Although there had been something of a demise of interest in class analysis, more recently there has been a return to a focus on class through explanations that take account of the multiple nature and discursive constitution of class-based subjectivities. Because of their insistent attention to the structuring of class relations such accounts of class could be defined as materialist forms of poststructuralism. Thus Bettie (2000) comments that her title ‘“Women without Class” has multiple meanings’ (ibid.: 3). These include a standard understanding of class in terms of low educational attainment, low income and little cultural capital and to signify that her paper is an intervention in theoretical debates that have marginalized class concerns. Bettie’s research is therefore concerned with developing an understanding of the complex and contradictory ways through which young women understand class difference. Her goal was to ‘explore the relationship between class symbolism and the formation of subjective class identity… in which class subjectivity is constructed in relationship to gender and racial/ethnic identity under late capitalism’ (ibid.: 7). Bettie describes her methodological approach as ethnographic as she ‘hung out’ with working-class girls in a Californian high school with a high proportion of Mexican-American students. While Bettie is concerned to foreground issues of class she interweaves her account with issues of ‘race’ through, for example, a focus on ‘acting white’ and ‘acting Mexican’.
Bettie’s analysis considers the performativity of class through which she ‘came to define students not only as working or middle class in origin but also as working — or middle-class performers [whereby] Girls who were passing, or metaphorically cross-dressing, had to negotiate their ‘‘inherited’’ identity from home with their ‘‘chosen’’ public identity at school’ (ibid.: 10). In this way Bettie understood the gap between how their families looked and talked at home and how these students looked and talked at school as a way of conceptualizing class ‘as not only a material location but also a performance’ (ibid.). In this Bettie explores issues of class-based meanings of taste, success and authenticity and the enactment of working — and middle-class femininity. She concludes by arguing that the usefulness of conceptualizing class as performative is that it focuses attention on class identities as effects of social structure and as a sense of place (see also Skeggs, 1997). This ‘helps explain why class struggle is often waged more over modes of identity expression than over explicit political ideologies’ (Skeggs: 29).