit and the white-working 
class, articulations of ‘white trash’ and the Rust Belt, the 
accumulation of new forms of value across digital platforms, racialized 
classed formations and colonial histories, the spectacular presence of 
the working-class across contemporary media, and now the urgent 
questions of reproductive justice for gendered care relations under 
conditions of Covid19 and many more.

We would welcome submissions that both analyse the ground-breaking 
legacy and influence of Skeggs’s work in their fields, and connect it to 
contemporary developments in the ways class and gender continue to be 
theorised. Possible areas of interest might include, but are not limited to:

• The legacies of Formations of class and gender in feminist theory.
• Formations of class and gender and the neo-conservative turn.
• Imaginaries of pathology and dependency, and the history of the 
welfare state.
• The relevance of class to the politics of care and reproductive justice.
• The moral economies of race, class and gender.
• The mediations of class and the circulation of value
• Racialized classed formations and colonial histories.

The deadline for paper proposals is *4th April 2022.*

**

*Abstracts can be submitted here 
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdEAlKr310vg1Nl3bUv4nL7yFCbFj3mE1D6eGh8s8h5AUOvCw/viewform> 
via Microsoft Forms.*

Questions can be sent to (classandgenderformations /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(classandgenderformations /at/ gmail.com)>.


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