q-sputnik

I find the ‘white middle-class woman’ concept problematic and I struggle to identify with it. It is so common in the social sciences and so widely used in articles, books and blogs as if ‘white middle-class’ constitutes a homogenous category that is clear and acceptable by all who choose to belong to it. But to me it seems that the category connotes more than race, class and gender. It explicitly places race, class and gender as understood in privileged western nations and according to the problems and conflicts these nations have been faced up with.

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I sit on my red IKEA sofa, it was the cheapest and is ok for my ‘taste’, but have difficulty self-reflecting my cultural capital while sitting on that sofa since ‘taste’ is not preference according to my aesthetics but my actual habitus. I am forced to admit that I belong in a middle-class because I do a postgraduate degree and therefore it does not matter that today I am unemployed, what is important is the potential income I will get with a postgraduate degree. Having been to an Art&Design College falls rather heavy on my head too, especially with the accompanying stigma of the New Media or Digital Artist which tends to be the scorn of Media Studies theorists. Eventually, it all comes down to experiencing what one critics, can you really talk about photography if you never experimented with a camera? At the same time, is it enough to read the history of cinema and be a film expert? This is the great divide cultivated in educational institutions between theory and practice, the dis-illusio of the intellectual field who is a definite no-no for art students, intellectuals write to cover their lack of talent but your portfolio talks for you, not your degree. For theory students hands-on knowledge or the ‘industry’ are unknown concepts,

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