Download After the Cultural Turn: Is Class Theory in a Cul-de-Sac?

Moral Panics and Young White
Working-Class Identities
The Moralising Discourse on ’Chavs’
Dr. Elias le Grand
Department of Sociology, Stockholm University
GEDS, Birkbeck College, University of London
Introduction
• Connecting moral panic panic studies and cultural class
analysis
• Addressing the lack of dialogue between these two
strands of research
• The volatile social reaction to ’chavs’ as a case: how the
moralisation of chavs is tied to the dialectical formation
of class identities
• Empirical material from PhD project – analysis of public
discourse and long-term ethnographic research in South
London
• Argue for the interrelationship between moralisation
processes and the cultural dimensions of class
Moral panic analysis and the sociology
of moralisation
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Moral panics are usually conceived as a sudden, hostile and widespread social
reaction over the behaviour of a person or group that are seen to threaten deeply
held values – the moral order of society – and thus cast as ‘folk devils’ (cf. Cohen,
1972)
‘Widening the focus’ (Critcher, 2009) of moral panic analysis by connecting it to
mainstream currents in social and cultural theory
Moral regulation as wider framework for moral panic:
Moral panics conceived as strong, sudden, volatile forms of moral regulation
(Critcher, 2009; Hier, 2002, 2008, 2011; Hier et al., 2011 ; Hunt, 2011 )
Critcher (2009) distinguishes between three aspects of moralisation processes: (i)
moral order, (ii) social control, (iii) ethical self-formation (cf. Foucault’s [1991]
notion of governmentality)
These important developments have extended the moral panic concept as well as
led to a more unified sociology of moralisation
However, recent work have failed to engage with class theory (though see Young,
2009; Warner, 2013)
Cultural class analysis
• Class analysis after the cultural turn:
• A renewed interest in the cultural dimensions of class,
including identity, consumption, affects/emotions, symbolic
boundaries
• Strongly influenced by Bourdieu’s multi-dimensional notion of
class (1984 [1979]; 1987)
• Classes are conceived as groupings of individuals with
differential access to cultural, economic and social capital or
resources
• Class and identity:
• Beyond ’class consciousness’: focusing on the implicit,
mediated ways in which identities are classed
• Classed hierarchies of moral worth/value
• Continued expansion of middle-class occupying the normal
and normative (Savage, 2003)
• Stigmatisation of (many aspects of) working-class culture
• Lack of research within cultural class analysis of moral panics
Linking moralisation and class:
dialectics of identity formation
• How are moralisation processes bound up with class
relations?
• ‘Chavs’ as a case
• Interpret the chav phenomenon deploying cultural class
analysis and Critcher’s (2009) three aspects of moralisation
processes: moral order, social control and ethical selfformation
The study
• Extensive qualitative content analysis of public discourse on chavs, on
websites, in newspapers and popular culture
• Long-term ethnographic work in ’Satellite Town’ (Nov 2007 – Dec 2008) a
deprived area located on the outskirts of South London.
• I lived for five months and conducted participant observation and photo
elicitation interviews at two youth clubs in the area.
• Empirical material analysed with the assistance of Atlas.ti
The social reaction to chavs
• ‘Chavs’ in the UK
• Stigmatising stereotype typically used to label
young, white, working-class youths adopting
certain markers of style and dress, particularly
tracksuits, trainers and jewellery.
The emergence of the chav discourse
• Mentions of the word chav in ten* major national British newspapers,
2003-2012 (Source: LexisNexis Academic)
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
0
390 1339 914 831 627 477
540 586 464
* The Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Express, the Financial Times, the
Guardian, the Independent, the Mirror, the Sun, the Telegraph and the Times.
Chavs as threat to the moral order
Two quotes from the Daily Telegraph:
“They are the sullen, pasty-faced youths in hooded
tops and spanking-new "prison white" trainers who
loiter listlessly on street corners; the slack-jawed
girls with mottled legs, hoop earrings and heavilygelled hair who squawk at each other in consonantfree estuary English and frighten old ladies on buses.
They are the non-respectable working-classes: the
dole-scroungers, petty criminals, football hooligans
and teenage pram-pushers” (Lewis, 2004).
“Chav… [is] a suitably monosyllabic noun or adjective designed to
illuminate that which is most appalling in the young, designer-labelobsessed under-class of early 21st century Britain. When you see a
stunted teenager, apparently jobless, hanging around outside
McDonald's dressed in a Burberry baseball Cap, Ben Sherman shirt,
ultra-white Reebok trainers and dripping in bling (cheap, tasteless and
usually gold-coloured jewellery), he will almost certainly be a chav. If
he has difficulty framing the words "you gotta problem mate?" then he
will definitely be a chav. Very short hair and souped-up Vauxhall Novas
are chav, as is functional illiteracy, a burgeoning career in petty crime
and the wearing of one's mobile telephone around the neck. Chavs are
most at home in run-down, small-town shopping precincts, smoking
and shouting at their mates. A teenage single mum chewing gum or
drawing on a cigarette as she pushes her baby, Keanu, to McDonald's
to meet the chav she believes to be his father is a chavette” (Tweedie,
2004).
• Chav as ’folk devil’ – a threat to the moral and aesthetic order of British
society
• Moral-aesthetic boundaries:
• Vulgar, ’tacky’, ’cheap’, excessive forms of consumption, e.g. jewellery,
’blingy’ Christmas lighting, fast food, tattoos.
