scholarly journals “For some people it isn’t a choice, it’s just how it happens”: Accounts of “delayed” motherhood among middle-class women in the UK

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsty Budds ◽  
Abigail Locke ◽  
Vivien Burr
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Delayed Motherhood ◽  
The Uk

scholarly journals ‘A Cockroach Preserved in Amber’: The Significance of Class in Critics' Representations of Heavy Metal Music and its Fans

2014 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-741 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy R. Brown ◽  
Christine Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Heavy Metal ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
Heavy Metal Music ◽  
The Uk

In this paper we engage with new cultural theories of class that have identified media representations of ‘excessive’ white heterosexual working-class femininity as a ‘constitutive limit’ of incorporation into dominant (middle-class) modes of neoliberal subjectivity and Bourdieu's thesis that classification is a form of symbolic violence that constitutes both the classifier and the classified. However, what we explore are the implications of such arguments for those modes of white heterosexual working-class masculinity that continue to reproduce themselves in forms of overtly masculinist popular culture. We do so through a critical examination of the symbolic representation of the genre of heavy metal music within contemporary music journalism. Employing a version of critical discourse analysis, we offer an analysis of representative reviews, derived from a qualitative sample of the UK music magazine, New Musical Express (1999–2008). This weekly title, historically associated with the ideals of the ‘counter culture’, now offers leadership of musical tastes in an increasingly segmented, niche-oriented marketplace. Deploying a refined model of the inscription process outlined by Skeggs, our analysis demonstrates how contemporary music criticism symbolically attaches negative attributes and forms of personhood to the working-class male bodies identified with heavy metal culture and its audience, allowing dominant middle-class modes of cultural authority to be inscribed within matters of musical taste and distinction.

scholarly journals Mid-century Modern Jazz: Music and Design in the Postwar Home

Popular Music ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-74
Author(s):  
Tom Perchard
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Modern Jazz ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Cover Art

AbstractThis article takes an imagined, transnational living room as its setting, examining jazz's place in representations of the ‘modern’ middle-class home across the post-war West, and exploring the domestic uses that listeners both casual and committed made of the music in recorded form. In magazines as apparently diverse asIdeal Homein the UK andPlayboyin the US, a certain kind of jazz helped mark a new middlebrow connoisseurship in the 1950s and 60s. Yet rather than simply locating the style in a historical sociology of taste, this piece attempts to describe jazz's role in what was an emergent middle-class sensorium. The music's sonic characteristics were frequently called upon to complement the newly sleek visual and tactile experiences – of furniture, fabrics, plastics, the light and space of modern domestic architecture – then coming to define the aspirational bourgeois home; an international modern visual aesthetic was reflected back in jazz album cover art. But to describe experience or ambience represents a challenge to historical method. As much as history proper, then, it's through a kind of experimental criticism of both music and visual culture that this piece attempts to capture the textures and moods that jazz brought to the postwar home.

Living together full time? Middle-class couples approaching retirement

1999 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARION HILBOURNE
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Marital Relationship ◽  
Personal Space ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
Senior Managers ◽  
Emotional Quality ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship

A review of the research literature shows that research on the effects of male retirement on the relationship between husbands and wives is largely based on US populations. Moreover, there is a lack of recent empirical evidence on the marital relationship in middle-class, middle-aged couples living in the UK. A study of anticipatory thoughts about retirement voiced by 306 retiring senior managers and their wives is described. The most frequent focus of their hopes and fears was potential change in the marital relationship after retirement. Three times as many wives as husbands referred to their marriages as they speculated about retirement. A content analysis revealed four major themes. The most frequent was change in the emotional quality of the relationship followed by the conflict between spending time together and the loss of personal space. There was less emphasis on the implications for household management and the possibility of widow(er)hood. The verbatim comments also illustrate some other facets of marriage among middle-aged, middle-class UK couples in the 1990s.

Unpiecing the Jigsaw: Compulsive Heterosexuality, Sex Crime, Class and Masculinity in Early 1960s British Cinema

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-151
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Class System ◽  
Crime Film ◽  
Sexual Murder ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk

This article explores the discursive intersections of masculinity, class and heterosexual desire in the still undervalued British police procedural film, Jigsaw. It considers the film both as an example of a new style of cinematic crime narrative and as a significant conjectural text in which ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and marriage, especially in their post-war and mid-century forms, are re-articulated, here as compulsive heterosexuality: a masculine drive that can ultimately lead to sexual murder. The film's low-key naturalistic style owes much to the newly realist television drama of the period, while its identification of middle-class masculinity as the locus of transgression carries cultural resonances well beyond the ostensible project of the film's narrative. Released in 1962, Jigsaw was in effect squeezed between, on the one hand, the British New Wave and, on the other, the pop musicals and London-focused films that dominated cinema in the UK in the mid-1960s. However, the casting of dependable Jack Warner as the investigating detective and its Brighton setting mark it out as an important text situated on the cusp between older versions of the crime film and the new permissiveness. Jigsaw's interrogation of the problematic sexual behaviour of two ostensibly middle-class, middle-aged men is therefore particularly interesting, especially when placed within the context of the cultural anxieties about marriage, the increasingly fluid class system of the early 1960s and an emergent youth culture.

scholarly journals Små barns livsverdener: Klassespesifikke erfaringsrom?

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Stefansen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Parenting Practices ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Ways Of Being

Title: Young children’s life worlds: Class specific spaces of experienceAbstract: The significance of class for children’s everyday life has received limited attention in Norway. In recent years a number of studies from the UK and the US have explored this topic. This paper presents analysis from a research project inspired by this growing body of research. It explores classed patterns in parents’ interactions with the institution of formal day-care. The paper also discusses how parenting practices of different sorts contribute to the reproduction of classed ways of being in the world. Special attention is given to the life worlds of middle-class and working-class children, and what is perceived as parallels between these life worlds and parents' class experiences. 

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