Abstract
This article draws upon theories of performance and (sub)cultural capital to explore the intersections of class identity and urban spatial practices. Based on interviews and participant observation, this contemporary ethnography explores how some young adults experience the stigmatized neighborhoods of East Vancouver, Canada, imbuing their spatial identifications with subcultural significance and class meaning. Interviewees’ spatial and embodied relationships with East Vancouver reveal a complex articulation of class positioning involving “East Van” pride, class denial, spatial performances and anxieties over class location.
The interactive processes and cultural underpinnings that (re)produce and perpetuate class differences are increasingly of import to sociologists interested in inequality and social class (e.g., Bennett et al. 2010; Bettie 2000; Bourdieu 1984; Hall 1997; Langford 2013; Reay 1997; Schwalbe et al. 2000; Stuber 2006). For instance, Schwalbe et al. (2000) argue that attention to localized perceptions, experiences, reactions to (and I would add enactments of) cultural practices have the potential to contribute to larger or extralocal understandings of the social reproduction of inequality. Likewise, sociologists drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and cultural capital have informed class analysis through their explorations of “class cultures as modes of differentiation” (Langford 2013, 328) and the cultural practices that serve to reproduce, maintain, and obscure social hierarchies (e.g., Bennett et al. 2010; Bettie 2000; Savage 2000). Tom Langford (2013), who traces the trajectory of class analysis in Canadian Review of Sociology, notes that sociological engagements with Bourdieusian approaches to class analysis within Canada are minimal and perceives an opportunity for sociologists to fill this gap. Following such a trajectory in considering localized perceptions and cultural practices, this article draws on an ethnographic study to explore the dynamics of place and social class in an East Vancouver nightlife dance scene in British Columbia, Canada (from 2005 to 2006), illuminating the ways in which understandings of class are unstable and can have multiple meanings: as it is displaced, erased, and reconfigured symbolically and culturally by some young people that live, play, and move through the stigmatized neighborhoods of East Vancouver at that time.
Symbolic and cultural negotiations of social class are explored here with some attention to performance, as a means to examine a distinct link between spatial identifications and anxieties around class and enactments of “East Van.” To date, the performativity of class is underdiscussed in performance studies literature and its related fields of scholarship (see Murphy 2012 for a more detailed discussion), yet has much to offer social and cultural theory. This paper links performance to concepts of habitus and (sub)cultural capital in order to contribute to sociocultural understandings of the complexity of identity and class positioning in contemporary urban space.
More specifically, the subsequent sections draw from ethnographic data to argue that while working-class status is a material reality for many participants in the study, class identity is often denied, and is also sometimes a performed and performative practice. In other words, while many interviewees proudly identify with East Vancouver as intertwined with their experiences of being working-class, “East Van” status (linked to both aesthetics and social location) is described by some interviewees as a performance. The discourse of performance reveals anxieties around articulations of social class in particular and risks an alignment with neoliberal rhetoric that characterizes social location as a matter of choice rather than a material and social reality that limits experiences, choices, and expressions. Though performances vary, the body remains a site where membership is inscribed; various cultural practices (such as hair styles, clothing, transportation, and leisure dance preferences) indicate community affinity and differentiation (though often transient), suggest class membership, and also signify place: East Vancouver. East Vancouver offers some interviewees a sense of place, visibly enacted at many of their events; however, this relationship is fraught with both tension and social power. The paper begins with a discussion of how concepts of performativity are useful to understandings of social class, and then turns to participants’ subjective relationships with East Vancouver to examine their complex articulations of class positioning. Participants’ comments cover “East Van” pride, class denial, spatial performances, and anxieties over class location. 1 The following section posits the concepts of (sub)cultural capital, performance, and performativity as useful to the study of class and spatial practices.
Constituting Class(lessness)
In Distinction (1984), Bourdieu argues that those that dominate in the economic sphere also dominate culturally and ideologically, engaging with and imposing their own means of cultural production and symbolic systems. Preferences in taste and style, part of the many forms of what he terms cultural capital, can be used to facilitate hierarchical differentiation. Cultural capital can be converted or translated to symbolic value—wherein status, recognition, resources, and/or prestige may be accrued. This works to essentially legitimize the social order as innate or natural while reproducing social hierarchies. Cultural capital is also embodied as a form of habitus, as bodily dispositions and practices adapted through experience of the social world. According to Bourdieu (1984), habitus is key to social reproduction, as it is through the embodiment of social structures that social domination becomes focused on the body; different social groups have different habitus. While distinctive dispositions are embodied, often preserved across generations, they do not emerge from a central core or essence. In other words, though embodied, class taste is not innate, but rather performative, in that it repeats a fiction of (class-based) bodily truth.
Bourdieu’s concepts are relevant to the study of subcultures, particularly through the application of what Thornton (1996) has termed subcultural capital. Operating in a similar manner to Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, subcultural capital refers to insider cultural knowledge, a sense of “being in the know” that has currency in terms of status. For example, this account by an interviewee (a member of the non-mainstream dance scene introduced in the following sections) exemplifies the characteristics of “being in the know”: I think people are more willing to talk to other people I guess in indie nights because there’s like—“Oh you knew about this place?” It’s in the know. . . . Whereas somebody at the Roxy [a mainstream nightclub] is like some yokel that likes meeting everybody.
Such a position of subcultural power, the possession of knowledge as to how and where to act, serves to both exclude those who do not possess it and to unify those who do. Participants within this study simultaneously embody (through dance, movement, and spatial navigation) and utilize (through symbolic representational modes such as clothing and music) specific ways of being, through the application of subcultural capital. Sarah Thornton, in her examination of dance culture ideology, argues that “subcultural capital is the linchpin of an alternative hierarchy in which axes of age, gender, sexuality and race are all employed in order to keep the determinations of class, income and occupation at bay. Interestingly, the social logic of subcultural capital reveals itself most clearly by what it dislikes and by what it emphatically isn’t (not that I’m part of it)” (1996, 105).