• Loutish and anti-social behaviour (”yob culture”, ASBOs)
• Violent boys in gangs
• Single teenage mothers; ‘slutty’ femininity
• Welfare dependency – ”dole scrounging”
• Marginalized spaces – council house estates, McDonald’s eateries
(acronym: ”[C]ouncil [H]ouse [a]nd [V]iolent”)
• Boundaries constructed through mockery (e.g. chav jokes, Vicky Pollard in
Little Britain)
• ’Chav’ incorporates two familiar folk devils: (i) young, violent
working-class males; (ii) working-class welfare cheats, which
includes a gendered social type, namely the single, unwed,
young working-class mother.
• A highly classed label – characterized by lack: lack of
economic and cultural capital. Categorised as part of the ’nonrespectable’ fraction of the British working class
• Chav discourse linked to marginalised whiteness, which also
serves to legitimate it. The denigratory vocabulary would be
unthinkable, i.e. politically incorrect, if applied on other
”marginalised” groups or categories, e.g. ”non-white”
minorities, gays, disabled.
• Denigratory discourse contested, especially by left-wing
commentators (e.g. In Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonization
of the Working-Class [2011])
Origins of the term ‘chav’
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Many aspects of phenomenon not new.
Young white working-class kids congregating in groups and with low social status
since at least the 1990s all over Britain
Local names include: Neds (Glasgow), Kevs (London, Bristol), Charvers
(Newcastle), Townies, Steeks, Spides, Bazzas, Ratboys, Kappa Slappas, Skagers,
Janners, Stigs, Hood Rats.
Chav has become an ”umbrella term”
Origin of the term unclear:
Romani – chavi
’Cheltenham average’
Chatham
East End of London slang for friend, like ’mate’ or ’mush’
Chavs as targets of social control
• Regulating access to public space: shopping malls,
pubs, night clubs and other public establishments
(e.g. internet cafés) started banning clothing items
(baseball caps, hoodies, tracksuits) or brands
associated with chavs (Burberry, Prada)
• Bluewater shopping centre ’hoodie’ ban in 2005
• DWP campagn in 2008 against ’benefit thieves’
• Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) strongly
associated with chavs
Policing the ”chav”
Regulating access to public space
Sign in London pub.
Department of Work and Pensions advertising poster
‘Chav ASBOs’
• Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) were
issued in 1997 and subsequently strengthened
and broadened throughout the UK during
2003-2004
• Chavs strongly associated with ASBOs
• From the website of the Home Office (2009):
• What is anti-social behaviour?
• The term anti-social behaviour covers a wide range of selfish and
unacceptable activity that can blight the quality of community life. Terms
such as ‘nuisance’, ‘disorder’ and ‘harassment’ are also used to describe
some of this behaviour.
• Examples include:
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Nuisance neighbours
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Yobbish behaviour and intimidating groups taking over public spaces
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Vandalism, graffiti and fly-posting
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People dealing and buying drugs on the street
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People dumping rubbish and abandoned cars
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Begging and anti-social drinking
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The misuse of fireworks
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Reckless driving of mini-motorbikes. (Home Office, 2009)
From the homepage What is anti-social
behaviour? (Home Office, 2009)
Ethical self-formation:
The governance of self and other
• ’Beyond moral reformation’: chavs mainly targets of social
control rather than objects of ethical self-formation
• Ethical self-formation plays a greater role on the part of the
moralisers: casting chavs as a non-respectable group of white
working-class people, is dialectically related to constructing
other working-class and middle-class people as respectable
and morally righteous.
• ‘Class contempt serves to reciprocally enhancing and
confirming the goodness, self-regard and status of one’s own
class’ (Webster, 2008, p. 294).
Self-governance and
disidentification with chavs
• Classed disidentification with the term chav
• Young people in Satellite Town on their tastes
in tattoos
• Tattoos as ‘inscriptions of love’ in white British
working-class culture (Back, 2006)
• The case of Holly, 17 years old
Katie: I would never wear that.
Elias: Have you never had like a name or anything? No?
Katie: Only if it feels like... I’d have family. But I’d never have a boy’s
name.
Elias: So you’d have your mum’s name or something?
Katie: Yeah, I’d have my mum’s name. But not in a chav way, like
[inaudible] name in Hebrew.
Elias: What’s a chav way to have a...?
Katie: To have ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ on a tattoo.
Elias: But in Hebrew?
Katie: In Hebrew.
Elias: So you wouldn’t have, like, jewellery with her name or ‘Mum’ or
something?
Katie: Oh no!
Elias: Okay [laughs at her reaction]. And not names and not your initials
or anything?
Katie: [Shakes her head]
Conclusion
• The social reaction to chavs moralisation processes with elements of a
moral panic
• Bound up with long-standing processes of moral distinction against the
white British working-class, particularly as regards respectability –
constructing a respectable/non-respectable binary (cf. Bott, 1964; Skeggs,
1997; Stacey, 1960; Watt, 2006)
• Dialectics of class identity. The formation of denigratory representations,
which serve to:
• (a) construct chavs as a stigmatised social identity, positioning certain
white working-class people as ’non-respectable’ and simultaneously
• (b) cast certain middle-class and working-class people as respectable and
moral.
• Two general points: (1) Moralisation processes are situated in class
relations, i.e. rooted in the unequal access to economic, cultural and
social capital/resources between moralisers and moralised
• (2) Moralisation as performative in constructing class identities – moral
boundaries and forms of identifications based on class
Conclusion
• Two general points:
• (1) Moralisation processes are rooted in class relations
• (2) Moralisation processes are performative in constructing
class identities
• Notions of respectability central to classed forms of
moralisation: casting certain working-class people as ’nonrespectable’, ’respectable’ middle-class and working-class
people can identify as morally righteous (cf. Bott, 1964;
Skeggs, 1997; Stacey, 1960; Watt, 2006).