CHAV MUM CHAV SCUM - IMOGEN TYLER PDF

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Notes | Sociology Live: Week four – Chav Mum, Chav Scum

“CHAV MUM CHAV SCUM” Class disgust in contemporary Britain by Imogen Tyler This article explores the emergence of the grotesque and comic figure of the chav within a range of contemporary British media focusing on the role played by disgust reactions in the generation and circulation of the chav figure through popular media.  Article explores the emergence of the comic figure of the chav within a range of contemporary British media focusing on the role played by disgust reactions in the generation. o Concentrates on the figure of the female chav, vilification of young white working-class mothers which embodies historically familiar and contemporary anxieties about female sexuality, reproduction, and racial mixing o Level of disgust directed at the chav is suggestive of a heightened class antagonism that marks a new episode in the ontology of class struggle in Britain Social classifications are complex political formations that are generated and characterised by representational struggles.  Indeed, all processes of social classification, including gender, race, and sexuality, are mediated Class Disgust For Miller, emotions are feelings mediated, affected animated. The idea that emotions are animating and endowed with affect through mediation. For social class, it’s often represented through caricatured figures, figures that are often communicated in highly emotive ways. -

Then emotional mediated through repeated expressions of disgust for those deemed to be of a lower social class.

Disgust is always a response to something and our reactions are often revealing of wider social power relations. Lawler and Skeggs – role of middle class disgust in the formation of social class. Social class disappeared as a site of analysis within cultural studies in the late 1980s. Along with the rise of political rhetoric of inclusion, classlessness, and social mobility. And ‘the underclass’ rapidly took the place of the term working class. The Figure of Chav Chav – Pikey, Townie, Hood rat – have become terms of abuse for the white poor within contemporary British culture. Haywood – the term chav has always related to communities who have experienced social deprivation in one form or another. Currently, aligned with stereotypical notions of lower-class Chav News One of the primary sites within which the chav figure has been constituted is newspapers. Writing in The Edinburgh Evening News in 2004, the year in which

disgust and fascination with chavs peaked in the British press, journalist Gina Davidson’s invocation of “dole-scroungers, petty criminals, football hooligans and teenage pram-pushers” illustrates how the chav figure comes to embody in a condensed form a series of older stereotypes of the white poor. In particular, the use of phrases such as “petty criminal” and “dole-scroungers,” conjures up debates from the 1980s and 90s about the rise of a socially excluded “underclass.” However, one of the things that distinguishes the figure of the chav from previous accounts of the underclass is the emphasis on the excessive consumption of consumer and branded goods. Indeed, within news media accounts of the chav, this figure is primarily identified by means of his or her “bad,” “vulgar” and excessive consumer choices— cheap brands of cigarettes, cheap jewellery, branded sports tops, gold-hooped earrings, sovereign-rings, Burberry baseball caps. As In the context of shifting class definitions, the vilification of the chav can be interpreted as a symptom of a middle-class desire to re-demarcate class boundaries within the context of contemporary consumer culture. However, the attempt to demarcate class difference through practices of consumption is not a new phenomenon Lewis argues that mockery of chavs marks the return of traditional snobbery. Identifying herself as middle class she identifies the chav as “the non-respectable working classes.” (pg 22) Broadsheet newspaper articles on chavs tend to fall into two groups: articles by journalists such as Burchill that are highly critical of the new vilification of the working classes and articles by journalists such as Lewis that overtly celebrate this “new snobbery” and offer vivid descriptions of the “delicious release” afforded by class disgust. Menninghaus argues that laughing at something is “an act of expulsion” that closely resembles the rejecting movement of disgust reactions. Disgust and laughter are, he notes “complementary ways of admitting an alterity” (2003, p. 11). Like disgust, laughter is community-forming, it is often contagious and it generates proximity. Laughter is always shared with a real or imagined community. Laughter is often at the expense of another, and when we laugh we effectively “fix” the other, as the object of comedy. In the case of laughter at those of a lower class, laughter is boundaryforming. It creates a distance between “them” and “us,” asserting moral judgments and a superior class position. Laughing at chavs is a way of naming, managing and authorising class disgust, contempt, and anxiety. The expression of class disgust within newspaper articles on chavs is deliberate and self-conscious, it is a feigned disgust performed both for our entertainment and as a means of asserting middleclass identity claims. (pg23) Chav Online The website, urbandictionary (n.d.) is an online slang dictionary that functions as an unofficial online authority on English language slang. There were 368 definitions of the term chav posted on the site at the time of writing this article, and I have listed below a small number of indicative phrases taken from some of the most highly ranked posts. Chavs . . . the cancer of the United Kingdom

Chav: a type of person who lacks the intelligence to be able to speak or write proper english, uses words, if they are proper words such as “blingin,” “mingin” etc A social underclass par excellence. The absolute dregs of modern civilization All chavs are disgusting scum. (urbandictionary n.d.) As Ahmed notes, “to name something as disgusting is performative” in that “it generates the object that it names” (2004, p. 93). This disgust speech generates a set of effects, which adhere to, produce, and embellish the disgusting figure of the chav. Through the repetition of this disgusted response, the negative properties attributed to chavs make this figure materialise as representative of a group that embodies those disgusting qualities, a group that is “lower than human or civil life” (Ahmed 2005, p. 97) (24) Within “new media” spaces such as urbandictionary, we are not only viewers but active users who can enter and affect representational spaces and places. In the case of chavs, visitors to the site can not only read about them, but have the power to invent the chav as a knowable figure.