This follows Mike Savage’s (2000) discussion of class cultures in Britain as “modes of differentiation.” He notes that though contemporary collective class characteristics are tenuous, “people continue to define their own individual identities in ways which inevitably involve relational comparisons with members of various classes” (p. xiii). Drawing on the concept of habitus, he explains that social class is “implicit, as encoded in people’s sense of self-worth and in their attitudes to and awareness of others—in how they carry themselves as individuals” (p. 107). By social class I refer to a group of people who share experiences/perspectives arising from their economic and cultural position within a stratified society (Bourdieu 1984; Goode and Maskovsky 2001; Hall 1997). In this study, social class is materially based, yet it is also both performed and revealed as performative, as a persistent mode of distinction.
Class and Performativity
Concepts of (sub)cultural capital which are useful to an analysis of how social structures are embodied is complementary to theories of performativity; together, they offer a way to explore how class enactments can both instantiate class inequality or, alternately, draw attention to the fiction of the internal innateness of class difference. To clarify, while performativity involves an unintentional citation (repetitions of acts that constitute the fiction of a stable identity—such as gender) that proceeds, exceeds, and constrains a subject (Butler 1990), performance is a contained or bounded act, an intentional action. However, normative and/or transformative citational practices of performativity are also always a part of performance. Though concepts of performativity have been useful to understandings of gender and sexuality, and later, racial and ethnic subjectivities (see for instance Bettie 2000; Fusco 1995; Joseph 1998; Muñoz 1999; Case et al. 1995), theorizations of class as performative are fewer. Julie Bettie (2000), however, does just this. Bettie (2000) links Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to Butler’s theory of performativity by bringing the study of class performance to the nonwork identities of female youth. In doing so, she complicates the relationship between class identity and class symbolism. Bettie argues that “class can be conceptualised as performative in that there is no interior difference (innate and inferior ‘intelligence’ or ‘taste,’ for example) that is expressed; rather institutionalized class inequality creates class subjects who perform, or display, differences in cultural capital” (2000, 11, italics in original). She points out that though class subject positions have been a central theme within subcultural studies of youth cultures, it has often been to the exclusion of thinking about race, ethnicity, and gendered subject positions, and, conversely, though gender has been central within studies of performance, attention to class has been relatively minimal. Women, in particular, have not been thought about as class subjects, and this is made most evident when the rubric of “youth” culture stands in for “male.” Thus, Bettie locates the need for a performance-based gendered analysis of class and also racial/ethnic subjectivities (something she herself does, as does Wilkens 2008). Such an analysis lends itself to this study for, as interviewee responses (the majority of them female) reveal, their leisure practice draws heavily upon subcultural capital and class-based symbolism. Vancouver’s Eastside streets, houses, and bars become performative sites during the study period, which enable shared enactments of cultural and class belonging, just as particular subjectivities and performances emerge through interviewees’ relationship to the city spaces of East Vancouver.
Ethnographic Parameters and Method
The following exploration stems from a two-year ethnographic research project on dance and nightlife carried out in Vancouver, BC, Canada from 2005 to 2006. The research involved 24 months of participant observation and 25 open-ended in-depth interviews with a group of young men and women between the ages of 19 and 33 who shared identification with an artistic community centered in East Vancouver, enjoyed dancing, and attended non-mainstream leisure venues that catered to this particular scene. Group members shared some practices (particularly in terms of leisure) and also some norms and values, hence the term “youth” is employed in this paper in reference to their status as a youth culture or subculture (though informal and unnamed), rather than in reference to participants’ age. The majority of interviewees were “working-class educated” (McDermott 2004, 180), white, heterosexual women. Participants were asked to self-identify their class, age, race/ethnicity and sexual preference, and these descriptors are drawn upon in the article. Occupation, education level, and family formation were also requested. The majority of the people interviewed self-identified as white or as of western European heritage, while four interviewees self-identified as Asian, Black, Chilean, and Mexican, respectively. All interviewees identified as heterosexual. Just over half of the interviewees identified as working-class (more than half of them were from single-parent families) and most worked (or attempted to work) in the lower rungs of the art and culture fields, while often juggling their “day” jobs within the low-skilled and low-paying service sector. Just over half of the participants were in the process of or had completed a university degree and all had completed high school. At the time of the study, the majority of the participants resided in East Vancouver, British Columbia. This particular article is about participants’ identifications with East Vancouver and understandings of social class rather than nightlife or leisure dance practice, even though these themes initiated the original study as a means to understanding participants’ everyday cultural experiences.
Participants in this study created their own “sense of place” (Rose 1995, 87–132) as they struggled for alternate leisure spaces outside of Vancouver’s mainstream entertainment district, sometimes transforming the intended function of spaces to suit their needs, as is common in youth subcultures (Glass 2012, 702). East Vancouver, the place of residence for the majority of interviewees, was also the primary location of their leisure practices where they frequented a range of formal and informal mostly run-down sites such as down-market venues and pubs, makeshift art galleries, warehouse spaces, house parties, and public spaces such as alleys. Participant observation took place at twenty-one of these venues. Only one of the twenty-one spaces could be described as a dance club, even though dancing took place at all of the sites at some point (often as an event). Because the sites were so diverse, capacity ranged from fifty to three hundred people depending on how formal the venue was.
