Young Girls’ Embodied Experiences of Femininity and Social Class

Introduction

At the turn of 2013, a series of significant changes to British welfare support were ushered in, accompanied by reinvigorated academic debate about the conceptualization of social class; even the introduction of new models of social class (Savage et al., 2013). However, whilst many scholars work to highlight that the empirical actualities of class remain (Woodward et al., 2014); political rhetoric evades any reference to social class – instead opting to focus on choices, behaviours, attitudes and expectations. Class is then the ‘absent presence’ (Woodward et al., 2014: 427) within policy spheres of health, employment, education, leisure and sport. Yet even popular discourses note the inherent classed battles conjured within the political vernacular; an evocative vocabulary (shirkers, scroungers, skivers) that exposes the ‘cynical venom at the heart of David Cameron’s coalition’ (Milne, 2013). Within this article, we focus on these aforementioned empirical actualities of class by analysing the everyday realities of young girls and theorizing the complex interplay between their understandings of social class and how this becomes visible and manifests itself in various mechanisms of, and meanings about, inclusion, exclusion, pathology and normalization. Our attention to young females’ constitution of social class derives from a wider research project focused on the complex relationship and intersections between gender, femininity and social divisions such as class, race, sexuality and disability. This research concentrated on the way femininities are negotiated by young girls within their everyday lives and looked at their leisure practices and engagement with media. The findings from this study reinforced our contention that class certainly still matters and all its manifestations need to be explicated and addressed (Woodward et al., 2014). Subsequently, our focus herein is the subjective mechanisms through which middle-upper class femininity was made known and experienced, the way that social class is embodied and how this study of embodiment is ‘about culture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of being-in-the-world’ (Csordas, 1999: 143). Therefore, we hope to add to the reinvigorated conversations about class called for by Woodward et al. (2014) through our analysis of class as a key organizing principle for ‘producing the modes of subjectification and subjectivity’ (Walkerdine, 2003: 239) and the way subjectivities are ‘defined against those who are other/not-me’ (Bradley, 2014: 431).

The (Ir)Rationalities of Neoliberalism: ‘Future Girls’, ‘Top Girls’ and ‘Chavs’

Our understandings of the nuances of class-based embodied femininities are ground within an extant neoliberalism that provides the political/economic rationalities for social welfare ‘reforms’ in the UK. For Giroux (2001, 2005), the defining essence of the rationality of neoliberalism is the morbidity of the social sphere, evidenced from the hegemonic cynicism toward all things public and collective. Coming to the fore in the late 1970s and early 1980s after a not inconsiderable incubation period, within most Western democracies an alternative political philosophy was strategically advanced (especially through the Reagan/Thatcher era), prefigured on the need to dismantle the basic institutional components of the post-war social welfare consensus, and mobilize policies intended to extend market discipline, competition, and commodification throughout society (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Jessop, 2002). The corollary of this has been the rise of a virulent contempt for the very notion of social welfare provision accompanied by an equally pernicious and questioning attitude towards those who are its recipients. Within the United Kingdom, this has emerged in policy reforms such as the introduction of a cap on the amount of benefits working age people can receive and new rules on the size of state-provided accommodation in order to increase incentives for people to find work (see https://gov.uk). While the doses vary – an outcome of temporal, spatial, political and utterly contextual variations – the basic prescription of neoliberalism is the same: purge the system of obstacles to the functioning of free markets; celebrate the virtues of individualism (recast social problems as individual problems); foster economic self-sufficiency; abolish or weaken social programmes; include those marginalized into the labour market on the market’s terms (such as through the workfare scheme); and, criminalize the homeless and the urban poor (Giroux, 2005).

The dictates of neoliberalism incentivizes the subject to become the instigator of their own biography, modelling the responsible, flexible self as ‘enterprising, reflexive, autonomous and self-regulating’ (Hollingworth and Williams, 2009: 468). Through an ethic of self-discipline, subjects are expected to publicly perform their worth (‘correct life choices’) as evidence of their value; values which more often than not are represented in a symbolic manner that depicts or permits sameness and difference. In this regard, as Skeggs and Loveday (2012) proffer, the social subject themselves becomes a ‘site’ of their own investment – be that financial or in terms of time, material resources and aesthetic performance. This embodied ‘site’, a vessel or container of sorts, becomes a key location for understanding neoliberal class politics: the body represents an individual’s value, productivity, conformity and status, and speaks to a fluid conceptualization of class as an enduring subjective lived experience (Munt, 2000). In this sense, social class cannot be conceived in terms of objective empirical economic conditions alone (Archer and Francis, 2006; Vincent et al., 2010a, 2010b), it is writ large on our bodies, a part of the intimate private sphere that has now been marshalled into public spaces ‘for the operation of power, using it to reinforce arguments of normalcy against the ruptures of social and cultural tensions’ (Skeggs and Wood, 2008: 559). We are forwarding, therefore, a relational and complex understanding of social class whereby, at the same time that class is ‘denied, in talk of “classlessness”, its importance downplayed’ it is also ‘performed, played out, registered in numberless small nuances of interaction in every aspect of our daily lives’ (Bradley, 2014: 429–30).

