Beverley Skeggs is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. She has published The Media; Issues in Sociology; Feminist Cultural Theory; Formations of Class and Gender; Class, Self, Culture Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety (with Les Moran) and Feminism after Bourdieu (with Lisa Adkins), and with Helen Wood, Reacting to Reality TV: Audience, Performance, Value and Reality TV and Class, along with many journal articles on class and culture. As an ESRC Professorial Fellow she developed a “sociology of values and value’’ that included projects on the digital economy and prosperity theology, and whilst Director of the Atlantic Fellows Programme, established the ‘Global Economies of Care’ theme at the LSE.
Explanations of how identity is constructed are fundamental to contemporary debates in feminism and social theory. In this important addition to the literature, Beverley Skeggs demonstrates that class needs to be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity, and power. Class has been marginalized in feminist and cultural theory and it has become increasingly difficult to teach, research, or speak about class. Formations of Class and Gender identifies the neglect of class issues in favor of gender issues, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society. In a sustained examination of the production of knowledge, detailed ethnographic research is used to explain how ôrealö women modify and reformulate our understanding of class, subjectivity, and sexuality. A critical examination of cultural representationùinformed by recent feminist theory and the work of Pierre BourdieuùFormations of Class and Gender is an articulate demonstration of how to translate theory into practice. Engaged with theoretical and methodological issues, this will be the standard referenced ethnography on class and gender. It will be required reading for students and researchers in womenÆs studies and sociology.