Participant observation at these twenty-one venues aided me in identifying initial interviewees who were approached based on their regular attendance and participation at such events. More than half of the sample included regular participants, the other portion of participants were recruited through snowball sampling. Participants were provided with confidentiality and anonymity. 2 All interviewees attended dance nights primarily located in East Vancouver, participating to varying degrees within a scene closely tied to East Vancouver. It is important to note, however, that while many interviewees lived in and/or identified with East Vancouver, this was not the case for all of the participants.
At the time of the study, I shared a partial semblance of cultural similarity with respondents as an educated, white woman from East Vancouver with a working-class background who had, on occasion, frequented some research sites socially. This proved useful for recruiting initial interviewees and gaining confidence through a shared (though limited) understanding of cultural practice. Because of these attributes, a position of preliminary familiarity has been argued as valuable in ethnographic studies of youth cultures (Hodkinson 2005). Young people’s identities are fluid and complex, as are their scenes. With multiple facets of identification, ethnographic relationships are effected (see Bennett 1999, 2003; Hodkinson 2005; Muggleton 1997; Valentine, Skelton and Chambers 1998). Though present, I was not a central actor in this scene. My position as academic outsider may have, at times, structured interviews in such a way that felt too formal for participants to want to engage with, while my difference in age (older) differentiated me from many of the younger participants. Melvina Johnson Young (1993) reminds us that power relations are always present in the interview process, and as Allen and Cloyes (2005) note, such power relations instigate the construction of expressions of experience into a form of “social performance.” Interviewees’ responses featured in this article must be considered in the light of these dynamics.
Data analysis in this research draws from critical and feminist qualitative methodological approaches that value subjectivity and allow for continuous comparison (i.e. Allen and Cloyes 2005; Emmerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Fonow and Cook 2005; Smith 2002; Stanley and Wise 1990; Turnbull 2000). Constant comparison served to identify themes and subthemes as well as multiple layers of meaning from interview transcripts and fieldnotes. To a much lesser extent, the study borrows from a tenet central to performance ethnography, in that it recognizes embodied practice as a crucial source of cultural knowledge and meaning-making (i.e., Conquergood 1991, 1998; Denzin 2003; Desmond 1997; Donkor 2007; Frosch 1999; Ness 1992; Novack 1990; Pollock 2006; Schechner 2002; Sklar 2000; Warren 2006). In analyzing the data, “East Van” identity and performativity as interconnected to understandings of class emerged as significant themes, providing the focus of this article. The quotes included in the following sections are representative of the study’s findings.
Observations of Context and Setting: “East Van” Pride and Identity
East Vancouver is composed of a grouping of neighborhoods predominantly defined by ethnic diversity, low-income households, single-parent families, and rapid gentrification, and average income levels between West Vancouver neighborhoods and East Vancouver reflect this divide (City of Vancouver 2006, 2012a, 2012b). 3 Though each neighborhood has distinct characteristics, East Vancouver has been attributed with left-leaning, counterculture values (Bouthillette 1997) maintained through centers, institutions, and events that support the area’s strong artistic, political, and activist identity (i.e., vocal antipoverty groups, shelters, and feminist organizations) (City of Vancouver 2006, 2012a, 2012b). It is also home to a high concentration of artists and cultural workers when compared to the city as a whole (City of Vancouver 2006, 2012a, 2012b). For example, The Downtown Eastside (DTES), East Vancouver’s most impoverished neighborhood and a key site of rapid gentrification (Blomley 2004; Smith 2003), has “almost double the concentration of artists” than the rest of the city; while their education levels are consistent with other artists in the city, their income is proportionately lower (City of Vancouver 2012a, 33).
Beverly Pitman, alluding to the sociospatial impact of Vancouver’s investment and development policies, calls the DTES “an island of dereliction in a rejuvenated centre city” (2002, 181). Compounding its status as a neighborhood marked by poverty, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is renowned globally as a site of violence against poor and Aboriginal women (BBC International 2003) and was declared a “public health emergency zone” because of high rates of intravenous drug use, overdose deaths, and HIV/AIDS infection rates reported in 1997 (Culhane 2009). Although a number of local writers speak to the strong sense of community and resistance of the DTES, it is characterized within the mainstream media as a homogenously “bad neighborhood” (of visible drug use, poverty, and homelessness) (Woolford 2001). The DTES and East Vancouver (as a larger extension) are areas that are obviously much more complex than conventional representations suggest (Boyd 2005; Boyd, MacPherson, and Osborn 2009; Culhane 2009; Feldman 2001; Robertson and Culhane 2005; Smith 2003).
“East Van” Pride.
As an urban space associated with deviance and othered through racializing and class-based discourses (particularly the DTES), East Vancouver and the people who live there are often both repelled and romanticized in dominant representations (see Woolford 2001 for an example of stereotyping by the media). In response to negative stereotyping, collective expressions of pride and solidarity with the area have developed. “East Van” pride is not a relatively new phenomenon, nor exclusive to participants within this study; however, emblems of pride are part and parcel of such a scene. Thus, participants negotiate and are involved in these multiple and contradictory constructions of the area. Those interviewed were certainly not among the most marginalized within East Vancouver’s landscape, yet many were working-class residents of Vancouver’s Eastside who potentially faced structural barriers not encountered by middle- and upper-class youth. The romanticization/condemnation of East Vancouver itself is intertwined with class-based and racialized conceptions of space. This is particularly apparent within the DTES. Countering the stigma associated with East Vancouver neighborhoods, I observed that many local youth bear tattoos and/or wear T-shirts that sport homemade scribbles of “East Van,” while “East Van” graffiti claims numerous park benches, bus windows, and sides of buildings. 4
Youth construct and negotiate identity in, of, and through city spaces. How they come to attribute particular meanings to particular social spaces is determined, in part, by a social imaginary or collective mythology (Lefebvre 1991; Barthes 1975)—social space is not only a signifier of meaning but is also constitutive. As Ruddick (1996, 12), drawing from Lefebvre and Barthes, explains, a social imaginary, produced by the discourse that surrounds it, does not simply reflect the object to which it refers but becomes something else. This social imaginary is socially constructed and imagined, as well as partial, fragmented, continually (re)negotiated, and also constituted. While interviewees define themselves against (yet in relation to) more affluent neighborhoods such as the West Side and downtown Vancouver (and the mainstream by extension), they also constitute themselves in relation to what it means to be in and of “East Van.” Interviewees from East Vancouver, in particular, express a strong sense of “East Van” pride.