Dirty White Chavs Class disgust is intimately tied to issues of racial difference and chav disgust is always racializing. These figures constitute an unclean “sullied urban” “underclass,” “forever placed at the borders of whiteness as the socially excluded, the economically redundant” Whilst the term chav is a term of abuse directed almost exclusively towards the white poor, chavs are not invisible normative whites, but rather hypervisible “filthy whites. This borderline whiteness is evidenced through claims that chavs appropriate black American popular culture through their clothing, music, and forms of speech, and have geographical, familial and sexual intimacy with working-class blacks and Asians an immigrant population. This “contaminated whiteness” is represented by the areas in which chavs allegedly live and their illegitimate mixed-race children as well as, more complexly, by their filthy white racism. The process of differentiating between respectable and non-respectable forms of whiteness attempts to abject the white poor from spheres of white privilege. The figurative function of the chav as a marker of racial and class difference is made most explicit through the excessively reproductive body of the chavette. ( pg 25/26) Chav Mum There is a repeated emphasis within news media and internet forums on the sluttish behaviour and multiple pregnancies. Many of the definitions on UD often refer to the chav women as constantly having children, usually all from different fathers. Whilst young unwed working-class mothers have always been a target of social stigma, hatred, and anxiety, the fetishization of the chav mum within popular culture has a contemporary specificity and marks a new outpouring of sexist class disgust. (26) The term “Vicky Pollard” has taken on an extraordinary resonance, often replacing the term “chav” as a synonym for this imagined social type it independently populates

negative newspaper and internet forum accounts of white working-class girls and young women. (pg 28) Vicky Pollard” is increasingly used as a shorthand within “serious” debates about the decline of social and educational standards. For example, in a 2006 speech to the annual conference of the Professional Association of teachers, Lawson, chair of the association, warned teachers that nursery nurses with few qualifications and poor social skills risked creating a generation of “Vicky Pollards”: “I don’t want to trivialise this in any way at all, but we don’t want a future generation of Vicky Pollards” (2006). As “Vicky Pollard” becomes entrenched and condemned as a negative figure she takes on a force and reality which conceals her origins as a fictional television character played by a white middle-aged man. Incoherent, “loud, white, excessive, drunk, fat, vulgar, disgusting” she embodies all the moral obsessions historically associated with young white working-class mothers in one iconic comic body. (pg 29) The mass vilification and mockery of the chav mum can be understood in relation to what Wilson and Huntington (2005, p. 59) have argued is the emergence of a new set of norms about femininity, in which the ideal life trajectory of middle-class women conforms to the current governmental objectives of economic growth through higher education and increased female workforce participation. We can clearly ascertain how the chav mum figures middle-class values through disgust for the sexuality and excessive reproduction of the lower classes. (pg30) The Thrills of Slumming it Class Slumming - “Chav slumming” doesn’t pretend to be sociological, there is no ethnography, no gathering of knowledge about the poor, no charity, no reaching out to touch, and no liberal guilt; there is nothing but disgust and pleasure. Through communal fun and laughter the upper and middle classes attempts to secure themselves, mark their difference and enjoy a fix of affect. (31) Chav Pride Despite relentless demonization, the chav has become an increasingly complex figure and some of those interpellated as filthy chavs have now reclaimed the term as an affirmative sub-cultural identity. This trans-coding of chav is most visible within popular music acts, such as white teenage rapper Lady Sovereign and the acclaimed pop icon and urban poet Mike Skinner (who releases records as The Streets). The selfidentified white working-class journalist Burchill has declared chav hate a form of “social racism” whilst also repeatedly attempting to transcode and claim for herself an affirmative chav identity Conclusion Social inequalities have dramatically increased in Britain in the last 30 years with increasing economic polarisation between the wealthiest and the poorest social classes (see Dorling et al., 2007). It is within the context of deepening economic inequality that we need to view much vaunted claims of the democratisation of popular media. -

The minimal opportunities for economically marginalised groups to communicate their experiences and identities within mainstream forums suggests there has been little if any shift in the alliance between elite media industries and traditional social institutions and hierarchies: class allegiances

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reproduce social inclusion and exclusion in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of class privilege. Certainly within the representational regimes which dominate within contemporary Britain social class is only visible in highly stereotyped and often antagonistic forms. Whilst the mockery and derision of many marginal groups is now widely considered to be in “bad taste,” the caricaturing and mockery of the working classes is encouraged and celebrated, as so much “reality programming” reveals.

As Miller (1997) suggests class disgust not only motivates but sustains “the lower ranking” of peoples. The figure of the chav is mobilised in ways that justify the continued division of society into those who can speak, act, and feel and those who are “spoken for.” Being identified as “chav” not only means having the place you live, the way you speak, the clothes you wear, your culture, habits, and lifestyle subject to perverse misrepresentation, mockery, and derision but also actively blocks your social mobility. In the final instance, the cumulative effect of disgust at chavs is the screening of the disenfranchised white poor from view; they are rendered invisible, inaudible or, like Vicky Pollard, laughably incomprehensible.

Note: All notes are directly from the article. Imogen Tyler (2008) “Chav Mum Chav Scum”, Feminist Media Studies, 8:1,17-34, DOI: 10.1080/14680770701824779 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680770701824779 Published online: 18 Mar 2008....