Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture

Chapter 5: Guns, Language, and Beer: Hunting for a Working-Class Language in the Academy

Chapter 5 Guns, Language, and Beer HUNTING FOR A WORKING-CLASS LANGUAGE IN THE ACADEMY Ann E. Green CLASS AND THE ACADEMY: VIGNETTE #1 I’m team teaching feminist theory with a colleague from psychology. We have ten students, all white, eight women and two men. We’re sitting outside discussing readings on environmental feminism. We’ve been arguing for about twenty minutes about vegetarianism and environmentalism . My colleague says, “And what about those guys with guns? Those guys who shoot everything up? Who are they?” It takes me a moment to answer, “My Dad.” Students are surprised. “Your father hunts?” “Yes, and I’ve hunted, too . . . sort of; I don’t carry a gun and I’ve only been out in the early morning hunting turkey and we’ve never seen one.” What I don’t say is that most men that I knew growing up hunted, that hunter safety was a required subject for sixth graders (and that I passed and got a florescent orange hunter safety card), that many of my high school classmates hunted (and many later enlisted in the army because jobs were scarce). I don’t tell them about being ten years old 75 76 Ann E. Green and waking up early on December mornings, walking sleepily into the kitchen to discover that my father and his friends have already eaten eggs, pancakes, bacon, and ham cooked by my mother, and gone out to hunt at the first legal moment, the moment that the game commission determines is official sunrise. They woke at 3:30 a.m. and milked and fed seventy cows before leaving. They would return at noon for lunch with at least one deer carcass in the back of the pickup. It’s hard to write about social class in ways that don’t recreate academic scripts about social class. It’s also hard to make class visible in daily life, in daily encounters, even in the teaching moment that opens this chapter . To interrupt a conversation in feminist theory to talk about social class seems, on the surface, to be completely appropriate. To talk about the environmental movement as a classed movement, to consider who hunts and why, seems like a logical question to raise. So why didn’t I do it? It seems to me that there are several complex reasons that talking about class and writing about class are difficult. Middle-class, white, assumptions of propriety and politeness dominate academic discourse and the assumptions about what is “polite” to say in an academic context. While assumptions about social class affect how we encounter one another , these assumptions are difficult to articulate. While I come from a Northern, white, rural, working-class background, grew up on a farm, have parents who didn’t attend college, worked a number of “shit jobs” (custodian, bank teller, house cleaner, farm worker), these experiences are generally erased from my public persona, and this is not often a choice on my part. When I talk with colleagues about their summer homes or their children’s private education, there is often an assumption that we share the same class background, and that background is one of privilege, upper middle class or higher—and, further, that if I don’t have those material things, that I aspire to them. Like the assumption that because I am married and straight that I aspire to give birth to biological children, this assumption that I aspire to middle-class symbols of status is problematic. However, to interrupt a conversation about middle-class privilege with an assertion about a working-class past or a question about middle-class values is often considered “impolite” (and in some contexts, not “collegial”). And, sometimes, when teaching or writing, it’s risky because the assertion can be misread or misinterpreted. For example, when talking with a colleague’s wife about her new baby, she went into a long digression about how fearful she is that our faculty tuition benefits at other institutions will be cut. I responded by saying, “Well, you have a lot of time and we can fight, the faculty can fight, to keep that benefit.” She said, “But this really concerns me. Little 77 Guns, Language, and Beer Johnny may not be able to go to college where he wants to, and you’ll understand when you have children.” I said, “If I have...