Between aggrieved whiteness and class precarity: a feminist politics of interpretation

Abstract

A key challenge faced by antiracist, feminist scholars engaging white working-class subjects is how to conceptualize and name class-related vulnerabilities while remaining critical of broader narratives of white victimhood/aggrieved whiteness that undergird contemporary forms of white supremacy. In this article, we draw on our respective research experiences studying white working-class communities in the US South to consider how to make conceptual and ethical space for the ways white working-class research subjects navigate—in contradictory ways—the multiple axes of power that shape their lives. Across different projects with white working-class subjects, we found narratives of loss and insecurity tied to class precarity often intertwined, explicitly or implicitly, with tropes of aggrieved whiteness—the latter functioning to legitimize and reinforce broader structures of white supremacy. Each of us struggled to analytically and ethically untangle these threads in the lives of research participants, given our impulse to compassionately explore class precarity while also challenging and critiquing white supremacy. In grappling with these and other dilemmas of interpretation, we reflect on the ethics of care and respect as a cornerstone of feminist methodology and how to engage in compassionate critique as we analyze and represent white working-class narratives.

Keywords:

• class
• epistemology
• feminist methodologies
• precarity
• relationships
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants of our respective research projects, who generously shared their experiences and ideas with us. We would also like to thank Katherine Brickell and the anonymous reviewers for their critical engagements, which sharpened our arguments. All errors or unconvincing interpretations are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lise Nelson

Lise Nelson is Associate Professor of Geography in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona. Her research examines labor, identity, and belonging in the context of neoliberal globalization. She is interested in the ways globalization impacts, and is contested by, less powerful groups whose experiences and opportunities are shaped by gender, race, class, and/or illegality. Her research in Mexico centers on neoliberal restructuring and struggles over gender, indigeneity, and political authority in Michoacán. Much of her scholarship analyzes the economics and politics of Latinx immigration in the United States. This line of inquiry includes research exploring struggles over farmworker housing in Woodburn, Oregon, as well as studies of gentrification, immigrant labor regimes, and geographies of social reproduction in the rural United States. She is committed to fine-grained, historically situated qualitative analysis that links processes of everyday life and local change with global transformations and power dynamics.

Barbara E. Smith

Barbara Ellen Smith is Professor Emerita in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Virginia Tech. Her research contributes to the fields of women’s and gender studies, sociology, geography, and Appalachian studies. She has published four books and numerous academic articles and book chapters. Much of her research coalesces around class and gender dynamics vis-à-vis immigration, racial politics, and transformations in the nature of work. She has written extensively on the politics of social reproduction, labor activism, extractive industries, and rural deindustrialization. Drawing on a range of qualitative methods, Smith is especially interested in the politics of economic change, immigrant settlement, and community practices in the context of the rural and Appalachian US South.

Jamie Winders

Jamie Winders is Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She is best known for her interdisciplinary work on international migration, as well as her contributions to geography’s engagements with race, labor, and social reproduction. Jamie is Editor-in-Chief of the International Migration Review and Associate Editor of cultural geographies. Much of her research focuses on the interactions between changing patterns of immigrant settlement and racial/cultural politics, particularly in the context of new immigrant destinations in a domestic and an international context.