{"id":7001,"date":"2011-08-30T09:00:59","date_gmt":"2011-08-30T08:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=7001"},"modified":"2013-03-22T11:32:45","modified_gmt":"2013-03-22T11:32:45","slug":"is-chav-a-feminist-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2011\/08\/30\/is-chav-a-feminist-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"Is ‘Chav’ a Feminist Issue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chav, n. British slang (derogatory).\u00a0 In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Oxford English Dictionary<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chav and other C-words<\/h3>\n

If \u2018cunt\u2019 is reportedly losing its power to shock or offend, don\u2019t worry, other c-words are available. \u2018Class\u2019, for instance, appears to have become unsuitable for use in polite society these days, while \u2018Chav\u2019 has become commonplace in the respectable parlance of those who would never dream of using any other c-word so blithely. Owen Jones\u2019s book Chavs<\/strong><\/a>, a welcome and necessary analysis of the latter phenomenon, identifies it as a culture “created and then mercilessly lampooned by the middle-class, rightwing media and its more combative columnists”<\/a>. Chavs<\/strong> examines the word\u2019s place in current political and cultural discourse in the context of a simultaneous narrowing of socio-economic opportunity and an erasure of traditional working-class identity.<\/p>\n

\"cover<\/a>Before we begin, it\u2019s worth heading off a few preconceptions at the pass. ‘Chav’ is a multivalent and unstable signifier, and the word’s origin<\/a> and evolution shows it meaning different things to different people. It’s been around a relatively long time: a 2005 study<\/a>\u00a0described \u2018chav\u2019 as a strange subculture which, unlike its predecessors, lacked any association with a particular musical movement or political ideals. 2004 saw the rise of \u2018chavertising\u2019<\/a>, a marketing strategy targeting \u2019chavs\u2019 as a subculture with spending power, whose members \u2018wore their wealth\u2019 and prioritised consumption. At the tail-end of 2004, I attended a gig in Chatham by the former Libertine Carl Barat, whose dubious supergroup, in deference to the town\u2019s history with the term, and with who knows what degree of irony or self-awareness, styled themselves \u2018The Chavs\u2019 for the evening. And the (working class and Welsh) novelty rap crew Goldie Lookin Chain<\/a> were satirizing various aspects of \u2018chav\u2019 culture as far back as 2001.<\/p>\n

Jones\u2019s book, however, focuses on a particular and relatively recent variation in the word\u2018s meaning<\/a>, one which is concentrated in political and media discourse and which is overwhelmingly used about the working class rather than by them. This hasn\u2019t always been, and isn\u2019t always the case – Lynsey Hanley\u2019s review of the book<\/a> locates the idea of \u2018chavs\u2019 within the complexities of working-class communities, where the word can be used to differentiate between ‘those who aim for “respectability” and those who disdain it’. Back in my 1990s comprehensive-schooled childhood, the latter group were certainly distinguishable, known with varying degrees of contempt, amusement or nervousness as ‘neds’ or ‘townies’. But these terms were localised, used within a community to delineate internal\u00a0hierarchies, rather than to section off an entire community by those at one socio-economic remove from it.<\/p>\n

Regardless of the tortuous relationship between the term and the demographic it describes, the use of the word in 21st century political discourse has developed a peculiar, specific and politically-loaded edge. Jones outlines how the word has been stripped of its previous meaning and reapplied in government and media rhetoric, almost invariably being conflated with ‘lower socio-economic group’ by those of a higher one, without reference to or cognisance of the lower socio-economic individuals being tarred with the same brush.<\/p>\n

An equal-opportunity stereotype?<\/h3>\n

At first glance, \u2018chav\u2019 is a term tied to class rather than gender. Chav stereotypes are remarkably even-handed: for every lager-swilling lout there\u2019s a single mother<\/a>, for every Wayne Rooney a Waynetta Slob<\/a>. The sports gear and leisurewear prominent in \u2018chav\u2019 uniform is a type of dress which makes it possible to efface one’s femininity with shapeless tracksuits and scraped-back hair.\u00a0The baseball cap which graces the cover of Jones\u2019 book is a\u00a0gender-neutral accessory.\u00a0Is the female \u2018chav\u2019 a recognisable figure? A google image search for \u2018chavette\u2019 brings up images of relative deprivation and degradation rather than the upwardly-mobile targets of \u2018chavertising\u2019 \u2013 the ubiquitous Croydon facelift, tracksuits, pregnant stomachs and yards of bare skin. Many of these are self-conscious or pastiche portrayals by those not identifying as a permanent part of the subculture \u2013 a kind of chav drag. There\u2019s also a Newcastle fancy-dress company selling a ‘Super Chavette’<\/a> costume, as well as several \u2018chav babe\u2019 sites – the straight, and no less curious, counterpart of the numerous gay male chav-porn sites discussed here by Jack Cullen<\/a>. And the \u2018chav\u2019 icon extraordinaire<\/em> is of course female too – Little Britain<\/strong>‘s Vicky Pollard<\/strong><\/a>, one of the oddest fictional stereotypes to be fixed as a moral standard since George Bush Senior instructed America to be \u2018more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"Still<\/a>The types of women stereotyped as \u2018chavs\u2019 make an interesting point about the particularly virulent strain of misogyny which chav-hatred can contain. Anti-chav commentators reveal a disquieting obsession with the presumed sexual precociousness and promiscuity of young working-class women, as well as their aggressive lack of deference and their status outside traditional family and community hierarchies. The behaviour for which \u2018chavs\u2019 are criticised includes being too loud, too flash, too drunk, too vulgar and too disrespectful towards their \u2018betters\u2018. Is this particularly problematic behaviour when observed in women?<\/p>\n

