Beverley Skeggs

Lancaster University | LU · Department of Sociology

This article examines the conditions of possibility for protest that are shaped when we open our browsers and are immediately tracked by Facebook. It points to the significance of tracking in the making of contemporary personhood showing how the relationship between property and personhood is being currently reconfigured as Facebook experiments wit...

It is the purpose of this paper to make explicit the methodology (the theory of the methods) by which we conducted research for an Economic and Social Research Council-funded research project on the relationship of values to value. Specifically, we wanted to study the imperative of Facebook to monetize social relationships, what happens when one of...

This general introduction locates the GBCS papers on the elite, and their respondents, within a context. It emphasizes some of the key points made by the respondents in order to intervene in a discussion about what is at stake in doing sociological research on class. It draws attention to the differences between on the one hand status and stratific...

i>Sociologists’ Tales brings together the thoughts and experiences of key UK sociologists from different generations of British sociology in reflecting on why they have chosen a career in sociology, how they have managed to do it and what advice they would offer the next generation.

We are living in a time when it is frequently assumed that the logic of capital has subsumed every single aspect of our lives, intervening in the organization of our intimate relations as well as the control of our time, including investments in the future (e.g. via debt). The theories that document the incursion of this logic (often through the te...

The book shows how class has not disappeared, but is known and spoken in a myriad of different ways, always working through other categorisations of nation, race, gender and sexuality and across different sites: through popular culture, political rhetoric and academic theory. In particular attention is given to how new forms of personhood are being...

This paper is about the struggle for value by those who live intensified devaluation in the new conditions of legitimation and self-formation, by which the self is required to repeatedly reveal its value through its accrual and investment in economic, symbolic, social and cultural capitals. It explores how this value struggle is experienced: felt a...

The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.

A simple phrase takes its meaning from a given context, and already makes its appeal to another one in which it will be understood; but, of course, to be understood it has to transform the context in which it is inscribed. As a result, this appeal, this promise of the future, will necessarily open up the production of a new context, wherever it may...

Theories of the good and proper self (the governmental normative subject, be it a reflexive, enterprising, individualising, rational, prosthetic, or possessive self)1 or even the self produced in conditions not of its own making, such as Bourdieu's habitus, all rely on ideas about self-interest, investment and/or ‘playing the game’. As people are i...

This is the first book about reality television to make class its central focus. Despite popular and media debate about the ‘classed’ behaviour of reality stars such as Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty, and the class confrontations depicted in shows such as Wife Swap, class politics have been overlooked in much political and academic discussion of real...

This paper focuses on research conducted over a period of thirty months as part of a wider ESRC-fimded initiative on violence. It focuses on the stistainability of safer gay space. This paper shows how the generation of the fear of the 'heterosexual other' functions to enable certain claims to be made on the space from a proprietorial aspect which...

Many theorists have charted for some time how capital extends its lines of flight into new spaces, creating new markets by harnessing affect and intervening in intimate, emotional and domestic relationships, and into bio-politics more generally. Feminists have known for a long time that women’s ‘domestic’ labour has been central to the reproduction...

Between 2001 and 2005, ‘Judge Ruth Herz’ appeared in a popular German daytime reality television court show, Das Jugendgericht (The Youth Court). German reality television court shows, of which there are several (Machura 2009), draw heavily on a US format. A key dimension of this format, and central to its reality effect, is the use of real judges...

Drawing on the textual analysis of an ESRC research project‘Making Class and the Self through Mediated Ethical Scenarios’, this article illustrates how ‘reality’ television offers a visible barometer of a person's moral value. The research included an examination of the shift to self-legitimation, the increased importance of reflexivity and the dec...

This chapter reports on a project which set out to see if the ethical dramas and emphasis on self-work offered by the expanding number of reality television formats might influence current articulations of identity. Reality television is generally deemed a valueless pursuit, a form of ’trash’ television and is often used to represent a crisis in ci...

In the telling of the inscription of feminism into sociology, both space and time intervene. Institutionally some departments appear to be at the vanguard of feminist thought, others, as if feminism never happened. These uneven manifestations tell a story about people, place, power and struggle. Even feminism itself operates on different temporalit...

Drawing on recent research from a project which included both textual and audience research, this paper will explore the involvement of women viewers with 'reality' TV as 'circuits of value'. These relationships cannot be adequately described as deconstructions of representations as in a text-reader framework of media theory. Rather, we examine the...

One of the most striking challenges encountered during the empirical stages of our audience research project, `Making Class and the Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios' (funded as part of the ESRC's Identities and Social Action programme), stemmed from how the different discursive resources held by our research participants impacted upon the k...

This article explores how white working-class women are figured as the constitutive limit – in proximity – to national public morality. It is argued that four processes: increased ambivalence generated by the reworking of moral boundaries; new forms of neo-liberal governance in which the use of culture is seen as a form of personal responsibility b...

