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US Working-Class/Poverty-Class Divides

Hamilton College

In arguing for more finely nuanced and inclusive understandings of class in the USA, I write as a ‘poverty-class scholar’ articulating an identity, experience, marginality, and concomitant consciousness and epistemology distinct from that of working-class academics. Both in and out of academe, representations of working-class identity are juxtaposed against and, thus, reinforce the ‘otherness’ of poor women who are positioned as boundary markers, demarcating the unacceptable and illegal ‘others’ of the working class. Concomitantly, in claiming to speak for and then neglecting these differences, working-class scholarship allows for the cooptation, erasure and mis-representation of poor women and children. Ultimately, I argue that only by including theories generated ‘from experience outward,’ that expose and critique the differential impact of class on women’s lives without claiming an uncontestable authenticity, can we begin to understand the operations of class as it is lived, theorized and contested in contemporary society.

Key Words: gender • poverty • poverty-class scholarship • representation • US class • working class

Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 5, 817-834 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0038038505058367


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