When asked whether they identified themselves as an “East Vanner” many interview participants strongly affirmed that East Vancouver was an important part of their identity based on their lived experiences and also imbue the geography with concepts of class. One woman attempted to sum it up: Oh my God, actually I did this test about identity in this stupid class I took and so the thing that I felt the strongest about was East Van. More than Canadian, more than from B.C., more than white, more than—well woman and working-class were kind of there too but. . . . For many years of my life I contemplated tattooing East Van on my body. For many years, whenever people ask me where I’m from, I say East Van. . . . It means the community that I came from, it means for me, what that meant is that it was a diverse community and that also there is something about working-class that I hold, even though I’m going on in the future and won’t be working-class. Like I guess that’s what that means if I have a degree? But anyways it’s still my roots and I find that there’s a lot more cooperation also and, oh man, I just feel more comfortable over here, you know. Sometimes, as with many things and identity, it’s also what we’re not. So it means I’m not from the West Side.
Although the interview question asked about East Vancouver in particular, many interviewees felt the need to express their understanding of place in relation to the West Side of Vancouver (a constitutive other). In general, interviewees identified East Vancouver as a place of lower economic status, of cultural diversity, a community and as a place that was consciously less affluent, corporate, and commercial than other areas of the city. I too observed these distinctions. One young man living in East Vancouver acknowledged the sense of pride felt by many, including himself, who identify with the neighborhood, but then went on to comment on one of the complexities of defining “East Van” pride: No [I’m not East Van]. . . . I live in East Vancouver so I definitely associate with that but I have friends that have lived here since they were born, on the Eastside. That, I would say, would be the true Eastsiders. I’m just a poser.
While not identifying as an “East Vanner,” he acknowledges kinship but also hints at anxieties around “authentic” claims to the space (“I’m just a poser”).
Many interviewees who live, work, and play on the Eastside of Vancouver reject an ideology of consumerism that they associate with the West Side and an aggressive heterosexuality which they conflate with the Downtown Entertainment District. Beyond the boundaries of this study sample, I also observed articulations of this east–west divide in various Vancouver art works, the lyrics of local hip-hop artists, and in the content of East Vancouver high school plays. East Vancouver pride is a means to subvert dominant negative representations about the people and the places affiliated with the area. For more than half of the participants in this study, growing up in East Vancouver and working-class materiality shaped their experiences and identity. Throughout the study I observed this sense of pride enacted, invigorated, and reproduced through the collective sense of belonging that East Vancouver dance parties offered some participants (as a mode of differentiation from west side and mainstream leisure practices and spaces), providing a context for many to reassert their own identities into the space.
Participants’ dance scene drew from the material reality of East Vancouver as an alternative and resistance to the city’s more mainstream and consumer-oriented entertainment district in the city’s downtown core. Interviewees predominantly defined their nightlife activities spatially against the Entertainment District and the west side of Vancouver, which they characterized as hypermasculine, violently heteronormative, and dominated by an aggressive pick-up scene. Nevertheless, the “East Van” scene still maintained a status of heterosexual and white privilege. Participants within this dance scene appeared predominately white, even though Black, Hispanic, Aboriginal, South Asian, and East Asian Canadians, for example, were also part of the community.
Throughout the study, I observed class tensions. For example, the name, “Salon Des Bourgeoisie,” given to one briefly popularized Saturday dance night attended by some interviewees (and myself) at the time of the study, indicates some of the racialized and class-based tensions evident in the dance scene. The night that I observed took place in a medium-sized beer parlour of an old, rundown hotel in East Vancouver’s DTES. The venue appeared to be more often frequented by older, poor, working-class white and Aboriginal people, as well as those struggling with drug addiction and mental illness, and could be described as rough for those who stumbled in unawares, similar to the surrounding neighborhood. Salon Des Bourgeoisie, with its implicit reference to affluence and playful suggestion of grandeur, emphasizes the economic and social marginality attributed to the space and how it had been constituted by the very mixed make-up of the Saturday night regulars. The name suggests class anxiety or self-consciousness, ironic self-reflexivity, and also racial tensions. 5 Dance events that I attended there seemed to forge a sense of belonging between participants in their rejection of non-mainstream dance clubs and shared affinity for East Vancouver leisure sites while also provoking class (and race) as simultaneously significant and absent. The following section draws from interviews to relate how class positioning, tied to identifications with East Vancouver, can also be performative.
