13118
Seminar
WiSe 20/21: Politics of respectability and the social classes
Rukmini Barua
Comments
This course offers an overview of the key debates around the question of respectability and its association with social class from the 19th to the 21st centuries. In examining this theme across a wide terrain, this course aims to outline temporal, social and geographical linkages and variations. Broadly, we aim to analyse the ways in which certain notions of social respectability coalesced around working-class and plebeian social behaviour. The distinction between the respectable and the rough is often mapped along the divide between the labour aristocracy and the rest of the labouring classes. In questioning this dualistic classification of working class culture, this course draws attention to the malleable and dynamic nature of social respectability within the working classes. Addressing a wide variety of sites—Victorian Britain, colonial India, apartheid South Africa, the United States and contemporary South Asia—we will seek to understand how respectability politics works toward the production of gendered working class subjectivities. Some of the key themes that will be discussed include the political and ideological underpinnings of respectability, its deployment as an instrument of social control, dynamics of social reform, aspiration and upward mobility, practices of masculinity and femininity, as well as the performance of ‘dis-respectability’ as a challenge to dominant socio-cultural norms. In surveying a range of historiographical texts, the course will pay particular attention to relational and situational aspects of social respectability, to move beyond an understanding of the notion as either a fixed normative ideal or a ‘filtered down’ form of bourgeois practices. close
15 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Mon, 2020-11-02 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2020-11-09 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2020-11-16 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2020-11-23 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2020-11-30 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2020-12-07 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2020-12-14 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2021-01-04 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2021-01-11 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2021-01-18 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2021-01-25 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2021-02-01 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2021-02-08 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2021-02-15 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2021-02-22 12:00 - 14:00