Practicing Class: Disjunctures between Class Position and Presentation in Gay Communities

• In Event: 4446 - Sexualities III: Sexual Culture and Performance

Abstract

Research on sexuality tends to neglect its links to the class structure, and in particular, to neglect the negotiation of these links in the cultural realm. These empirical deficits may be tied to the more general reification, including within feminist scholarship, of theoretical antinomies between economic and cultural analysis, with many scholars consigning sexuality to this latter cultural domain. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s reconceptualization of class, this paper investigates the extent to which community-level cultural practices reflect the class origins, experiences, and aspirations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) people, with particular attention to cultural patterns associated with axes of gay community fragmentation. Patterns identified from 39 qualitative interviews in behavior, speech, and dress among LGBQ residents of the Seattle area suggest tendencies to imitate culturally and socially dominant, yet economically dominated, class fractions in both gay male and lesbian culture. Processes of subcultural socialization appear at least partially responsible for these cultural patterns, which do not fully reflect the “real” class positions of LGBQ people enacting the cultural practices I describe. These findings highlight the significance of gender and sexuality as potential mediators of the class-culture relationship, with symbolic dimensions of this mediation masking the salience of class as a determinant of life outcomes and principle of division among LGBQ people. This paper thus complicates sociological theories of class misrecognition by elaborating its mechanisms within subcultures marginalized on a gender/sexual basis.

Author

• Emily Ruppel, University of California-Berkeley