Archive for calls, March 2022

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

Sat Mar 19 12:12:25 GMT 2022






*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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