Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture

NOTHING TO DECLARE

NOTHING TO DECLARE IDENTITY, SHAME, AND THE LOWER MIDDLE CLASS It is a striking fact of scholarly life that talking about oneself has become a virtue. The culture of confession, once limited to self-help manuals, therapy groups, and talk shows, has gradually penetrated the walls of the academy. For critics who are disenchanted with the spread of theory or who simply want to explore different kinds of scholarly writing, autobiography can be an appealing alternative. Getting personal can take a wide variety of forms, from a terse vignette prefacing a conventional piece of scholarly writing to a full-blown striptease by an academic superstar. Often it is accompanied by an ethical imperative . I am doing this, the author implies, and you should do it too. What authorizes the discourse of personal criticism? Why is writing about oneself deemed important or interesting? Sometimes the answer is fame. In a 1 culture of celebrity the private life of a prominent scholar appeals to our curiosity and becomes worthy of our attention. Alternatively, the therapeutic or the political value of autobiographical criticism comes to the fore. Writing about oneself is presented, with varying degrees of intellectual sophistication, as an act of catharsis or a means to self-knowledge. It is also clearly indebted to the “politics of recognition” informing new social movements grounded in group identities .1 Feminists, in particular, have often been at the vanguard of personal criticism , arguing that traditional forms of academic language need to be replaced by a more personal voice. As someone who has never wanted to write about herself, I began to wonder about the reasons for this reticence. Of course, no trend is without its critics, and a number of writers, including some feminists, have expressed reservations about the value of self-disclosure as an intellectual or political strategy.2 There is a sustained questioning of confession within poststructuralist theory, as well as a flourishing body of autobiographical writing informed by such theory. But neither defenders nor critics of autobiography have gone far in exploring the various social conditions that may affect the desire to speak or remain silent about the self. I want to pursue one aspect of this question by examining some of the meanings of class in relation to contemporary academic culture. More specifically, I am interested in the lower middle class, my own social origin. Being lower-middle-class is a singularly boring identity, possessing none of the radical chic that is sometimes ascribed to working-class roots. In fact, the lower middle class has typically been an object of scorn among intellectuals , blamed for everything from exceedingly bad taste to the rise of Hitler. Yet as older forms of class polarization and class identification begin to dissolve, the lives of ever more individuals in the industrialized West are defined by occupations , lifestyles, and attitudes traditionally associated with the lower middle class. At the same time, lower-middle-classness is not so much an identity as a nonidentity: “the one class you do not belong to, and are not proud of at all, is the lower middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower middle classes.”3 What, then, is one to make of this widespread yet indeterminate , important yet underanalyzed class stratum? In what ways is the inbetweenness of the lower middle class at odds not only with the identity politics of gender and race but also with traditional ways of thinking about class? My response to these questions is intended to be exploratory rather than conclusive. It forgoes some of the usual approaches to class in focusing on the psychic as well as the social, semiotics as much as economics. It is interested as much in literary and cultural representations of the lower middle class as in the objective reality of this class formation. And it is fully cognizant of the paraN O T H I N G T O D E C L A R E 34 doxes involved in a semiautobiographical reflection on the problems of writing autobiographically. ON CLASS There is a noticeable silence about class in much contemporary cultural theory. This is certainly true of my own field, feminism, which has been galvanized and transformed by issues of race but has yet to deal substantially with the current realities of class. While feminist critics sometimes give a cursory nod toward the importance of class differences, it is rarely acknowledged...