Performing East Van: “It’s Like a Vibe”
While most interviewees, also residents of East Vancouver, strongly identified with its neighborhoods, a few middle- and upper-class respondents thought of East Vancouver as an aesthetic or style rather than primarily a location or place where one lives. Geographical location, thus, becomes played out on the body. For example, one “East Van”–identified upper/middle-class participant living in the Gastown area (a rapidly gentrified East Vancouver neighborhood that borders affluent downtown and the impoverished Downtown Eastside) described East Vancouver as a way of being: I guess people who have lived in East Van. That’s such a trite thing to say. But yeah, just sort of that more fringe culture of Vancouver, people who are into more creative stuff. The people I know who live in East Van are people who go to art shows, they sew their own jeans, they live in places like this [shared warehouse spaces]. I don’t know, it’s kind of all over the place but I think it’s definitely people who aren’t necessarily looking to, they’re very DIY [Do It Yourself] and aren’t necessarily looking to make a lot of money and they are kind of happier. Not necessarily happier but a little more at ease with not working their way up the corporate ladder. I don’t know how to explain it but, East Van, it’s like a vibe, it’s not a description. I guess that’s my thing of East Van . . . people. (emphasis added)
The interviewee suggests DIY attributes and living location (which could equally be connected to lack of monetary choices) are the result of lifestyle choice (rather than to economic necessity) expressed as a form of opposition to capitalist ideals. Indeed, she understands East Vancouver as a vibe rather than a material place; she suggests that East Vancouver, as an emotional atmosphere, can be enacted. Similarly, another woman (also living in the Gastown area) stated, No, no [I’m not East Van], but I can do it. . . . Now East Van means you wear an orange scarf and you have a beard and go to Emily Carr [Vancouver’s most prominent post secondary school for the arts]. Even if you live in the West End that makes you East Van. It used to mean you lived in East Van. It’s changed. Yeah it’s fucked, it’s totally fucked. Total Strathcona [an East Vancouver neighborhood], Emily Carr star, Weirdo Beardo, that’s the other term.
The comment, “I can do it” implies that East Vancouver is more than just a location. The statement speaks to how a minority of participants can become “East Van” by embodying the characteristics East Vancouver is attributed with. Thus, those who do not actually live in East Vancouver also take on or appropriate an East Vancouver aesthetic through (among other things) body movement, spatial leisure practice, and body attire. Likewise, one young man (moving to the East Vancouver neighborhood of Strathcona at the time of the interview) identified an “East Vanner” as someone who had grown up in East Vancouver; however, he also attributed East Vancouver with aesthetic signifiers (e.g., having a “beard”). Hence, he also suggests a performative element to understandings of place: I’m not a beardo. You know what I mean?
“Beardo,” slang for young men who have a beard and/or are unshaven, is associated with a range of aesthetic signifiers, including an association with East Vancouver (as the two commentators above indicate). In both comments above, a beard marks the (male) performance of place (East Vancouver) and as an aesthetic marker, enables statements such as “I can do it.” The gendered aspect of the term suggests perhaps that men (similar to white participants) can do it with greater ease. Wilkens (2008, 12), following Thornton (1996), notes, “masculinities are hipper than femininities,” as subcultural cool is often defined against a mainstream that is feminized as “unhip.” Doing “East Van,” 6 though not remarked upon by the majority of participants who identified as working class, seemed to be performed through particular attention to the nuances and ability to act and look like one belonging within the working-class spaces of East Vancouver and in this particular scene—that is, not looking like a tourist.
Based on my participant observations, not looking like a tourist meant not sporting symbols associated with upper- and middle-class wealth, such as a briefcase, “real” jewelry, sport or office attire, corporate logos, clothing brand names, especially name brand giants such as Tommy Hilfiger, or arriving in a car (a bike, public transport, or skateboard was common). It also included knowledge of East Vancouver and some of its formal and informal leisure spaces, a presumed ease and familiarity in areas of derelict (often represented through physical comportment, that is, how one moved through the space), and absence of formal or excessive assertions of East Vancouver pride (i.e., store-bought shirts bearing an “East Van” symbol—though tattoos, homemade logos, graffiti of the symbol, or clothing representing local businesses were customary). Participants by and large lacked evidence of physical sculpting, extreme exercise, or body maintenance (i.e., appearing clean-cut).
Doing “East Van” also involved a process of Othering, in attempts to embody some markers of marginality associated with the area. Glass (2012, 704) describes this process in his study of upper-middle-class punks who borrow from more marginalized communities “like the homeless, immigrants, people of color, etc.—who cannot choose their marginality” to authenticate their own punk identities. However, because “class is displaced onto race, so that whiteness is equated with middle-classness” and as a marker of the norm, this association also serves to close off “meaningful cultural space for white working-classness or white poverty” (Wilkens 2008, 10). Performative enactments of classlessness are significant here in maintaining a seemingly color-blind identity, in also doing whiteness—ignoring how race and racial inequality intersect with social class, while accruing an “East Van” identity based on these power differences.
Multiple trajectories of performance studies maintain that performance allows for slippages of meaning through both normative and transgressive performances. McKenzie argues that performance genres, as theorized by anthropologists Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, have stressed notions of performative liminality; embodied performances are conceived of as potentially subversive in that they create liminal spaces, in-between temporal places, where social norms are played with and, at times, inverted. Rather than theorizing performance as simply transgressive, Butler has been significant to performance theory because she draws from such theories of liminality and reinterprets them as normative performance (McKenzie 1998, 222). Normative performances are evidenced when, through performative citationality, social norms are repeated rather than contested (Butler 1993). Butler, then, counters normative assumptions of performance as subversive by emphasizing that most performances reinforce or re-produce cultural hegemony. 7
Participants attended dance parties in East Vancouver that may be seen as liminal spaces that allow for the inversion of social norms, particularly capitalist norms, as lower-class symbolic practices are valued in that they are linked to “East Van” authenticity. Such performances are ultimately normative, however, in that dominant class structures remain intact. Part of this involves a (temporary and temporarily esteemed) performance of lower-class-ness by a minority of middle- and upper-class participants attempting to embody “East Van.” For example, the more affluent interviewees participating in performances who obtain subcultural capital through performing “East Van” still possess the social mobility to transgress the lived realities of East Vancouver. Exaggerated performances of being “East Van” also draw attention to the constructed character attributed to East Vancouver, and to class norms as performative—hence the more sceptical enumerations of what constitutes an “East Van” identity put forth by some of the interviewees.
