ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen a strong take-up of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas by feminists analysing how class distinctions are produced and reproduced in relations between women (Bourdieu, 1984; Skeggs, 1997; Skeggs and Thumin, 2008; McRobbie, 2009). His theory of the role of cultural capital and the distinctions of ‘taste’ in establishing social class differences is here turned back on the analysis of culture itself. Angela McRobbie writes of a ‘new, virulent form of class antagonism’ in her work on TV makeover programmes such as What Not to Wear, and argues that Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence aptly captures the hurtful and injurious language used in these contexts (McRobbie, 2009, p.133). Here the ‘field’ has authority over the ‘habitus’, as the upper-middle-class presenters deftly denigrate the bad taste of the victims who come forward for self-improvement: ‘the message is that the poor woman would do well to emulate her social superiors’ (McRobbie, 2009, p.130).
