The following text is an excerpt from the zine “working_lass_hero_ine”. Personal stories, social theories, statistics, song texts, photos, and blog entries about social class have built its foundation. They belong to poverty class academics, workers’ children, educators, and workers. They’ve all formed the basis of a fictional character named working_lass hero_ine, meant to serve as a visual manifestation of hierarchical and classism-based structures and dynamics. This rendering makes no claim to completeness but indicates in which areas class is effective, e.g. embodiment of social class, aesthetic attitude, and habitus. It is unambiguous and diverse, just like the experiences with classism and the view on (creative) work, education, career.
“I began my journey to class consciousness as a college student learning about the politics of the American left reading Marx, Fanon, Gramsci, Memmi, the little red book and so on. But when my studies ended, I still felt my language to be inadequate. I still found it difficult to make sense of class in relation to race and gender. Even now the intellectual left in this nation looks down on anyone who does not speak the chosen jargon” – wrote bell hooks, Afro-American literary scholar and intersectional feminist, in Where we stand: Class Matters (2000).
Likewise, my engagement with social class and class consciousness began with social advancement, as an increase of cultural capital, where I nonetheless noticed a decrease in the proportion of fellow students whose parents had a workers’ or unemployed background. From comprehensive school to grammar school and from a technical college to the University of the Arts Berlin, class seemed to change. While in the USA, France, and England “classism”, i.e. the “discrimination of persons on the basis of the actual, presumed or attributed social or educational status”¹, is increasingly addressed as a topic, class in Germany still receives little attention. Or, in bell hooks’ terms, it remains an “uncool subject”. Yet Germany is one of the European countries in which education is still strongly dependent on one’s social origin.²
Talking about inequality of opportunity in the educational system:
“I began my journey to class consciousness as a college student learning about the politics of the American left reading Marx, Fanon, Gramsci, Memmi, the little red book and so on. But when my studies ended, I still felt my language to be inadequate. I still found it difficult to make sense of class in relation to race and gender. Even now the intellectual left in this nation looks down on anyone who does not speak the chosen jargon” – wrote bell hooks, Afro-American literary scholar and intersectional feminist, in Where we stand: Class Matters (2000).
Likewise, my engagement with social class and class consciousness began with social advancement, as an increase of cultural capital, where I nonetheless noticed a decrease in the proportion of fellow students whose parents had a workers’ or unemployed background. From comprehensive school to grammar school and from a technical college to the University of the Arts Berlin, class seemed to change. While in the USA, France, and England “classism”, i.e. the “discrimination of persons on the basis of the actual, presumed or attributed social or educational status”¹, is increasingly addressed as a topic, class in Germany still receives little attention. Or, in bell hooks’ terms, it remains an “uncool subject”. Yet Germany is one of the European countries in which education is still strongly dependent on one’s social origin.²
Talking about inequality of opportunity in the educational system:
