ABSTRACT
This chapter will draw on original ethnographic (and auto ethnographic) research and interviews with spoken word performers to argue that stand-up poetry and spoken word is an ‘in-between’ form, whose position between the fields of art and commerce makes it attractive to socially mobile performers and audiences.
It uses the theories of the sociologist Bourdieu to argue that its practitioners can find themselves ‘culturally homeless’, as well as being ‘cultural omnivores’ as they produce and reproduce particular types of cultural capital.
It suggests that using research from Comedy Studies, particularly on stand-up performance, would illuminate the complex, context-dependent and shifting social class dynamics of the form.
