Notes on Martha Gimenez, Back to Class: Reflections on the Dialectics of Class and Identity

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Notes on Martha Gimenez, Back to Class
Reflections on the Dialectics of Class and
Identity
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The Nature of Social Identity

• This is not the same philosophical question as
  that of personal identity, which Rachels
  discussed in chapter five it has less to do
  with the connection between mind and body/brain
  than it does with the relationship between the
  individual self and other selves. Social
  identity is not given, it is constructed.

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A Question about Social Identity

• Self-Diagnosis List what you regard as the
  five most important features of your own social
  identity, e.g. race, class, gender, sexual
  orientation, religion, nationality, ethnicity,
  political orientation, age, parents, occupation,
  marital status, music or sports preferences, etc.
• In other words, construct a long sentence like
  the following I am _____, and _____, and
  _____, and _____ .

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A Question about Social Class

• What is your own social class? Upper, middle,
  lower? Why do you think that the term working
  class is so rarely used in the contemporary U.S.?

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A Quiz about Social Class in Recent U.S. History

• 1971 Gallup Poll on Popular Support for the
  Vietnam War (taken from James Loewen, Lies My
  Teacher told Me, revised edition (NY Simon and
  Schuster, 2007).

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Gimenezs Thesis

• In this paper, I will argue that identity
  politics, legitimized by academic discourse and
  strengthened by distortions about class in the
  media, and in political and public discourse, has
  greatly contributed to channeling political and
  intellectual energies toward limited and,
  ultimately, self-defeating goals (p. 108).

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Status and Class

• Status has to do with non-economic cultural
  values and symbolic power.
• Class has to do with who has actual economic
  power over how goods and services are produced.
• Although status and class are often confused,
  when class divisions are taken into
  consideration, it becomes clear that many of the
  problems afflicting women and people of color are
  not due entirely to their identity but to their
  class position (p. 111).

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Class and Identity

• Gimenez stresses the dialectical interaction
  between class and identity class and identity
  . . . are not mutually exclusive but part of the
  network of experiences that shape peoples
  experiences. Class struggles and identity-based
  struggles are intertwined class relations
  presuppose cultural understandings, and cultural
  and political recognitions are a means toward
  economic and political justice (p. 115).

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What is to be Done?

• What is needed, at this critical time . . . is
  a return to class, unmediated by the distortions
  of cultural/ideological understandings of its
  effects. This entails, among other things, a
  clear understanding of how the class structure
  imposes actual limitations on identity politics
  (p. 116).