Against culture? Class analysis, strategic essentialism and methodological nationalism after Beverley Skeggs' Formations of Class & Gender

Beverley Skeggs’ first book (FoC&G) has been central to the study of class and culture, pushing it towards a more sustained consideration of intersections with gender and, to a lesser extent, race. Yet, some tensions within Skeggs’ work remain unrecognised, and hence unresolved, in recent debates about class, culture and their link with intersecting inequalities. This article argues that FoC&G encapsulates two different approaches to the study of class and culture and that the distinction between these approaches has a significant bearing on how sociologists do class analysis and, potentially, imagine class politics. On the one hand, Skeggs’ focus on upwardly mobile working-class women, her longitudinal methodology and her heterodox theoretical toolkit challenge the analytical conflation of class positions, dispositions and practices, providing important tools to research class trajectories (as opposed to class positions) and class formations as socially heterogeneous. On the other hand, this approach coexists with a strategic essentialism that emphasises broad differences between working- and middle-class dispositions, and with a methodological nationalism that centres whiteness and, more subtly, citizenship status. I show that this combination of strategic essentialism and methodological nationalism remains influential in later class analysis, particularly as Bourdieu’s influence grew and Skeggs’ theoretical originality was downplayed. I argue that the anti-essentialism of FoC&G – its reflection on the representational limits of class analysis – remains important for future research on multi-status class formations. However, it needs to be expanded towards a deeper understanding of how strategic essentialism and methodological nationalism influence class analysis’ representational strategies.