Guided by the work of Harris (2004a, 2004b) and McRobbie (2007), we suggest that nowhere are these embodied class politics more apparent than when one looks towards what it means to be, and what is expected of, young women in Western capitalist soci-eties. Eloquently represented in the image of the ‘Future Girls’ and ‘Top Girls’ who are celebrated for their determination, their drive and ability to seize life chances, young women have been ‘constructed as the vanguard of [this] new subjectivity’ (Harris, 2004b: 1). ‘Future Girls’ and ‘Top Girls’ are both highly visible and valorized within books, television programmes, films, magazines and websites. This new privileged girl/subject is constructed as a powerful actor within free market imperatives and engenders a new language of affordances and freedoms to choose. Furthermore, she embodies a distinctively neoliberal subjectivity that strives for self-fulfilment, and demonstrates conduct of the self through monitoring, surveillance and self-investment (Harris, 2004a, 2004b). Yet, the multiple iterations of ‘can-do girl’ discourses offer up an individualized and often narrow reading of Westernized femininity. These are subjectivities wrought with struggles and contradictions, they are far from abstract and timeless impressions but are ‘embodied and historical . . . structured by other forms of inequality’ (Williams, 2013: 6).

Bound then within the context of the political and economic trajectories of neoliberalism, there appear to be disparate opportunities available for girls in education, employment and leisure. Such disparities are the preoccupation of the sociology of education, health and critical girl studies, drawing attention to the ways that articulations of classed femininities, whilst not necessarily new (see Allan and Charles, 2014), have been intensified and reconfigured in the neoliberal present. Our theoretical groundings are influenced by the ‘Bourdieusian understandings of social and cultural reproduction’ and physical/corporeal capital (Maxwell and Aggleton, 2014: 190) across these disciplines, and we hold these together with Nikolas Rose’s (1999) influential work on (self-) governance and conduct (or the conduct of conduct). In so doing, our analysis explores the embodied practices and dispositions that are deployed by the girls in their governance of the self as we aim to further understand the ruptures and tensions, as well as the coherences that appear within young girls’ accounts of embodied femininity as a classed subjectivity.

In the United Kingdom – and parodied in ‘the popular’ Vicky Pollard character in BBC television’s Little Britain series – it is the figure of the ‘chav’ that has become a vehicle for explicitly exhibiting ontological class antagonisms (Tyler, 2008). Lawler (2005a, 2005b) argues that the respectable, law abiding, forward looking and hard-working have been absorbed into the middle classes, consigning the ‘rough’, the ‘contagion’, to the outside where they become discursively constituted as passive, ‘work shy’, and welfare recipients. The visibility of this specific ‘other(ed)’ body is discursively constituted as a pejorative scar on the pristine neoliberal corpus; pathologized as being in need of regulation and governance on the basis of living in council housing, the use or threat of violence, their aesthetic value, but also the social cues they embody: accent, age, ‘(in)appropriate’ behaviour, eating habits. Indeed, such popularized iconography is ubiquitous; we hear references as part of mainstream vocabulary, and our politicians evoke them during interviews and in parliament (Jones, 2012). Accordingly within the balance of this article, we address the ways in which young girls occupy a ‘can do’ status and explicate how this serves to conceal, demonize and eviscerate those who ‘can’t do’. In so doing, we explore how class is inscribed on the young female body through celebrated, embodied performances and the concomitant discursive positioning, labelling and pathologization of the ‘other’.

Methods that Move

Data collection took place over a school term in 2010 with a group of 20 females aged between 12 and 13 years. The girls attended Franklin School, a private (fee-paying) school in the West of England and data were collected across a series of weekly ‘media and body image’ workshops as well as focus groups with the participants. This context is not insignificant methodologically or theoretically given a number of scholars have focussed on the ways in which young people’s subjectivities are sculpted in particularly ‘classed’ ways within schools (Allan and Charles, 2014; Maxwell and Aggleton, 2014; Ringrose, 2007). Similarly, we centralize these lived experiences but extend our analysis beyond school-girl subjectivities and the institutional setting and context of Franklin School. We do so given we see the school as one of many sites of educational process impacting the young girls’ everyday lives. As such, our approach is located at the crux of interrelations between the educative capacity of (popular) culture and that of institutions such as schools and colleges. Therefore, our methodology and analysis is not just about ‘subjectivity formation in school settings’ (Allan and Charles, 2014: 349); we embrace influences from public pedagogy that ensure we take seriously the multifarious ways in which young girls ‘learn’ – and are educated – about feminine performativity and ‘appropriate’ ways of being female (see Francombe, 2014). Our methods are reflective of this.

Each workshop session involved activities and guided discussion pertinent to the girls’ everyday lives and feminine subjectivities. For example, the girls talked readily about shopping, playing sport, using MSN messenger and Facebook, reading magazines, playing computer games, being a student at the school, being a sister, daughter, friend. The workshops were relaxed and informal and adapted, when necessary, to key emergent themes around gender, sexuality, social class, race and disability. The project utilized a range of innovative methodological practices designed specifically to engage young people – elsewhere we have discussed these as ‘methods that move’ (see Francombe, 2013). These methods ranged from dancing and playing Nintendo Wii games, to creating collages from magazines, writing narratives, making posters and drawing pictures, and the workshops were underscored by a climate of collaboration through which the girls became partners in the construction of knowledge.

As the girls engaged with the research activities, it was clear that they struggled to verbalize class inequality but were clear that ‘chavs’ were representative of ‘poor people’. In order to best capture their experiences and reflections and to enhance their comments and descriptions, this specific workshop was adapted to utilize drawing as a method as – when used appropriately – it appeals to young people’s skills and competencies (Punch, 2002). The lead researcher wanted to understand more about the way the Franklin School girls’ embodiment was contingent upon being different to the female ‘chav’ and so they were asked whether they would be able to/would like to draw two pictures, one of the ‘chav’ of which they so readily spoke and the other of themselves. They were then asked to clearly label these illustrations to show the differences and similarities. The written, spoken, and drawn data we present within this article are multi-layered, and our analysis here maps specifically the narratives around gender- and classed-based embodiment and is informed by Johnson et al.’s (2004) framework for dialogic textual analysis that examines the link between individual experiences and the social context. This analysis framework complemented the multiple data sources that were collected and allowed our interpretations to shift between the girls’ sculpting of a desirable subjectivity and our problematization of the ways in which this desirability was often discussed and experienced in relation to another subject formation. The pathological, deviant and symbolic ‘chav’ body was the terminology of choice through which the girls demonized, and differentiated themselves from, the working classes. Subsequently, in our analysis we interrogate how, through the mobilization and embodiment of class-based femininity, the Franklin School girls carved out a space in which to understand, preserve and legitimate their middle-upper class subjectivity while simultaneously demarcating the working class body. By way of order, our analysis is focussed on the way in which embodied class femininities are comprised of careful and conscious negotiation of the aesthetic presentation of the self, conduct and behavioural decisions, consumptive practices and educational and life choices.

Embodied Femininities: Aesthetic Presentation of Self

There are chavs, chav chavs, nasty chavs, funny chavs, upper-class chavs, chavs you can be friends with, chavs cos [sic] of what they buy, and us. (Monique, workshop 5)

Within this section, we explore how these young girls struggled with both their own desire to embody normalized and ‘appropriate’ femininity and, how in their attempts to legitimate and rationalize their bodies, they affectively conceptualized and demonized an ‘inappropriate’ body politic (the white ‘chav other’) ¹ that was in need of regulation and governance. At times this process of differentiation was articulated explicitly, however at other times working class femininity was (re)established and (re)constituted through silence and omission. As Walkerdine (2003: 246) notes, ‘everything that is not present in this performance contains that other narrative, the narrative of being “Other”, now pushed into the place opposite to the position she … holds’. Therefore, through the figurative ‘other’ – the ‘chav’ – the middle-upper class girl of the neoliberal present was brought into being. Young girls have been (re)established as smart consumers (Harris, 2004b) of both product and lifestyle due to their positioning as the new citizens of the neoliberal moment (Harris, 2004a, 2004b) and Bourdieu’s work around capital, tastes and dispositions has been fundamental to the integration of social class and consumption (Holt and Griffin, 2005). Like the girls in Maxwell and Aggleton’s (2014) research, the Franklin School girls’ projects of the ‘normalized’ self were shaped, materially and discursively, through resources and dispositions; consumption was aligned to a display of ‘normal’ middle-upper class femininity and so shopping and consuming were politicized expressions of self. But as McRobbie (1997) cautions, the invitation to consume does not address all women and consumption takes on new value when correct choices have to be made with regard to the presentation of the self. The intense regulation of the individual through this rhetoric makes docile and productive the ‘proper’ consumer-citizen and renders those who make ‘inappropriate’ consumptive choices as pathological (Allen and Osgood, 2009).

Class can be read into fashion styles and, consistent with popular conceptions and representations, the girls identified ‘chavs’ according to the clothes they buy and wear (Hayward and Yar, 2006). Class was therefore embodied and read through the multiple stylizations of the self that the girls proffered; indeed the ‘chav body’ was also seen as stylized and sculpted through consumption. The tracksuit, for example, became an artefact of biopolitical performativity as it operated to speak to, and tell stories of, localized class struggles. Wearing a tracksuit took on political significance when it was construed as inauthentic in comparison to the taken-for-granted ‘norms’ of middle-upper class style (Tyler, 2008). The ‘authenticity’ of a ‘cheap puff jacket, cheap tracky’ (Stephie) was called into question on the basis of choice. The girls’ (unassuming) individualized responsibilization suggested that the way one dresses, styles their hair and applies their make-up operates as a means of distinguishing between females: (re)establishing a normative consumptive middle-class. With Jones (2012: 9), these utterances of difference, which hinged on negative traits associated with the ‘chav’ aesthetic, became indicative of ‘pure class contempt’. This ‘contempt’ was displayed through what we term a language of excess that, in conjunction with a preoccupation with the fake and unnatural, discursively implied inferior taste that was not only different to the middle-upper class ‘norm’ but was a vulgar impersonation of it. By way of demonstrating this assertion, we turn to the girls’ stories (verbal/drawn/written) given they are suggestive of this process of ‘otherization’. By establishing a clear and stable understanding of ‘us’ and ‘them’, the middle-upper class girl located the self (herself) as legitimate, authentic and respectable. Nowhere was this more evident than when analysing the annotations that accompanied their drawn images of classed femininity (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Illustration produced during a workshop.

The language of excess, and the commodified aesthetic, is extended here through the use of dualisms related to fake and cheap versus ‘normal’, nice and expensive. Within these images the girls emphasized certain visual and narrative signifiers that functioned in multifaceted ways to explicitly highlight the ‘flaws’ of the working class body (Hollingworth and Williams, 2009). Being extremely hyper feminine, and some might say a hyper (hetero)sexual female (Skeggs, 2005), was considered undesirable or excessive by the girls. Indeed, pushing the body to excess was considered critically, as Nina suggested, ‘It’s nice to have your hair back and more natural, but then having it back and then loads of make-up doesn’t look very nice’. The ‘chav’ body was a figure that was ‘pretty, but they emphasize it too much’ (Charlotte) and they had traversed beyond the boundaries of the ideal. Comparisons between the fake (shoe and clothing brands, use of lots of make-up and fake tan) and authentic (natural, pretty) were frequent and imbued the ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ as dualistic class sensitive differentials. For example, India’s assertion that the working class girl would be wearing ‘thick make up’ whilst a middle-upper class female (herself) would utilize ‘natural make up’, reinforced this binary between respectful, stylish and then excessive overindulgence. With Smith Maguire and Stanway (2008: 72), comments such as this ‘signal aspirations to a more self-assured, socially-competent, adult mode of embodiment’ that is the antithesis of the inferior taste and style of the lower class girl (Tyler and Bennett, 2010).

Embodied Femininities: Conduct and Behaviour

Clothing, as the initial point of reference in the aesthetic presentation of self, intersected with other narratives around conduct and behaviour that relationally framed the girls’ ‘knowledge’ of the working classes. Drawing directly from the girls’ dialogue, working class femininities were understood as different in terms of the perceived threat of violence, being tough, engaging in age ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, and the spatial dimensions within which these performances occurred. Following Skeggs (2004), the girls utilized technologies of knowledge – albeit knowledge of the working class as dangerous, uncontrollable and unmanageable – to locate working class activities and conduct as different to their own middle-upper class lives:

Building on their ‘knowledge’ of working class behaviour, the girls viewed the working class body as denoting a threat and therefore inviting a fearful response:

This assumed unproductive, irrational behaviour that warranted the moral gaze, was once more reconfigured as a lived experience of class through the distanciation established between us (the middle-upper class girls) and them (the ‘chav’). Returning to the girls’ invocation of the tracksuit, or more accurately in this instance, the distinctive performativity of ‘wearing’ the tracksuit, we can see the wider multidimensional becomings of class-based embodied femininities:

Through condemning the embodiment of the wrong type of ‘hoodie’, Roxy, Paris and Lottie drew on the popular rhetoric of the ‘tracksuit hood’ as symbolic of the out of control and unruly (Wyer and Calvini, 2011). Simultaneously they troubled these understandings by highlighting their own ‘correct’ and ‘proper’ conduct when wearing a ‘hoodie’, despite the irony of their previous damning critique of wearing a tracksuit. Therefore, the tracksuit operated as a site for the conspicuous display of, and discrepancies between, class-based femininities. The classed body was read through both the material hoodie and the girls’ preferential reaction to its emblazoned Franklin School logo as opposed to ‘Superdry tracksuits’ ² (Aqua). In distinguishing between clothing in such a manner, the epitome of neoliberalism – the middle-upper class young girl – was made visible and known according to a rational, entrepreneurial, autonomous self (Allen and Osgood, 2009). The antithesis, the misbehaving (smoking, drinking and getting ‘into drugs’ [Lottie]) ‘chav’ behaviour was deemed inappropriate, especially for girls of their age. By readily defining and ascribing value and meaning to the excesses of the body and behaviour of the working class female, bodily performance was constantly scrutinized and located in terms that became comprehensible for the girls and their lives and experiences. Moreover, such embodied conduct and ‘irresponsible’ behaviour is, according to the Franklin School girls, radically localized.