While lower-class symbolic practices are to some extent valorized, the performative aspects of fashion and spatial practice also consequently serve to obscure the class realities of those more economically marginalized East Vancouver youth who participate within the scene. Thus, while the numerous working-class youth who attend East Vancouver dance parties gain social capital (through performances of self, as being “of” and “from” East Vancouver) as well as a sense of pride (based on an identity tied to place), the realities of their lower-class location risk being simultaneously denied, dismissed as performance rather than social location.
Aware of these complex and sometimes contradictory processes of identification and echoing a sentiment expressed by a few of the other interviewees, one participant felt that many youth romanticized East Vancouver, while pretending to identify with the area. He explained that he no longer identified as an “East Vanner” because he no longer lived there. When asked what “East Vanner” meant to him he stated: These are piercing questions. I think maybe you’re asking [about some] sort of affiliation with something that’s sort of not tangibly, but abstractly related to feeling, somehow related to feeling some affinity for people around you or something somehow in relation to class. But I would say in a sort of false way often.
Why false?
Well most people that would consider themselves East Vanners, in a way that I think they would consciously associate themselves as being that, probably come from a place that’s very not East Van.
Appropriating the term?
It’s somehow romantic or something.
The above respondent experienced considerable difficulty in articulating what the concept “East Vanner” means to both himself and others, yet maintained some idea of what was “not East Van.” He is markedly reflexive in his response and is most cautious of temporary (which he locates as false) affinities with the area, acknowledging that he himself possessed the mobility and means to satisfy his desire to leave the neighborhood of East Vancouver (specifically the DTES). The following middle-class man also does not identify as an “East Vanner,” although he has at some point lived and worked in the DTES. He, too, problematizes the tendency of some youth to imitate or appropriate “Eastsider” status, though he states that he does not do this himself: Nah, I’ve lived in the Downtown Eastside in the past, and I’ve worked in and around DTES for a couple of years, but that’s not enough for me to claim loc [local] status. I just think it’s best to be wary of affiliating with a neighborhood too much—take Strathcona [an East Vancouver neighborhood] for example. People move there and a week later they might as well have been born there for the way they suddenly identify as “one of them.” I’m over it.
The problematic of the romanticization of “Eastsider” status by a minority of participants, as noted by some interviewees, exposes the taking on of “down and out” or “deviant” urban spaces by those who have the spatial mobility to come and go amidst such inner city locals, as tourists or otherwise. Further, it also indicates the growing popularity and more recent gentrification of East Vancouver spaces. However, regardless of fears about appropriation of the term and status of “East Vanner,” all of the interviewees who identified with East Vancouver either lived in East Vancouver at the time of the interview or had at some point lived in East Vancouver over a considerable period of time (many had lived in East Vancouver their entire lives). I will return to a discussion of these fears of false identification later with regards to class positioning.
In terms of spatial mobility, these findings seem to be consistent with the Dillabough, Wang, and Kennelly (2005) study of much younger (high school) youth in Ontario. Their ethnography determines that middle-class youth possess spatial mobility that working-class and poorer youth do not. The lack of mobility for some exacerbates a feeling of marginalization. Through such an analogy, Dillabough, Wang, and Kennelly delineate the interconnectedness of identity, youth subcultures, and their relation to space: Clearly, most middle-class youth have greater spatial resources. They are often driven home in cars, live in property owned by their families or walk home through leafy neighbourhoods and have little cause to worry about the “dangers” of urban inner city life. Such early degrees of spatial mobility reinforce social advantages accorded to those who live in privileged areas of the city. Against the knowledge of such mobility, the experience of economic disadvantage and “failing schools” confirms economic disadvantaged young people’s distinctiveness to others and to themselves as marginal non-citizen. In this way, place and youth sub-cultural identity are closely intertwined within the inner city. These crucial space-identity relationships are underwritten by a “geography of social difference” (Massey, 1994) which is rendered explicit through young people’s phenomenologies of urban space. (2005, 103–4)
Participants who were not from East Vancouver, but who nonetheless played in East Vancouver, possessed the mobility, sense of entitlement, and desire to traverse multiple spaces within the city. A few participants did not live in East Vancouver at the time of the study, however, they enjoyed partying and dancing in East Vancouver as a temporary place of amusement, as one upper-middle-class man articulated: We used to have a funny motto . . . , live on the West Side, party on the Eastside. So I identify with an Eastsider in terms of what I like to do for nightlife but I’m pretty West Side in terms of a lot of other ways. Like I value having the middle-class income and being comfortable. Like I don’t do well on short money. Not that I have large money. I just kind of have the normal amount of money (emphasis added).
Note the spatial mobility the above statement alludes to: “live on the West Side, party on the Eastside.” As well, what constitutes the “normal amount of money” is itself a class-based conception that the respondent spatially associates with the west side of the city. Another upper-class, West Side woman echoes a similar sentiment while also noting that East Vancouver is romanticized for some youth: I think everyone probably likes everyone to think that they’ve had it rough and that they’re from the Eastside, but I doubt it. Like I know for me I’m not from a bad neighbourhood. I’m from Point Grey [West Side] and I go there [East Vancouver]. So I assume if I’m going there, there must be a good portion of people who are like that too. Like most of the friends that I go there with are kind of like, they grew up in the suburbs, and they moved to the city, and now they go and explore interesting places. (emphasis added)
The above quote suggests an ideological spatial divide between Vancouver’s east and west; Eastside is represented in the negative, as a “bad neighborhood,” implicitly constructing the West Side as “good.” This is opposite to the respondents from East Vancouver cited earlier who expressed sentiments of “East Van” pride and did not voice concerns of false identifications. The interviewee also speaks of a performance of class positioning and the capacity for spatial mobility, while her desire to explore “interesting places” (and by implication meet “interesting people”) potentially resonates within the language of colonial expansionism (Hall 1997, 239) and “frontier myths” (Smith 1996, 13), as an enactment of Othering.
