Class analyses class theory from historical, cultural analytical and feminist perspectives. It offers a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding class and why class is increasingly relevant today.

1. Introduction: Class-Why and How?

1.1. From Singapore to Sweden

1.2. The world after die Wende

1.3. Class-some fundamental distinctions

1.4. Class is dead, long live class

1.5. Feminist critiques

1.6. The cultural turn

1.7. The purpose of this books

References

2. Construction: The Grand Narrative of Class

2.1. The etymology of class

2.2. Class as conflict

2.3. Who were Marx and Engels?

2.4. The development of capitalist society

2.5. Historical materialism

2.6. Marxism after Marx

2.7. Class as situation

2.8. Who was Weber?

2.9. Class types

2.10. Class rather than status

2.11. Weberianism after Weber

2.12. Class and hegemony

2.13. Class and structuralism

2.14. Class just happens

2.15. Quantifying class

2.16. Feminist critiques of Marxism

2.17. Engels and Marxist feminism

2.18. Socialist radical feminism

2.19. Anti-racist class analysis and class critiques

2.20. The Birmingham School

2.21. The whiteness of the working class

Summary

References

3. Deconstruction: The Class Narrative Dismantled

3.1. Postmodern life

3.2. A postmodern working class

3.3. Postmodern critiques from the left or the right?

3.4. Jean-François Lyotard and postmodernism as narrative critique

3.5. Jean Baudrillard and the end of society and politics

3.6. Zygmunt Bauman and postmodernism as a state of mind

3.7. Once upon a time classes existed, and they mattered ...

3.8. Beyond left and right?

Summary

References

4. Reconstruction: New Narratives About Class

4.1. Who were the workers?

4.2. The languages of class

4.3. Gareth Stedman Jones and the challenges of working-class history

4.4. Joan W. Scott and post-structuralist feminism

4.5. Patrick Joyce, postmodernism, and the crisis of social history

4.6. Post-Marxism

4.7. Class positions and forms of capital

4.8. Pierre Bourdieu's theory of class

4.9. Beverley Skeggs's feminist analysis of Bourdieu

Summary

References

5 Conclusions: Class Analysis, Past and Future

5.1. Class as classification, or, where to start

5.2. Class, a question of recognition and redistribution

References

Appendix: Dictionary definitions of class

Index

Ulrika Holgersson is an associate professor of history at the Department of History, Lund University, Sweden. She is a cultural and gender historian, with media and popular culture as specific areas of expertise. Her publications include Popular Culture and Classification. The Discourses of Work, Class, and Gender in Swedish Women's Magazines at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (2005) and The Servant Maid and the Feature Film. Stars of the Swedish 'Folkhem' of the 1930s and 40s (2016).