In this sense, it is not just people who are deemed in need of regulation; places (often those that contain the working classes) are also perceived to be unproductive and subject to market-led regeneration (Paton et al., 2012). The cartographies of embodied class dispositions featured heavily in the girls’ ‘knowledge’ as they articulated a quite lean, mean and divisive social and cultural geography. That is, the spatial imaginaries conjured by the girls are emergent technologies of governance (Fusco, 2007) that offer powerful pedagogies through which bodies and subjectivities are spatially (re)organized. Indeed, for the girls, an immoral urban landscape (Fusco, 2007) connoted class antagonisms and heralded consequences by association for those who were located there. The workshop narratives below reveal the surveying of these places and those who frequent them:

In locating the body and its behaviour as integral to the production of place, classed subjectivities were (re)established based on their position within the city, moreover these seemingly passing observations simultaneously concealed and spoke to certain national concerns over an inferred threat to the social order that is conjured by youth hanging around on street corners, in bus shelters and sprawled in shop doorways (Hall et al., 1999). These places – and the bodies that inhabit them – are politically and theoretically inscribed and highlight the lack of productivity and deviance often attributed to working class youth. In drawing upon the ‘other’ as now both corporeally and spatially identifiable and contained, the girls located themselves as distinct from ‘them on the streets’ (Monique). Of note was the girls’ own position within these discussions; instead of themselves being situated in these places, they were always mobile, ‘driving through this quite chavvy place’ (Charlotte). For these girls, embodied class dispositions were not just spatial they were also temporal; their position was always only temporary, their mobility allowed them to gaze upon the (immobile) ‘other’ and skirt around the boundaries of the ‘exotic’ serving to maintain class-based fixidity in space. With Reay (2006) and Holt and Griffin (2005), urban place, and the ability or not to negotiate place, was an important resource in the young female repertoire that enabled the establishment of the sort of girl ‘I am’ and the sort of girl ‘I am not’.

Embodied Femininities: The Politics of Consumption

Overwhelmingly the need to categorize certain cultural practices and certain bodies overshadowed the nuanced experiences of young girls growing up in Britain. As with smoking and drinking alcohol, dietary behaviours were constructed in particular ways with particular consequences for young girls. Wrong consumptive choices were critically encountered when they emphasized, rather than concealed, evidence of what the girls considered abhorrent excessive corporeality (Tyler and Bennett, 2010):

Centralized around wrong consumption choices that exposed excessive flesh, the girls critiqued the ‘soft body’ (Jeffords, 1994), the superfluous flesh of the working class female. Excessive flesh was considered to be a corporeal confession of femininity gone bad, embodiment at its most ‘inappropriate’ that conjured notions of the ‘unproductive body that has been and continues to be overly reliant on the welfare state’ (Rail and Lafrance, 2009: 75). The girls’ affective responses (feeling sick) to seeing ‘fat squashing out’ speaks to the inescapable and dominant, indeed global, health discourses that surround the body and its size that have become narrowly read in class terms. The discursive reconstitution of the ‘other’ body and the vilification of fat are, however, situated alongside the girls’ continual references back to their own bodies and their own middle-upper class tastes and dispositions. The girls eagerly managed their own slenderness in a quest to embody a distinctly different corporeality as Aqua made clear:

I don’t mind being quite small but I am always like consciously worried that I am going to get fat. Cause [sic] I think because I’m quite petite at the moment I think and that’s fine, but I am always worried that I will get fat … I’m always scared that’s going to happen

The Franklin School girls were conspicuous in their consumption of food and controlled their calorie intake and physical exertion in order to maintain their slender bodies, reconcile body dissatisfaction and avoid, at all costs, a ‘fat’ body representative of deviance (Francombe, 2014):

The girls not only positioned themselves as different in terms of body shape and size, they also purported pseudo expertise in terms of diet. This allowed them to highlight bodily excess resulting from ‘inappropriate’ eating behaviours as well as rationalize the challenge to slender middle-upper class embodiment posed by the underweight working class ‘other’:

The dichotomy between the working class girl as too skinny or too fat was repeated throughout the workshop, provoking the lead researcher (LR) to ask:

