Lindquist and Class 2
Some more brief angles from Lindquist on how she’s thinking about class: “The experience of class in America is impossible to explain, difficult to render, and dangerous to address. It rests uneasily in the space between performance and evocation” (vi). Now, that first sentence strikes me as a little hyperbolic, and risks a reading as self-praise on Lindquist’s part: look at this dangerous and impossible task I’m taking on. The second part, though, seems to connect to what I was saying yesterday, in that your own class is partly what you say it is. On the following page, Lindquist asserts that class culture exists “between the material and the symbolic” (she likes that ‘between’ thing, no?), and the symbolic side is where the “performance and evocation” take place, I think. Queer theory helped us to see how all sexuality is performative; the important insight Lindquist seems to be getting at here — the one that I was wrestling with yesterday in attempting to connect what I thought about my own class background to the research I’ve read — is that while the experience of class is shaped my material concerns (that’s pretty much a given, I think), the place where class gets weird is in its performance as culture by the people who are situated within those material concerns.
Consider what Lindquist says in the very same paragraph: “It has often been remarked that all Americans, from welfare dependents to corporate executives, think of themselves as middle-class — and the ways Smokehousers speak of their own socioeconomic affiliations further confirm this observation” (vi). In other words, in a space that Lindquist the academic describes as a “working class” bar, the clientele describe themselves as “middle class” while she herself claims the status of “working class.”
Is this not strange?