Building social class analyses of YAL through key social class concepts by Sophia Sarigianides
| Dr. Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides is Professor & Coordinator of English Education in the English Department at Westfield State University in Western Massachusetts. She teaches courses on young adult literature, English Methods, and the role of race and social class in the ELA classroom. Her research and scholarship focus on antiracist teaching strategies, the role of conceptions of adolescence in young adult literature and in teacher thinking, and addressing social class through literature instruction. Her upcoming article, in English Education, focuses on the effects of a social class literacy curriculum she used with two working-class, YA texts. |  |
After working to build my racial literacy to do a better job of addressing race through literature instruction, I knew that the next area of personal ignorance that I wanted to focus on was social class. If someone asked me to do a class analysis of a text, I wouldn’t have known where to start to say something meaningful, something that unpeeled the novel in fresh ways unavailable without class-based knowledge.
So, I asked smart friends, specifying that I didn’t want to learn about Marxist analyses, but some other way to do class-based analyses. Thankfully, Amanda Haertling Thein recommended that I read Julie Bettie’s sociological study Women without Class: Girls, Race and Identity. From this book, I started building what I now think of as my social class literacy with key concepts like class injury (about which I wrote in an earlier YAW Blog), cultural capital, and definitions for understanding working-class experiences as either settled-living or hard-living working class. I started applying these terms to YAW in my YA course for ELA teachers, and it has changed the way I see characterization, theme, even setting in texts I’ve been teaching for a while.
In this post I share a few key class concepts and how they show up in some YA texts as ways to build class-based literary analyses, and by doing so, bolstering not only engagements with literature, but applications to readers’ lives, and teachers’ perceptions of current and future students.
So, I asked smart friends, specifying that I didn’t want to learn about Marxist analyses, but some other way to do class-based analyses. Thankfully, Amanda Haertling Thein recommended that I read Julie Bettie’s sociological study Women without Class: Girls, Race and Identity. From this book, I started building what I now think of as my social class literacy with key concepts like class injury (about which I wrote in an earlier YAW Blog), cultural capital, and definitions for understanding working-class experiences as either settled-living or hard-living working class. I started applying these terms to YAW in my YA course for ELA teachers, and it has changed the way I see characterization, theme, even setting in texts I’ve been teaching for a while.
In this post I share a few key class concepts and how they show up in some YA texts as ways to build class-based literary analyses, and by doing so, bolstering not only engagements with literature, but applications to readers’ lives, and teachers’ perceptions of current and future students.
Institutionalized Classism
As with the racial counterpart to this term, institutionalized classism reflects how institutions like schools, for example, reflect classism through policies and practices. So, when hard-living working-class Zoey, in Braden’s The Benefits of Being an Octopus, who lives with her mom and three younger siblings in her mom’s boyfriend’s trailer with him and his father, is asked to join the Debate Club at her middle school, we see how such extracurricular activities are classed.
Zoey has to race to the pizza joint where her mom works after school to pick up her baby brother from there, before crossing the street to pick up her other two young siblings from the bus and then take them home. To achieve this, her mom’s co-worker stays a bit after his shift to watch the baby while her mom starts her shift and they wait for Zoey. Once Zoey is invited to join the Debate Club by her teacher, she cannot imagine a way to stay after school to do this and still meet her family responsibilities. Only because her teacher knew about her responsibilities, and offered to drive Zoey to the restaurant in time to do her pick-ups was Zoey able to participate.
As my sharp student, Jessica, noted: “It took a lot of people helping her to make it possible for her to do this extracurricular activity.” In other words, after school “enrichment” opportunities—the kinds that look great on college applications, for example—require students to have leisure time, something available to middle-class students, but often not to working-class students. This is an example of institutionalized classism, and there is an abundance of textual details to unpack across texts to build a class-focused literary analysis.
As with the racial counterpart to this term, institutionalized classism reflects how institutions like schools, for example, reflect classism through policies and practices. So, when hard-living working-class Zoey, in Braden’s The Benefits of Being an Octopus, who lives with her mom and three younger siblings in her mom’s boyfriend’s trailer with him and his father, is asked to join the Debate Club at her middle school, we see how such extracurricular activities are classed.
Zoey has to race to the pizza joint where her mom works after school to pick up her baby brother from there, before crossing the street to pick up her other two young siblings from the bus and then take them home. To achieve this, her mom’s co-worker stays a bit after his shift to watch the baby while her mom starts her shift and they wait for Zoey. Once Zoey is invited to join the Debate Club by her teacher, she cannot imagine a way to stay after school to do this and still meet her family responsibilities. Only because her teacher knew about her responsibilities, and offered to drive Zoey to the restaurant in time to do her pick-ups was Zoey able to participate.
As my sharp student, Jessica, noted: “It took a lot of people helping her to make it possible for her to do this extracurricular activity.” In other words, after school “enrichment” opportunities—the kinds that look great on college applications, for example—require students to have leisure time, something available to middle-class students, but often not to working-class students. This is an example of institutionalized classism, and there is an abundance of textual details to unpack across texts to build a class-focused literary analysis.
