The making of class and gender through visualizing moral subject formation

Abstract

This article explores how white working-class women are figured as the constitutive limit - in proximity - to national public morality It is argued that four processes: increased ambivalence generated by the reworking of moral boundaries; new forms of neo-liberal governance in which the use of culture is seen as a form of personal responsibility by which new race relations are formed; new ways of investing in one's self as a way of generating exchange-value via affects and display; and the shift to compulsory individuality are reshaping class relations via the making of the self, By showing and telling themselves in public white working-class women are forced to display their lack of moral value according to the symbolic values generated by the above processes, It is a no-win situation for them unless we shift our perspective from exchange-value to use-value. Copyright © 2005 BSA Publications Ltd®.