Ethnography of joking (and ‘avoidance’) among social movement participants in relation to ‘class’ and ‘identity’ as emic categories of contention invites analytical triangulation of liberal self-proprietorship, neoliberal identity-proprietorship, and cross-cultural relations of semiotic and legal property to intervene in scholarly “class” vs “identity” debates in an original way. Identity-based rights involve a double-movement of exclusion and encompassment noted in regard to the original franchise (Graeber 2007; Dumont 1970), manifesting a constitutive residual (Brown 1995; Skeggs 2004). Elisions of statistics and ontology within the culturally mobile logic of modern legalism, compounded by the presumption that subjective identification with pain reflects objective standing in social hierarchy, normally serve to obscure not only how identity-as-property is a social relationship vis-à-vis those excluded from that identity (yet confused with a relationship to individual history), but also a relationship with unentitled members whose pain is encompassed to constitute the semiotic and legal property of rights-claimants.
A short version of this work was rehearsed for the Historical Materialism conference:
Lagalisse, Erica (2024) Property and Propriety: An Ethnography of Class and Identity. 22nd Historical Materialism Annual Conference, SOAS, London, U.K., Nov 7. 2024.