Class, consumption and prejudice:
contemporary representations of
‘the social scum’
Dr Tracy Shildrick, Prof.
Robert MacDonald
(University of Teesside) &
Dr. Colin Webster (Leeds
Metropolitan University)
T.A.Shildrick@tees.ac.uk
(Work in progress)
Aims
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To think critically about contemporary
representations of the poor – particularly the
young & poor – in popular media & social
science
To argue that talk of ‘chavs’ & ‘charvers’ is a
loud, late modern echo of age-old rhetorics
of the undeserving poor
To interrogate this talk & reflect on the
meaning & consequence of this form of class
prejudice
[Work in progress!]
A clamour of hostile words…
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Explosion of mass media reference to
‘chavs’; since the early 2000s
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Hayward and Yar (2006): ‘virtually zero’
references in UK national newspapers
1995-2003, yet 946 during 2004-5 alone.
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‘Chav’ now a familiar & ‘amusing’ cultural
common-place in everyday parlance
(middle-class dinner parties, sociological
conference conversations)
www.chavscum.com
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(Notorious) champion & purveyor of talk/
imagery about ‘chavs’ (followed by ‘chav towns’,
‘chav test’, ‘top ten chavs’ web-sites etc.)
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Documents ‘the burgeoning peasant underclass’;
foul-mouthed vitriol; photographs of strangers
posted for the disgusted vilification of blog
participants
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The polar opposite of the mutual Respect called
for by Sennett (2003)
What does it mean?
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Offensive, discriminatory language depicting
poor people……defined as/ targeted on:
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Appearance/ stylistic consumption (tracksuits, trainers,
hoodies, ‘bling’ jewellery, cosmetics, branded drinks,
etc)
Council housing
Welfare dependency/ criminality/ irresponsible
parenting
Youth
Popular, very new labelling of young, white,
working-class people at the social/ economic
margins (…with more to follow on the ‘racial’
aspects of representation)
Etymology & usage
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(Non-definitive); Romany roots – ‘child’ (or
‘friend’?), also local/ regional counterexplanations, synonyms (‘pikey’, ‘ned’,
‘scally’) & variations
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‘Charver’ (Tyneside/ NE England) & ‘Chore’
(Hartlepool/ Teesside) longer-standing &
more prevalent usage (than ‘Chav’)
A history of respectable fears
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Obviously, clear echoes of historic,
recurrent designations of ‘undeserving
poor’, back to 19th C. and before.
‘The “dangerous class”, the social scum,
that passively rotting mass thrown off by
the lowest layers of society…’ (Marx and
Engels, 1977:47).
Consumption & (classed)
identities
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Hayward and Yar (2006): ‘chav represents
a popular reconfiguration of the underclass
idea’
‘Excessive participation’ in ‘aesthetically
impoverished’ consumption - not
marginality to production (work) –
becomes the target for class ire
[Not in absolute agreement]
Hayward and Yar (2006)
‘…the chav phenomenon partakes of a
social process in which consumption,
identity, marginality & social control
converge; consumption practices now
serve as the locus around which exclusion
is configured and the excluded are
classified, identified and subjected to
(increasingly intense) regimes of
management’.
‘…regimes of management’: an
example
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Policing the ‘usual suspects’ (McAra and McVie,
2005); policing the ‘irrelevant’ (Loftus, 2007)
Stops, arrests & conviction rates reflect ‘form’ &
availability for arrest
But also subjective, class-based distinctions (by
officers) between the ‘respectable’ and
‘unrespectable’
(Possibly) on the basis of dress, demeanour,
embodied, physical appearance.
Researching & representing
‘chavs/ charvers’
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Common self-censuring of discriminatory
language & general avoidance of ‘victimblaming’ in contemporary UK academia
…in respect of ‘race’/ ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, dis-ability
Yet some apparent willingness to employ
‘classist’ terminology & representations…
Examples from youth studies…
McCulloch et al, 2006
Journal of Youth Studies
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Qualitative research: youth cultural divisions in
Edinburgh & Newcastle (45 interviews). 4
categories: ‘Goths’, ‘Skaters’, ‘Chavs/ Charvas/
Neds’, ‘Others’
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‘Chav, Ned and Charva are uniquely…&
interchangeably used as “othering” labels & only
rarely as a self-identifying label…[they] did not
associate themselves with the name and did not
feel they were one homogeneous group’ (p.5478).