Different discourses serve to structure participants’ relations to the Eastside and the DTES. For instance, constructions of the DTES as a space of vice and immorality inform decisions to “live on the West Side [and] party on the Eastside.” Ross and Greenwell describe the “danger” attributed to East Vancouver in the mid-twentieth century as such: For some white residents, voyaging from Vancouver’s West End to East End nightclubs was entangled with racialized and classed notions of “slumming it” because the East End clubs were located not only in Chinatown, but also adjacent to the area’s historic skid road, Vancouver’s first so-called slum district. (2005, 144–45)
The racialized illicit nature attributed to the DTES has retained its currency. The DTES and various other sites claimed by poverty within Vancouver are constructed by outsiders as spaces of exotic excess, and thus a place where partying can be assumed a “natural” outcome.
That interviewees are drawn to and identify with down-market spaces is significant. The intersection of art scene sensibility as well as “down and out” geography, mixed with a sense of being “in the know,” provides a source of subcultural capital to those involved. However, interviewees’ strong affiliation with Vancouver’s Eastside has diverse origins: it expresses the economic reality of many involved; it is a form of slumming or sightseeing for a small minority; and for some it is an aesthetic style.
Class Difference: “Oh God, Do We Still Have One?”
Although all interviewees characterized East Vancouver neighborhoods as low-income, there existed little consensus among interviewees with regard to their perceptions of each other’s class backgrounds. Many did not know whether or not a wide range of classes were represented among participants. According to the respondents, one factor that made it difficult to discern was the “shabby-chic,” 8 or “skid-row” style popularized within the scene: a mixture of ragged, secondhand, and designer clothing (often by local designers) commonly worn. The research revealed, however, that not all participants were from middle-class backgrounds (assumed by a minority of interviewees); in fact, more than half located themselves as educated working-class. I observed several practices, however, such as the “shabby-chic” style, guest lists, and the bike-culture, that served to obscure such class-based nuances, while simultaneously providing an affordable aesthetic practice for those with little income.
Class within this particular dance community is rendered absent yet exists as a primary marker. Although more than half the interviewees identified as working-class, several respondents stated that they were unsure of the social-economic positioning of other participants but generally assumed that there must be a mixture: I think it’s sort of diverse. It’s kind of a weird thing right now because, at least in East Van, I’m sure you’ve noticed, skid culture is, it has been for the last couple of years, big and everybody’s dressing like a skid. So they could be people that have a lot of money or come from a really wealthy background but just look like a skid. So that’s kind of a weird question, like it’s hard to judge but I think it tends to be people who are, like it’s more of a working-class environment where I tend to go, rather than a young, urban, professional sort of environment.
Some interviewees had difficulty conceptualizing the question. When asked about her class background, one woman expressed surprise that class difference still exists. She exclaimed: Oh God, do we still have one?
For another woman, the thought had never occurred to her: Geez, I’ve never thought of that but I suppose I would say I’m middle-class, right?
These quotes support Thornton’s observations about how club cultures keep discussions of class at bay (1996), creating a false sense of classlessness. However, they also speak to the erasure or lack of acknowledgment of class-based realities that shape the lives of participants within the dance community, such as the privilege of being upper- or middle-class or the experiences of those from working-class and poor backgrounds. This is significant for, as Murphy (2012, 51) argues, the disavowal of class difference is often made by those that serve to benefit from class disparity, in terms of their interest in material advantages. Reay, drawing upon Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, notes that “even when class is not overt and articulated in people’s decoding of the social world, it is still there as part of the implicit, taken-for-granted understandings they bring to their relationships with others” (Reay 1997, 227). The denial of class difference follows Bettie’s (2000) observations that while class may be a dominant theme in leftist social theory, so much so that race and gender are often reduced to it, class remains invisible in U.S. popular discourse. While within popular discourse, race and gender are assumed to be fixed, class is dismissed as temporary (ibid., 18; Reay 1997). In her ethnographic analysis of female high-school students in a California town, Bettie (2000, 14) notes that although class difference plays a dominant role in the social organization and stratification of students, her interviewees’ perceptions of class are expressed through the framework of fashion; it is through “the symbolic economy of style” in which class and race relations are played out. Class within popular discourse is articulated in other terms (through style preferences for instance), and it is the practice/performance that, according to Bettie, accounts for the “presence/absence” of class identity among some youth. Like whiteness, class is naturalized and rendered invisible.
I observed many ways in which participants in this dance community have managed to persevere against commercial forces, creating spaces that are free or affordable where consumerism is not the focus. (The prominent bike culture as the primary means of transportation for most participants is one example of this.) However, partly because of the so-called shabby-chic style, there is an assumption by some participants that many youth are in fact performing a lower-class status, as discussed earlier in relation to respondents’ identifications with East Vancouver. An “East Van” identity historically and discursively linked to a lower-class social location is described as a style, a performance, and/or something to aspire to. Echoing such previously expressed sentiments, one interviewee claimed that the dance scene is composed of Some middle-class kids pretending to be poor because it’s cool.
Another interviewee linked economic status to city location, stating that it is West Side kids that aspire to be from East Vancouver, thus inverting dominant capitalist values. She stated that the dance scene composed of: Like upper-middle-class or sort of like East Van middle-class . . . but I think we’re at an age where it’s kind of levelled out a bit. It’s not really about how much money your parents had or where you grew up but, I mean it’s the kids who grew up on the West Side that are trying so hard to be East Van anyway.
