eight - All change please: education, mobility and habitus dislocation

Summary

Introduction

This chapter highlights the central importance of social class and mobility, looking particularly at changes in the education system in the 1940s which gave rise to schooling opportunities and practices that transformed the classed lives of the majority of my participants: lesbians and bisexual women born between 1940 and 1958. Participants’ mobility, their ‘transgressions’ of the boundaries of class, gender and sexual identity, intersected to position them as ‘different’ or out of place across their life course; in Bourdieusian terms creating within them a disjuncture or ‘cleft habitus’ (Bourdieu, 2004; Friedman, 2016). Here I explain how my participants’ understanding and subjective experiences of their own class, gender and sexual identity changed as they were transformed by movement across fields against a backdrop of rapid social and cultural transformation in the UK. Rather than adopting Bourdieu's description of the habitus as ‘cleft’, with its suggestion of a division, split or rupture, I use the term habitus dislocation to signal the weight and enduring consequences of displacement created by multiple mobilities; the pain of being out of place in so many fields, for such a long time. This phrase, literally meaning ‘placed apart’, reminds us that when something is dislocated, although it may appear the same, it is always a little bit weaker and more vulnerable. This chapter deploys the concept of habitus dislocation to expose the difficulties and ‘cost’ of social mobility and as a way of understanding how multiple mobilities and repositionings in different fields render individuals ‘fish out of water’. My research suggests that the habitus dislocation that results from movement through such diverse fields of origin and destination is so powerful and so toxic it has motivated participants to seek and create affinity groups where the anxiety and isolation associated with habitus dislocation – the hidden, but persistent, injuries (Sennett and Cobb, 1977) of class, gender and sexual identity transgression – are alleviated through social interaction with other, similarly placed individuals.

Methodology

The study recruited 35 participants from London and the South East, Yorkshire and Lancashire. The participants, who all identified as white, attended a range of social groups. The average age was 64, with only two participants aged over 70. Twenty-five participants (71%) were single. The majority of women identified as lesbian with only two women identifying as bi/queer. No trans women participated.