Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production

4. Recognition: Queers, Class, and Dorothy Allison

70 > 71 the dismissal) through an assertion of class authority. Mess with me, I told this young man, and I’ll play the class card. When I do, you’ll lose. By most theoretical standards, I have conflated status and class here, to let the status difference between student and teacher and my hostile oneupmanship stand as homology for relative class power, on a campus where more faculty than students, in 1990, came from professional backgrounds. But rather than reading the conflation as sloppy, I offer it to illustrate the confusions and displacements routinely noted about discourses of class in the United States, displacements onto race, gender, language, money, and professional authority (e.g., Ortner 1991). Such displacements challenge the old claim that there is no language of class in the United States. Indeed, they are an American language of class, a category multiplied by the layers of class process and hierarchy present in any social encounter. Class Recognition? One conclusion from my story is that recognition takes many forms, though some categories of social difference, like sexuality, have been more amenable to a positive politics of recognition, while others, like class, have been less so. This is a point Beverly Skeggs (2000; 2004) makes more fully. Skeggs argues that for subjects suffused with the force and weight of misrecognition long imposed by bourgeois domination on the bodies, labor, and identities of working people, the goal is less recognition (or rearticulation, for example, from pervert to high-status queer) than unmarking the classed body. The route to such unmarking is economic redistribution—an equitable division of wealth and value produced by all kinds of labor, rather than the concentration of value up the class ladder. While identity politics recognize personhood and entitlement, in Skeggs’s analysis class politics demand redistribution , not recognition. For some authors, moreover, cultivating recognition comes at the expense of redistribution. Working on class and culture, I have been influenced by this line of thinking but slow to accept its opposition between recognition and redistribution and the uncoupling of class from recognition’s language and value. The politics and strategies of redistribution are essential (among them, progressive social welfare and tax policy, living wages, cooperative ownership, health and education as public goods, and dismantling the war economy). But recognition and social class are not incompatible, given the routine displacement of class onto so-called cultural differences (racial, ethnic, national, and sexual) and given popular and scholarly attachment to status hierarchies marked by education, income, and taste. If recognition politics don’t count, moreover, 72 > 73 “aha!” that receives as simple, empirical truth what is in fact a process of signification , or meaning-making, in relations of dominance and subordination . For example, to recognize a statement as true, or a gesture or person as familiar or legitimate, is in fact to participate in the system of signification and authority that lies behind “truth,” “familiarity,” and “authority.” To judge a statement as “making no sense” is, by contrast, to reject its very terms and frame the rejected item as a failed or suspect attempt by dominant (if unarticulated ) standards. Such a theory would contend, for example, that in dominant ideology and everyday life, queers (especially at Penn State in 1990) were everywhere recognized as perverts, failed heterosexuals rather than the counter-cultural resistors of bourgeois sexual propriety. Similarly, workingclass people become excessive bodies marked by multiple failures of control, rather than subjugated bodies produced by the formation of bourgeois subjectivity itself. If domination is all that recognition sets in motion, then I, too, want to reject it. But is it? Why, given how people understand the term and how they or we experience its violence, does it endure as something we want from the world? Is this just selective self-interest? Is social class banished from even a reconstructive recognition politics? Is the very desire for recognition a second-order ideological effect fast in need of progressive indictment or is something more relational going on? This question is especially vital in a universe where people participate in multiple class processes simultaneously and over time (as wage workers by day, say, and self-employed workers or students by night), and thus where no single class process can reliably be taken as the root of identification (Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2000). It is equally vital where mobilities up and down the class ladders of income and wealth do...