A meeting ground for mainstream social theory and contemporary feminist theory. Brings feminist theory face to face with Pierre Bourdieu s social theory. Demonstrates how much Bourdieu s theory has to offer to contemporary feminism. Comprises a series of contributions from key contemporary feminist thinkers. Defines new territories for feminist the...

This paper is about the construction of space and place in the urban imaginary. It draws on multidisciplinary empirical research—on Violence, Sexuality and Space—conducted in a place that was simultaneously represented in one of the most controversial programmes ever to be screened on British television—Queer as Folk. As the television programme in...

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2 (2004) 291-298 The case has been well made for a recent shift to what Jon Doveyidentifies as "extraordinary subjectivity," that is, a shift from grand narratives as the bases of truth claims to statements that the world no longer has meaning unless grounded in the personal, the subjective, and the part...

According to Žižek (1997) the logic of late capitalism offers opportunities for the incorporation of previously marginalised groups, whilst simultaneously dividing them at the same time. These possibilities for incorporation create divisions on the basis of gender, race, sexuality and class. Here, we examine how the capitalist desire for opening ne...

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2 (2004) 211-212 Many of the key debates and conceptual overhauls that have animated lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) studies over the last ten years or so might be broadly described in terms of their common interest in specifying the proper relations between gender and sexuality. I...

It is well-known that lesbians and gay men have long been produced and examined as objects of fear. However, this article analyses lesbians and gay men as subjects of fear. This paper offers an exploration of the formation and uses of fear in the context of lesbian and gay experiences of danger and safety associated with violence. In so doing it ex...

Sexuality and the Politics of Violence offers a timely and critical exploration of issues of safety and security at the centre of responses to violence. Through a multi-disciplinary analysis, drawing on feminism, lesbian and gay studies, sociology, cultural geography, criminology and critical legal scholarship, the book offers to transform the way...

This article unpacks the paradoxical and ambivalent meaning and value of femininity; both its theorization and its practice. To do this it draws on specific empirical sites in the UK—women's toilets—to think through the significance of the contemporary politics of recognition, a politics that Nancy Fraser (1995) argues is displacing the politics of...

This article unpacks the paradoxical and ambivalent meaning and value of femininity; both its theorization and its practice. To do this it draws on specific empirical sites in the UK—women's toilets—to think through the significance of the contemporary politics of recognition, a politics that Nancy Fraser (1995) argues is displacing the politics of...

This article draws upon data generated as part of a 30-month research project, 'Violence Sexuality, Space', undertaken as part of a wider Economic and Social Research Council initiative on Violence. The main focus of the article is upon ideas of property that are a recurring theme in our Manchester key informant data. We offer a jurisprudence of th...

This paper draws on longitudinal ethnographic research conducted between 1981 and 1992 with white working class women (published as Formations of Class and Gender , Skeggs, 1997) and preliminary research begun in 1997 (with Les Moran and Carole Truman), later funded by the Economic and Social Research Council entitled Violence, Sexuality and Space...

Ethnography has come under a lot of quite justified attack of late from a variety of different sources. This led in the !980's to the crisis in anthropology; a discipline hewn out of the ethnographic technique of studying the 'other' and to significant debates within feminist research (especially in Australia and the US). It has also led to a marke...

The changes in the last 15 years in British politics (massive unemployment, market-led higher education, Thatcherite consumer rhetoric, citizenship charters, and heightened student expectations) have generated many paradoxes for Women's Studies in (new and old) universities. For instance, traditional feminist demands for access to education have be...

The changes in the last 15 years in British politics (massive unemployment, market-led higher education, Thatcherite consumer rhetoric, citizenship charters, and heightened student expectations) have generated many paradoxes for Women's Studies in (new and old) universities. For instance, traditional feminist demands for access to education have be...

This article shows how a group of American Black female musicians are rapping themselves into existence against the powerless positions (both economic and cultural) that are offered to them. They ‘talk back talk Black’ (bell hooks, [sic] 1984) to colonialism. Firstly, they ridicule and undermine the strutting, bragging form of masculinity that want...

Drawing from ethnographic research this paper focuses on how sexuality is deployed in regulative and tactical forms within Further Education. It examines how masculinity is institutionalised through the internal discourses of education. It demonstrates how, on the basis of the normalisation of masculinity, male teachers are able to regulate female...

This paper exPlores how a group of 83 young;white, working class women became involved in the state's most recent attempt at restructuring social relations through vocational initiatives. Using ethnographic research conducted in a caring course department of a northern further education college, it examines how the students everyday practical exper...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Keele, 1986.

The relationship between feminism and domesticity has recently come in for renewed interest in popular culture. This collection makes an intervention into the debates surrounding feminism's contentious relationship with domesticity and domestic femininities in popular culture. It offers an understanding of the place of domesticity in contemporary p...