Cultural Capital
French theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, introduced the concept of cultural capital, to explain the ways that students who grow up in middle-class homes acquire class-based knowledge (e.g., about books) and practices (e.g., how to dress for an “occasion”) that better match the middle-classed expectations of schooling, and thereby make their educational experiences a smoother process than it is for working-class youth. We can draw attention to the role of cultural capital whether a book is explicitly focused on class-based themes or not.
For an example of the former, Ibi Zoboi’s Pride: A Pride and Prejudice Remix, puts on display the many ways that the working-class Benitez family lacks the kind of cultural capital on display in encounters with the wealthy Darcy family that moves in across the street. When Zuri, the protagonist, is in the car with Darius and his sister, Georgia, both of whom attend fancy prep schools, Zuri cannot understand half of the references to places they have traveled: “skiing somewhere called Aspen, go to somebody named Martha’s Vineyard every summer, and how they are still hoping to take a trip to some place called the Maldives” (168). Zuri lacks the cultural capital to follow the conversation.
French theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, introduced the concept of cultural capital, to explain the ways that students who grow up in middle-class homes acquire class-based knowledge (e.g., about books) and practices (e.g., how to dress for an “occasion”) that better match the middle-classed expectations of schooling, and thereby make their educational experiences a smoother process than it is for working-class youth. We can draw attention to the role of cultural capital whether a book is explicitly focused on class-based themes or not.
For an example of the former, Ibi Zoboi’s Pride: A Pride and Prejudice Remix, puts on display the many ways that the working-class Benitez family lacks the kind of cultural capital on display in encounters with the wealthy Darcy family that moves in across the street. When Zuri, the protagonist, is in the car with Darius and his sister, Georgia, both of whom attend fancy prep schools, Zuri cannot understand half of the references to places they have traveled: “skiing somewhere called Aspen, go to somebody named Martha’s Vineyard every summer, and how they are still hoping to take a trip to some place called the Maldives” (168). Zuri lacks the cultural capital to follow the conversation.
In contrast, in Colbert’s Little & Lion, a book focused more on issues of bisexuality and mental health than social class, the main characters are nonetheless upper middle-class characters who live in a beautiful home in a historic district in Los Angeles, can afford to send a child to a boarding school in New England, and discuss plans for the kids to travel after high school. In Suzette’s interests in visiting museums with her mom’s partner, Saul, the fact that engaging in this pastime is something they have enjoyed across their relationship, we see the “natural” presence of cultural capital around art, exhibits, and museums evident in middle-class homes.
In our YA course, we talk about how having class ease does not mean that youth like Suzette do not have problems. They do. But they do not have class-based problems, and this affords them opportunities to turn their attention to other facets of being than exigencies, and this affects characterization, it affects themes in YA texts, and it also exposes adolescence as a classed categorization when some youth have time to socialize and build romantic relationships and others do not.
In our YA course, we talk about how having class ease does not mean that youth like Suzette do not have problems. They do. But they do not have class-based problems, and this affords them opportunities to turn their attention to other facets of being than exigencies, and this affects characterization, it affects themes in YA texts, and it also exposes adolescence as a classed categorization when some youth have time to socialize and build romantic relationships and others do not.
Agency
This term is less of a class-specific piece of nomenclature, and more of a worthy consideration when making text selections focused on social class. As with texts featuring other marginalized groups, when we reach for texts to address social class, it matters to ensure that protagonists who may be class-oppressed are nonetheless still shown to be agentic.
In fact, it’s just this issue that bothers Jade, the protagonist of Watson’s Piecing Me Together. More than anything, she wants to be nominated for the service abroad program, where she can use the Spanish she’s learned. Instead, she is regularly nominated for class-based programs like SAT testing support, a job tutoring peers in Spanish, and the Woman-to-Woman program aimed at building cultural capital in Black, working-class, first-generation students striving for college. But when a young Black woman is injured at the hands of a police officer, Jade mobilizes to do something for her and for her family, and this sense of agency leads her to advocate for herself at school, too, around this much-desired opportunity to travel abroad.
This term is less of a class-specific piece of nomenclature, and more of a worthy consideration when making text selections focused on social class. As with texts featuring other marginalized groups, when we reach for texts to address social class, it matters to ensure that protagonists who may be class-oppressed are nonetheless still shown to be agentic.
In fact, it’s just this issue that bothers Jade, the protagonist of Watson’s Piecing Me Together. More than anything, she wants to be nominated for the service abroad program, where she can use the Spanish she’s learned. Instead, she is regularly nominated for class-based programs like SAT testing support, a job tutoring peers in Spanish, and the Woman-to-Woman program aimed at building cultural capital in Black, working-class, first-generation students striving for college. But when a young Black woman is injured at the hands of a police officer, Jade mobilizes to do something for her and for her family, and this sense of agency leads her to advocate for herself at school, too, around this much-desired opportunity to travel abroad.
Slowly, I have been building such a bedrock of social class vocabulary to craft the kind of critical lens that opens classed experiences for literary interpretation that feels resonant and meaningful for teachers aiming to teach their own ELA students about class. By focusing on concepts drawn from sociology—rather than from Marxist analysis, say—students in my courses have found easier inroads to noticing social class at work in YA texts, and understanding how important it would be to bring such awareness to their future students, too.
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