How to stop paying lip-service to class—and why it won’t happen¹

Literary and cultural scholars now generally agree that where gender, ethnicity, and class are concerned, class for some decades has been bringing up the rear, not only in the attention it receives but also in the practical results of this attention as compared with the attention given gender and ethnicity. Many feel distressed by the imbalance and sometimes strive to correct it, and here I will argue that this is easier said than done in our intellectual situation of these recent decades. For it is not as if we have deliberately shied away from the subject of class for fear of being accused of fomenting class warfare. It is rather that our efforts have been discouraged or aborted because class continues to resist the analytical methods, categories, and vocabulary that have become hegemonic among us because they have proved so productive for gender and ethnicity while also keeping class invisible. Gender and ethnicity, along with sexual orientation, post-coloniality, and other forms of difference, have been analyzed primarily as geographical sites of identity and oppression. But when you try to analyze class in that way, either you must resort to the conceptually problematic upper, middle, and lower, as sites whose origins, parameters, and persistence remain fundamentally inexplicable, or for all practical purposes you must come up empty. Class cannot be understood as a geographical site because, in the imperishable words of my marxist mentors, “class is an adjective, not a noun” (Resnick & Wolff 1997: 159). It is a particular form of the temporal process of human exploitation in the daily work that we do rather than our physical characteristics or political disempowerment. Class exploitation in all of its forms produces poverty, of course, and poverty can indeed be construed as a geographical site with its own problematic of identity and culture. But when we speak of the culture of poverty, we don’t mean at