Miseducation by Diane Reay

Author:Diane Reay [Reay, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447330660
Publisher: Policy Press

Commonalities and differences in mobility stories

There has been a gender imbalance in this chapter so far; these have been predominantly men’s tales, and reflect the history of social mobility over the last century as tales of working-class men made good. I want to underscore some of these themes of oscillation, ambivalence, guilt and inauthenticity that have emerged in the above examples of social mobility by looking at the work of Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey and Steph Lawler. Walkerdine and Lucey argue that upward mobility was something that all of the working-class women in their study met with deep ambivalence.10 Retaining emotional and material links with parents was key to psychic survival, and yet it was also often felt as a burden which the women could not escape from. These themes are echoed in Steph Lawler’s work on narratives of women’s upward mobility in which ‘the fantasy of “getting out and getting away” may be achieved only at the price of entering another set of social relations, in which the assumed pathology of their (working-class women’s) history and their desires is brought home to them more intensely’.11 This feminist work stresses the need to understand upward mobility as having a deeply defensive aspect. The discourses through which to read upward mobility present it as a freeing, a success. But striving for success for a working-class young person is about wanting something different, something more than your parents had, and that not only implies that there is something wrong with your parents’ life, but that there is something intrinsically wrong with them. And there is an emptiness to becoming somebody if your parents remain nobodies. What is the point of striving for equality with more-privileged others if the process creates inequalities between you and the people you love, and the communities you were born into? I want to argue that a tension between success for the individual at the expense of the failure of the many is a key motif in the narratives of many of the socially mobile. Berlant writes of shame as ‘the darker side of aspiration’s optimism’.12 And there is shame in both belonging and escape – shame in escape because it is about betrayal and desertion, but also shame in belonging because, in a strongly classed society like the UK, despite conflicting feelings of political connection and pride, a sense of belonging to the working classes carries connotations of being less.

But I also want to argue, as you can see both in the example of Akim and in my own experience, that longing for something different and then striving to make this happen constitutes an emotionally and socially terrifying shift away from the safe and familiar that is pervaded with setbacks and fallings-down. Social mobility is often presented as a straightforward linear process from one occupational category to another, but when we look at the lived experience of social mobility it is full of doublings-back, loops and curves, culs-de-sac and diversions.

What we also learn from both Jackson and

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