McCulloch et al (cont): charvas…
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i.e. quite different epistemological status to
this one category
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‘Tony (Charva):[referring to charva] It’s what
more posh people use to try and describe
thugs and that’ (p.552).
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Rather, highly localised, neighbourhoodbased names, territoriality & rivalries within
this externally labelled ‘sub-culture’ (cf:
MacDonald & Marsh, 2005).
McCulloch et al (cont): charvas…
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Street leisure & neighbourhood-based
socialising
Predominantly unemployed
Lower social class (by parental occupation)
Council estate housing/ labelled
neighbourhoods
Strongly social division between Charvas &
all other categories
Impossibility of young person electing for
this strongly-class based identity, from
outside class base (unlike other groups)
Shildrick (2006) Young
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Youth cultural divisions & illicit drug use
Hartlepool, NE England
Qualitative interviews, 76 16-26 year olds
3 ‘youth cultural groupings’:
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‘Spectaculars’: i.e. clearly expressed/ named
sub-cultural styles, Goths & Punks
‘Ordinary youth’: self-defined, ‘normal’
majority
‘Trackers’: defined by others as ‘chores’,
Hartlepool-specific (?) variant of charver
Shildrick (cont)
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Very similar to McCulloch et al’s findings
(about form & content of youth cultural
division);
Shildrick adds differences in drug-using
behaviour as further typological element
But politics/ ethics of academic
representation: why persist with universally
pejorative labelling?
‘Chores’ renamed neutrally by Shildrick (as
‘trackers’)
Anoop Nayak Race, Place &
Globalization (2004)
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Strong, sophisticated contribution to
contemporary youth studies
Valuably situating questions of cultural (&
ethnic) identity in historic context of unequal
life conditions & youth transitions in a postindustrial city in NE England
Three main youth cultural forms:
 [‘Real Geordies’]
 [‘White Wannabes’]
 ‘Charver Kids’…
Nayak: the symbolic violence of
class
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Economically marginal, socially excluded
Again, street-based & neighbourhood
socialising, plus illegal rave/ techno scene
But, claims some self-identification with label
Embodied styles/ habitus of ‘hard
masculinity’ & association with criminality,
violence, disorder, the underclass
Nayak clearly identifies symbolic violence of
class prejudice in popular, discursive
representations of this group
Nayak: blurring representations
with reality?
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‘Like many minority ethnic groups before
them, charvers were associated with street
crime, disease, drugs, over-breeding (many
came from large families) and the seedy
underbelly of the “black
economy”’(2006:824).
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i.e., associated with in the narratives of other
young people (we think), but, difficult to
identify where discursive analysis/ critique
finishes & ethnographic description starts
Nayak: charvers from a distance
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‘If the postures of Charver Kids are “apelike” and pronounced, other body-reflexive
practices such as smoking, spitting, wearing
loudly and drinking alcohol from bottles and
cans in public further served to authenticate
their “roughness”’ (2006: 823).
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Much on how they are seen & what they
allegedly do but (virtually) nothing of what
they say, or think, directly.
‘White trash’, poor places & the
new snobbery
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The tools & targets of moral censure may
have changed since the 19th C. – ASBOs &
council estate residents – but similar themes
show themselves (Hughes, 2007)
 e.g. the prejudice that character can be
read from appearance; facial (and racial)
features
‘Stigmata of degeneration’ define the poor,
‘the social scum’, ‘the unfit’ & ‘criminals’ as
belonging to an inferior race (Webster,
2007).
The racialisation of poor whites
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Poor whites as repositories of racism – but
also themselves racialised (Collins, 2004:
Webster, 2007).
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US & UK ethnographies show white intraethnic fears about maintaining
‘respectability’
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Council estates as ‘dumping grounds’ for ‘the
social scum’: key signifier of poverty
Hanley, Estates (2007:14-15)
‘Estates are dangerous, they imply: don’t
visit them, and whatever you do, work as
hard as you can so you don’t have to live
on them. All the people who live on
estates are failures, and failure is not only
contagious but morally repugnant…
…that’s what they’re for: to contain the
undeserving, un-useful poor. If the
feckless poor did not exist, neither would
council estates’.