The variegated sizes of female bodies were lost in the girls’ analysis; they saw no space for a working class girl in ‘the middle’. This middle ground, this normative space was reserved for them, for their bodies. As the conversation continued, the rationale they had for prescribing such extreme body differences unfolded:

This extract, whilst not exhaustive, directs our attention to the theoretical intricacies of class, the messiness of its boundaries, and how the biopolitical becomes manifest and understood at the level of the symbolic (Skeggs, 2004). In attending to the potential structural forces that impact upon the lived experiences of a working class female subject, Roxy’s comments – regarding McDonalds as opposed to home cooking as the only viable culinary option – drew upon and contested obesity, diet and health as being purely medical concerns, speaking instead to a number of social determinants of health (for example, the location of fast food restaurants within certain areas of cities and the price and [un]availability of fresh food). Nevertheless, the political significance of these comments are less understood, somewhat unsurprisingly given the neoliberal reinvention of ‘welfare’ speaks to choice, personal accountability, consumerism, and, self-empowerment while masking the very social forces that position people into the dejected borderlands of consumer capitalism (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). Poverty was read onto the body and into the diet and consumption behaviours of the working class; size a sign of deprivation and limited economic resource. Likewise, the resulting fatness (or other bodily abnormalities) resulting from a perceived apathy to cook was exclaimed upon by the girls – ‘sometimes they can’t be bothered to cook’ (Eva) – and seen as being proof of, and producing, laziness, lack of willpower, responsibility, effort and a failure of self-esteem rather than configured around structural inequalities. As such the girls embodied the ideal neoliberal citizen – the middle-upper class girl (themselves) – governed by free will and consumer choice, in relation to their discursive invocation of ‘chavs’ unable to cope with the endless freedom on offer. The bodies the girls deemed abject – because they are too fat, too thin, making the wrong consumptive choices, exposing fleshy excesses – are understood within a neoliberal conjuncture that not only produces self-disciplined citizens, but, for sustenance (of the body proper), requires their lazy fat or skinny nemesis (Sender and Sullivan, 2008).

Forms of biopolitical governance associated with diet and weight management were considered fundamental to the sculpting of the ethical self and accrued value upon/for the classed female body. Whereas the body conceived by Charlotte as being somewhere in the ‘middle’ was evidence of the moral worth of the individual and a display of the correct investment in the self, Skeggs (2005) notes that this imperativeness towards the ethically complete self is neither garnered in the same way nor possible for all. Rather, failures attributed to diseases of the will (Skeggs, 2005) render more visible the choices the working class have made; particularly when an implicit condition of their citizenship is an ability to reflect upon, work on and organize their lives and themselves through everyday techniques of self-governance (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). These everyday forms of self-governance are directed – or conducted in Nikolas Rose’s parlance – by an array of other practices for shaping identities and forms of life; from advertising, marketing, the multiple stylizations of the act of purchasing, cinemas, videos, pop music, lifestyle magazines, television soap operas, advice programs, talk shows, and, reality television. We are talking here about technologies that operate as ‘extensions of the logic of the marketplace that socialize individualized subjects and discipline the noncompliant’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 390, emphasis added). Of course, and what is conveniently forgotten from these corporatized, political rationalities – in the concerted attempts to make seemingly unproductive people and places productive, and to transform problem people into sites of ‘active consumption and responsible citizenship’ (Paton et al., 2012: 1470) – is any referent to the structural conditions that created, and sustain, class inequalities.

Embodied Femininities: Education and Life Choices

The school environment operated discursively as the girls learnt contextually specific expectations of female embodiment. The value given to education was recognized as a central symbol of self-investment for ‘the ideal subjects of the new socioeconomic order’ (Harris, 2004b: 97). Similar to Allan and Charles’ (2014) findings, Franklin School, an elite privately funded school, was a key site to ‘work on the self’ in class contingent ways and the girls re-established education as a form of entrepreneurial investment in the self which could either be championed or disengaged. The Franklin School girls considered educational (dis)investment as a ‘choice’ to be made and from their position of privilege (Maxwell and Aggleton, 2014) demonized ‘chavs’ for devaluing education:

Paris and Roxy reworked educational opportunity from a problem needing state provision – educational underachievement as a moral hazard – towards a problem of work ethic, individual productivity and aspiration (Carabine, 2007). Discourses of responsibilization were palpable through the utilization of nouns such as ‘option’ and the impression that ‘it’s their life’. Within these discourses of individualism, there was little scope allocated for the structural dynamics that may have ‘socialised their non-participating peers’ out of education (Rich, 2005: 502). Consequently, the girls’ irritation around female ‘chavs’ sabotaging their education can be read in terms of the personalized role of education in their own lives. For the girls, institutional capital derived from educational achievement – attendance even – surfaced as the first step in a normalized life trajectory; educational achievement was equated with employment and a disengagement from the former inevitably meant a lack of job prospects or motivation to find work. As a result, a middle-upper class moralizing gaze that was cast over education was soon extended to career options. Indeed, and as a recurrent theme across the data, there was a normative expectation around work and (un)employment, one that hinged on the individual’s dedication to the self as a project to be worked upon. This is depicted in Robin’s drawings (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Illustrations from workshop.