The romantic performance of “East Van” (as cool, dangerous, edgy, and exotic), and by association, a lower-class social location, certainly exists; however, not acknowledged by these respondents is that the fashion of poverty is also based on the actuality that many key participants within the dance scene who hold significant subcultural capital (through, for instance, their embodiment of East Vancouver) are themselves of lower socioeconomic status, and live in poorer neighborhoods because of necessity. Bettie (2000,11) suggests there is an anxiety felt by those who participate in class “passing,” meaning those who acquire the social characteristics to enable upward mobility. Many of the interviewees’ statements in this study indicate that there is also a different form of anxiety in relation to class passing, an anxiety that those who represent themselves as lower-class are often enacting a class-passing in reverse (enacting downward mobility).
As Goode and Maskovsky (2001) have expressed in conjunction with neoliberal discourses, people are increasingly stigmatized and blamed for living in poverty, while the actuality of poverty is seen as a lifestyle choice. Poor and working-class people from East Vancouver must also deal with such stereotypes. So entrenched (on an individual, societal, and academic level) is this neoliberal rhetoric that within this dance scene itself, such stereotypes (poverty as choice—articulated as pretending to be poor) persist. This justification of poverty is dangerous for, as Harvey discussing neoliberal capitalism has aptly noted, “Once the poor become aestheticized, poverty itself moves out of our field of social vision, except as a passive depiction of otherness, alienation and contingency within the human condition” (1989, 336). Consequently, many participants interviewed for this study—of educated working-class status—also have to negotiate with and often challenge disavowing discourse on a day-to-day basis.
For many participants in this study, identifications with and performances of “East Van” and a lower-class social location are not simply an aesthetic and performative choice, but enactments and affiliations shaped by factors such as limited social means.
Concluding Discussion
Although this study is limited to the Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at a specific time (2005–2006), I argue that the findings are relevant to further studies on urban spaces, class, and identity. As Reay noted over a decade ago, “While collective class consciousness may be dying away, class remains both a social filter and a key mechanism individuals utilize in placing themselves and others” (1997, 226). Her comment is relevant in this case as it is through the social filter of identifications with and enactments of East Vancouver (implicitly racialized and classed) that participants in this study often place one another. The performance of class (through spatial and embodied practice) does several things. It works to obscure class-based social realities; if class is assumed to be a performance, then it can be dismissed as a matter of choice rather than circumstance and social structure. The performance of class, however, can help to conceptualize class as performative. As previously mentioned in relation to Bourdieu, institutionalized inequality creates classed subjects that are expected to perform accordingly, through a stylized repetition of acts that are reiterative and constitutive of the subject. This citation is dependent upon social relations that give it cultural authority through shared understanding.
However, when authority is shifted, when the performance of class is obviously mimicked, class-based norms have the potential to be displaced, to be understood as something that is not internal or innate, but rather structural. By parodying dominant behaviours, norms (likened to habitus) can become ultimately revealed as conventions, as socially constituted. This is not to say that “white flirtations with alterity” (Saldanha 2007, 17) or Otherness are subversive—rather, that such flirtations ultimately work to reaffirm power structures while simultaneously revealing the conscious project of reinventing oneself (e.g., the work of becoming: white, bourgeois). Theorizing class as performative, however, should not be conflated with voluntarism. For many interviewees from East Vancouver, dance parties are playful spaces that allow participants to create and define for themselves what it means to be from East Vancouver (rather than have this determined primarily from the outside) and to reveal a sense of pride in a stigmatized area of the city.
Though subcultural capital is inverted within interviewees’ nightlife dance scene in terms of status (familiarity with spaces and some visual markers associated with the lower classes are more esteemed than familiarity with markers associated with dominant and/or the upper classes), this subcultural capital may not necessarily translate into symbolic or economic capital for working-class participants within the larger culture or outside of East Vancouver. Participants within this dance scene remain situated in Canada’s social order whereby the social privilege of the dominant culture is preserved and legitimized. For example, mobile and middle-class youth can perform “East Van” in different (perhaps more transient) ways than those restricted by materiality (and social structures).
Interviewees were reluctant to name themselves yet locate their identities as part of a community by differentiating themselves, through aesthetic and spatial practices, from what they consider to be mainstream nightlife practices. Identity formations in this case are not only acquired negatively (in opposition) (as is described by earlier by Thornton [1996]), but are also positively acquired, through constitutive practices (everyday practices that become normalized). For while it may be true that some interviewees were eager to avoid being classed, participating in what Thornton (1996) terms a “fantasy of classlessness,” social class nevertheless operates as a primary signifying factor. As previously noted, though a minority of participants expressed a disavowal of class difference or concern for class-passing, more than half of the interviewees in this study identified as educated working-class. These demographics, of course, remain in flux, as do groups and group affiliations. As the interview responses on East Vancouver identities indicate, the symbolic meanings of space are multiple, rather than singular. At the time of the study, East Vancouver is represented by interviewees as a classed space, a space that is simultaneously working-class and part of a middle-and upper-class performance.
This article contributes to socio-cultural understandings of the complexity of identity and class positioning in one contemporary urban space by linking performance to social class and cultural practice. I hope that attention to cultural practices and how they are perceived locally in a concrete setting can offer insight, through collective analyses, into broader understandings of the ways in which class can be displaced, erased, and reconfigured symbolically and culturally and how intersecting social hierarchies are reproduced, maintained, obscured, and spatially conceptualized. This is just one example meant to enter into the conversation of creative ways to explore the “presence/absence” of class difference that continues to circulate in popular, neoliberal discourse.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This research was made possible by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The work was supported through a fellowship from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council.