Summary & conclusions
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‘Chav’ & ‘charver’ examples of age-old
vilifications of the ‘undeserving’ poor
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‘…though the term chav/a now circulates
widely in Britain as a term of disgust and
contempt, it is imposed on people rather
than being claimed by them’ (Lawler,
2005:802)
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Recent youth studies identify currency of
terminology and existence of some sorts of
cultural/ social phenomena to which this
refers
Summary & conclusions
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In otherwise sophisticated analyses, some
come close to repeating/reinforcing moral,
class stereotyping
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…partly because of the comparative paucity
in youth cultural studies of ethnographic
‘thick description’ of poor(est) white young
people (Shildrick & MacDonald, 2007)
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(see Archer et al, 2007, for a more careful
analysis of ‘working-class young people’s
style, identity & educational engagement’)
To finish…
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Youth & the burden of representations (Ball
et al, 2000; Griffin, 1993; Pearson, 1983)
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Lister (2004:115): ‘the responsibility of
those who research and write about poverty
to use language that is respectful and “less
distancing”’.
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In other words, to paraphrase Sennett
(2003:3), to treat people though they
matter, with respect
References
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Archer, L., Hollingworth, S., and Halsall, A. (2007)’”University's not for me – I’m a
Nike person”: urban, working-class young people’s negotiation of “style”, identity
and educational engagement’, Sociology, 41, 2: 219-238.
Ball, S., Maguire, M. and Macrae, S. (2000) Choice, Pathways and Transitions Post16: New Youth, New Economies in the Global City, London: Routledge/ Falmer.
Bromley, S. (2002) ‘In the name of the Charver’, Leeds University, Department of
English, www.sarahbromley.co.uk/scally/academic.html (accessed 19/03/07):
Collins, M (2004) The Likes of Us: A biography of the white working class, London:
Granta
Griffin, C. (1993) Representations of Youth, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harris, J. (2007) ‘So now we’ve finally got our very own white trash’, The Guardian,
6th March.
Hayward, K. and Yar, M (2006) ‘The ‘Chav’ Phenomenon: Consumption, Media and
the Construction of a New Underclass’ in Crime, Media, Culture
Hanley, L. (2007) Estates
Hughes, G. The Politics of Crime and Community Basingstoke: Palgrave
Lawler, S. (2005) ‘Introduction’, special issue on Class, Culture & Identity,
Sociology, 39, 5: 797-806.
References
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Lister, R. (2004) Poverty Oxford: Polity.
Loftus, B (2007) ‘Policing the “irrelevant”: class, diversity and
contemporary police culture’, in O’Neill, M. et al (eds.) Police and
Occupational Culture, Oxford: Elsevier.
MacDonald, R., and Marsh, J. (2005) Disconnected Youth? Growing up in
Britain’s Poor Neighbourhoods, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Marx. K. & Engels,
F. (1977/ 1848) Manifesto of the Communist Party, Moscow: Progress
Publishers.
McAra, L., and McVie, S. (2005) ‘The usual suspects? Street-life, young
people and the police’ in Criminal Justice, 5, 1: 5-36.
McCulloch, K., Stewart, A., and Lovegreen, N. (2006) ‘“We just hang out
together: youth cultures and social class’, in Journal of Youth Studies, 9,
5: 539-556.
Morris, L. (1994) ‘The Dangerous Classes: the ‘underclass and social
citizenship’ London, Routledge.
Nayak, A. (2004) Race, Place and Globalization, Oxford: Berg.
-(2006) ‘Displaced Masculinities: Chavs, Youth and Class in the Postindustrial City’, in Sociology, 40, 5: 813-831.
References
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Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, London:
Macmillan.
Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. ‘The Hidden Injuries of Class’ Cambridge
University Press. Sennett, R. (2003) Respect: the formation of character
in an age of inequality, London: Penguin
Shildrick, T. (2006) ‘Youth Culture, Subculture and the Importance of
Neighbourhood’ in Young Vol. 14, no. 1.
Shildrick, T. and MacDonald, R. (2006) ‘In defence of subculture: young
people, leisure and social divisions’, Journal of Youth Studies, Vol 9, No.
2.
Webster, C. (2007) Understanding Race and Crime, Buckinghamshire,
Open University Press.
Webster, C., Simpson, D., MacDonald, R., Abbas, A., Cieslik, M., Shildrick,
T., and Simpson, M., (2004) Poor Transitions, Bristol: Policy Press.