The images distinguish, define and attribute middle-upper class value to specific practices and persons, making the schema of moral value apparent and identifying people in need of transformation (Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008). Such sentiments were epitomized by Joanna’s proposition that the working class girl is brought up in a household where the ‘Dad does not have no job, mum deal with drugs’. Comparatively, her own experiences were characterized by her mum and dad having ‘very good jobs’. This promotion of personal accountability and correct conduct is all too easily located in contemporary welfare and benefit reform and resultant popularized representations of unethical citizenship: ‘undeserved’ finance in the form of social benefits, and/or illegal narcotics/alcoholism. In this sense, the images are located within a wider discourse that names, shames and makes discernable those without the moral fortitude to live a ‘normal’ neoliberal life. The ‘chav’ girl, in Robin’s image, is one discursively constituted as a ‘problem’ to be justifiably managed, an immoral non-productive ‘other’ who is subject to control and exclusion. Blame and responsibility for an ‘unhealthy’ body lie firmly at her feet, she is a personal moral failure instantly held in comparison to the reconstruction of their own ‘normal’, idealized, aspired to embodiment.

Moreover, such moral failures were infused with discourses of teenage pregnancy and motherhood. The girls afforded both ‘chavs’ and ‘normal’ girls the dispensary to ‘choose’ how they spent their time; but these ‘choices’ ultimately served a distinctive purpose as they marked out, individualized and cast moralizing judgements over certain conduct. Roxy’s pictorial representation (see Figure 3) of working class femininity was inclusive of ‘thought bubbles’ denoting what these young women might be choosing to do. In scrutinizing this it is possible to see where the discrepancies may lie for the middle-upper class girl, she is a figure who is brought into existence via her opposition to a lifestyle of going out on the town, taking the baby to nursery, paying off debt and a mortgage. In essence, Roxy conceived this alternative lifestyle as distinct from her own class preferences – a preoccupation with school and the ‘choice’ to postpone motherhood until the completion of her education.

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Figure 3.

Illustrations from workshop.

Underpinned by a distinct classed-based moralizing, educational value and the desire to avoid teenage pregnancy were conflated such that – and we are guided by Roxy’s images here – they become synonymous with an embodied working class subjectivity. Interpreting these written, drawn and spoken conceptions of classed femininity reveals how their knowledge reconstituted the working class girl as mother. Articulated within a climate of contempt and disapproval, the teenage mother was deemed to be symbolic of failed working class femininity and a significant indicator of how divergent the embodied femininities of the Franklin School girls were:

Pregnancy at a young age was discursively constructed as an obstacle to embodying their ‘Future Girl’ subjectivities (Harris, 2004b). The cultural imperative to discount young motherhood as a valid life choice is itself representative of a political climate that seeks to minimize, reduce or eradicate characteristics of youth deemed to disrupt their ability to work such as school avoidance and/or low educational achievement, criminality and teenage pregnancy (Carabine, 2007). Indeed, the Department of Communities, Schools and Families’ Policy strategy (DCSF, 2010) operates as a form of pernicious discursively -based governance suggesting that ‘young people have the knowledge and skills to make safe and healthy choices’. Wrong choices – or ‘poor outcomes’ – would lead, according to the Policy, to health, emotional and well-being concerns, and the likelihood of long-term poverty. The report is clearly indicative of the workfare, as opposed to welfare, state (McRobbie, 2000) and calls upon teenagers (particularly female teenagers) to manage and monitor themselves – their bodies – responsibly and in a manner that does not detract from their productivity in work place/education settings. Not unlike this political rhetoric, the young girls themselves readily identified the pregnancies as untimely:

And then umm, you see the really young people walking around with this like five year old kid. It’s like, what are you doing? You can’t have a five year old kid when you’re that young. (Roxy)

Perhaps more so than in the other emergent discourses construed by the girls in this study, the ‘othering’ that was predicated upon the young mother or the pregnant teenager was emblematic of the ways in which class coalesced around tensions related to young femininity and power. Working-class pregnancy was seen by the girls to disrupt both the heteronormative family nexus and, as noted previously, the normalized life trajectory of a female in contemporary society – a pathway through education, career, marriage, and then family. Following Bettie (2003), these prospective stages towards motherhood can be seen to adhere to a normalized, neoliberal ‘ideal’ of extended adolescence via extended education. The decision to be made was not whether or not to have a baby but rather when the ‘(in)appropriate’ time was to do so. ‘Inappropriate’ decisions were relocated from being a social problem to one of individual failure and irresponsible citizenship, such that a historical trend towards working class youth entering adult roles before their middle-upper class peers was constructed as their own individual failings and inadequacies.

