Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity / Edition 1

by Julie Bettie

Overview

In this ethnographic examination of Mexican-American and white girls coming of age in California’s Central Valley, Julie Bettie turns class theory on its head, asking what cultural gestures are involved in the performance of class, and how class subjectivity is constructed in relationship to color, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. A new introduction contextualizes the book for the contemporary moment and situates it within current directions in cultural theory.

Investigating the cultural politics of how inequalities are both reproduced and challenged, Bettie examines the discursive formations that provide a context for the complex identity performances of contemporary girls. The book’s title refers at once to young working-class women who have little cultural capital to enable class mobility; to the fact that analyses of class too often remain insufficiently transformed by feminist, ethnic, and queer studies; and to the failure of some feminist theory itself to theorize women as class subjects.


Women without Class makes a case for analytical and political attention to class, but not at the expense of attention to other social formations.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520280014
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/18/2014
Edition description:	First Edition, With a New Introduction
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Julie Bettie teaches cultural politics and cultural theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is an Associate Professor of Sociology.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction to the 2014 Edition

1. Portraying Waretown High
2. Women without Class
3. How Working-Class Chicas Get Working-Class Lives
4. Hard-Living Habitus, Settled-Living Resentment
5. Border Work between Classes
6. Sameness, Difference, and Alliance
7. Conclusion

Notes
References 
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Julie Bettie’s book is interesting because it looks at the intersection between class, race and gender in the sphere of education in terms of gestures and performance of ‘class’ . . . The interdisciplinary orientation of Bettie’s book coupled with its combination of theoretical and empirical balance makes it a worthy read."

Allegra Lab

A lively and important contribution to a debate that questions an over-simplified gender-based approach to inequality. An accessible book, sensitively written.

Ethnic and Racial Studies

A unique ethnographic study of girls... Highly recommended.

CHOICE

“A lively and important contribution to a debate that questions an over-simplified gender-based approach to inequality. An accessible book, sensitively written.

Ethnic And Racial Studies

“A unique ethnographic study of girls... Highly recommended.

Choice

"Julie Bettie’s book is interesting because it looks at the intersection between class, race and gender in the sphere of education in terms of gestures and performance of ‘class’... The interdisciplinary orientation of Bettie’s book coupled with its combination of theoretical and empirical balance makes it a worthy read."

Allegra Laboratory - Patgiri Rituparna

Rather than following traditional and stereotypical notions common in mainstream U.S. sociology and criminology, which portray youth as delinquent and criminals, Bettie gives the reader the vivid representations of a group of working-class youth who are searching for 'creative responses to the injuries of inequality.'

Esther Madriz

Pathbreaking and original. Bettie's comparative analysis of race, class, and gender performance is unparalleled in current scholarship.

Angela Valenzuela

Bettie is doing something no one has done before: she explores the many ways that BOTH Mexican American and White adolescent girls interpret and enact racially gendered class identities. This book is essential reading for any serious scholar of gender, class, and race-ethnicity.

Denise Segura