Exhaustion, Scars, and Inheritance: An Embodied Approach to Social Class
In this essay, Emerson Bodde argues that class ought to be viewed as a “real social identity” in the sense developed by Linda Alcoff to describe race and gender as bodily, hermeneutic, and historically shaped social categories. Taking inspiration especially from Alcoff’s arguments concerning gender, Bodde argues class is just as “real” and “embodied” while rejecting Alcoff’s own anti-realist evaluation of class. In the same way that the differential relationship to sexual reproduction anchors the social category of gender as an underdetermining element for a social identity, work and its effect upon the embodied subject does the same for class. The anthropological necessity of work, the wracking of the body by work, and the determinate autonomy one exercises in “dealing with” exhaustion-these all situate work as a subjectivity-forming phenomenon that forms differential groupings. The argument is further defended by linking this account with Shannon Sullivan’s argument that epigenetic inheritance serves as a key element of the transgenerational dimensions of anti-black racism and racial injustice. Bodde concludes by suggesting that a fully sufficient elaboration of social class as a real social identity must be supplemented by an account of society and the reproduction of such identities over time.