Coda

Within this article, we have drawn attention to how a group of young girls who occupy a position of privilege remade their own normalized classed bodies and reconstituted ‘otherness’ through moralizing corporeal judgements. Our aim was to contribute to the recently reignited debates around the supposed decline of class-based inequalities in a neoliberal era and/or the need for a reconfiguration of class in light of recent economic and political transformations (Woodward et al., 2014). We have done this through empirically-based interpretations of classed power relations and both celebrated and pathologized embodied femininities. Our analysis is suggestive of the ways in which the girls embodied middle-upper class femininity and of the euphemistic transference (Bromley, 2000) that focused, in the main, their knowledge to a homogenous, restrictive and omnipresent – mediated – cultural icon: the ‘chav’. Further, and through an understanding of class as complex, multifaceted, relational and reconstituted through a distinctive language of bodily excess, we interrogated the ways that the working class female’s body and conduct was engaged and ‘called upon’ in the management of an individual’s behaviour and productivity. In this respect, we pointed towards the ways in which a class aesthetic was used as a means of differentiating between females – between an ‘(in)appropriate’ body politic – and operated as a central mechanism through which the young Franklin School girls established their own, and ‘othered’, subjectivities.

With Rose (1999), the girls’ ‘knowledge’ and the aspersions cast on working class bodies are ground within practices and technologies of the self through which conduct is conducted. Shaped around a somatic body ontology founded on the monitoring of bodily information (Monahan and Wall, 2007; Rich, 2011), the girls learned their own bodies – and by corollary demonized ‘others’ – through an assemblage of neoliberal technologies and dispositions that act to monitor, manage, control, and reshape classed bodies in the production of complicit and productive neoliberal citizens. Weaved throughout the girls’ experiences and wider circulating body narratives was a moralizing tone that pitched the formation of the ‘new’ self-sufficient and productive young woman against her antithesis, a non-conforming, unproductive abject body perceived as not be(long)ing. This is not to suggest that the girls necessarily understood the deep-rooted structural inequalities about which they spoke, nor the historical patterns of struggle, judgements and assumptions that they invoked when they apologized for stereotyping or making generalizations. Such an apologetic consciousness may temper some of our conclusions, yet recourse to neoliberal discourses of autonomy and self-responsibility were pervasive throughout the workshop and focus groups. For instance looking and/or behaving in a certain ‘inappropriate’ way – read a working class way – was considered solely a matter of choice (Harris, 2004b).

For Henry Giroux (2003: 195) social class, as a matter of societal consideration, has become negated under neoliberalism as issues of civic value have become privatized. This individualized culture of blame breeds derision in which class is reworked and in some instances relabelled in ways that efface the inequitable realities of the present. The social realities of the ‘Future Girl’, ‘Top Girl’ and ‘Cosmo Girl’ (Allan and Charles, 2014; Harris, 2004a; McRobbie, 2007) have been shown throughout this article to be located at the intersection of gender and class. Borrowing from Harris, these discourses obscure entrenched patterns of classed hierarchies and privilege middle-upper class femininity as more virtuous and respectable. This is perhaps most vehemently felt when social class is silenced or invisible. As was outlined at the outset, the ‘chav’ became the terminology par excellence to describe working class femininity and the ‘chav’ was deemed to be a victim of their own lack of will and poor ‘choices’ rather than disadvantaged by a nexus of social inequalities. Therefore, social class was visible – through the body of the ‘chav’ – yet unremarkable as the girls did not possess exacting vocabulary or reflexivity to comprehend class-based inequality or stigmatization. Even when questioned by the lead researcher and asked to imagine alternative realities that are more inclusive (Francombe, 2013), the girls still re-established the dominant pre-conditions of neoliberalism – their embodied positionality emblematic of the ways that individualization and self-production are stratifying and undermine attempts to counter marginalization within Western social agendas.

The insidious nature of class politics became writ large on the body; and the girls read class as an aesthetic presentation of the self that legitimated mocking, regulation, governance and surveillance. As a consequence, the normalized middle-upper class girl, celebrated for success in education, employment and financial security prior to (assumed) motherhood, was regulated by, and relational to, the ‘other’, pathological figure of humour – the young ‘chav’ mum (Skeggs, 1997, 2004; Tyler, 2008). This is a body conceived as a drain on the welfare system and in need of constant surveillance and regulation. In this sense, the constitution of their own young, slender, schooled, healthy body politic operates as a form of ocular authoritarianism that renders even more visible, and subject to control, those bodies whom are deemed or perceived to threaten normalized, healthy bodies and social practices (Silk and Andrews, 2008).