Suchergebnisse

In this ethnographic examination of Mexican-American and white girls coming of age in California's Central Valley, Julie Bettie turns class theory on its head, asking what cultural gestures are involved in the performance of class, and how class subjectivity is constructed in relationship to color, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. A new introduction contextualizes the book for the contemporary moment and situates it within current directions in cultural theory.Investigating the cultural politics of how inequalities are both reproduced and challenged, Bettie examines the discursive formations that provide a context for the complex identity performances of contemporary girls. The book's title refers at once to young working-class women who have little cultural capital to enable class mobility; to the fact that analyses of class too often remain insufficiently transformed by feminist, ethnic, and queer studies; and to the failure of some feminist theory itself to theorize women as class subjects.Women without Class makes a case for analytical and political attention to class, but not at the expense of attention to other social formations.

While most high school students will obtain future social class positions consistent with their class backgrounds, a handful of students are exceptions to this rule, being either upwardly mobile working-class students (on the college preparatory track) or downwardly mobile middle-class students (on the vocational track). Highlighting predominant patterns, research typically ignores such students precisely because they are exceptions to the rule. This article, based on ethnographic research among white and Mexican American high school girls in California's Central Valley, foregrounds the experience of upwardly mobile working-class students showing how race/ethnicity, class, and gender intersect in the lives of these young women, shaping their educational mobility. Using a comparative approach, this article examines the similarities and differences between white and Mexican American working-class girls' experiences of mobility. The article first describes the various contingencies leading to the girls' mobility, then explores their subjective experience of mobility, in both cases noting the girls' different experiences according to their race/ethnicity.