The tendency for anti-chav rhetoric to thinly veil both misogyny and class hatred reached an eyebrow-raising pitch with James Delingpole\u2019s<\/a> spittle-flecked rant that Vicky Pollard embodies:<\/p>\n

… several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who\u2019ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here an anti-chav stance allows a thoroughly unpleasant perpetuation of damaging stereotypes of the working class female (sexual promiscuity, sexual precociousness, a thoughtless or scheming lack of protection resulting in pregnancy) as well as a proscribing of non-traditional behaviour (women existing outside traditional family roles, deriving financial support from the state rather than a husband). All this with barely a glance at context or circumstance. Imogen Tyler’s 2008 study \u2018Chav Mum, Chav Scum\u2019<\/a> found not only that the word ‘has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor’, but also that “the figure of the female chav, and the vilification of young white working-class mothers, embodies historically familiar and contemporary anxieties about female sexuality, reproduction, fertility, and ‘racial mixing.'”<\/p>\n

This gendered and class-based disgust has become particularly prevalent in UK comedy, as identified in Barbara Ellen\u2019s wrecking-ball swing<\/a> at Little Britain<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Rewarding middle-class, educated, comedy workaholics for lampooning people without any of their advantages, struggling on the margins of society \u2013 was this where we’d come to, a boorish festival of exploitation and contempt? … Vicky Pollard alone gave certain sections of the media a label for the disgust they love to express towards young girls spiralling downwards, due to poverty, illiteracy and teen pregnancy…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While the comedies in question do not exclusively portray working class and female characters, the unedifying sight of Oxbridge-educated male comedians sticking it to underclass female grotesques does form part of a disconcerting trend in contemporary comedy towards punching downwards. Pace<\/em> Kathy Burke<\/strong> as the proto-chav Waynetta Slob<\/strong>, the only recent mainstream female comedian to draw on this stereotype has been Catherine Tate<\/strong> as Lauren Cooper<\/strong>, a character who compared to Pollard is relatively nuanced and sympathetic. (One of Cooper’s appearances<\/a> has as its pay-off her unsuspected and incongruous knowledge of Shakespeare, rather than a further display of the depths of her blissful ignorance.)<\/p>\n

Are we bovvered, though?<\/h3>\n

\"Catherine<\/a>Apart from the latent misogyny informing some chav-hatred, then, why is \u2018chav\u2019 a feminist issue? The \u2018chav\u2019 stereotypes which have gained media prominence and cultural currency are those which are politically useful, being amenable to adoption for narratives which draw on the idea of a semi-criminal, scrounging, feckless underclass to justify political attacks on all of us lower down the socio-economic scale. Many of these stereotypes are female, just as<\/a> many of the targets of these attacks will be<\/a>. The current government\u2019s rhetoric repeatedly plays on the stereotype of the idle and recklessly promiscuous single mother, whose \u2018irresponsibility\u2019 must be punished, to validate the wider reduction or removal of state support from benefits claimants – even though over half of single parents are in paid employment, a figure rising to 71% for those with a child over the age of twelve. The Daily Mail<\/strong>, happily conflating fact and fiction, used a picture of Waynetta Slob to illustrate an article on the increased number of women claiming sickness benefit, accompanied by the headline \u2018Rising toll of \u2018Waynettas\u2019<\/em>. As the smoke cleared after last month’s riots over much of the UK, the single mother was again in the firing line<\/a>, along with the moral decline, sexual depravity, and social disintegration she is held to represent.<\/p>\n

There is still a frustrating lack of attention to class paid by mainstream feminism, whose academic and theoretical focus is often divorced from practical considerations of material inequality, with the result that feminist analysis can seem off-puttingly remote and attuned only to middle-class concerns. Far from having vanished as a vector of political identity, class remains a stubborn and strengthening line of social division. The concept of the stereotypical \u2018chav\u2019, and its expansion into a term covering an entire externally-defined and already disadvantaged group, can make socio-economic differences appear insurmountable barriers, erasing the potential for solidarity over the common problems we face. Acknowledging that the discourse around ‘chavs’ can be disingenuous, and can provide a cover for denigrating the social agency and sexual autonomy of working-class women, as well as for wider political attacks on the unemployed and working poor, would be a significant step forward.<\/p>\n