‘Rude Boys’: The Homosexual Eroticization of Class

Since 2002, the ‘chav ’ has become a ubiquitous symbol of class difference in Britain. Simultaneously, a heterogeneous industry has appropriated ‘chav culture ’ in order to market a range of products and services orientated to gay men. In this article I explore some of the representations employed by this industry to argue that they function within a symbolic economy in which the chav is positioned as a subject lacking any intrinsic worth. However, while representations continually impute a lack of value to such subjects, it is precisely this lack which is converted into sym-bolic capital to be bought and sold.The effect of such representation is performa-tive since it both constructs and inscribes subject positions in social space. In conclusion, I argue that a form of symbolic violence is created by such represen-tation through the legitimacy it lends to normative conceptions about, what become imagined as, ‘real ’ people. KEY WORDS class / representation / sexuality / symbolic violence … representations of the working-class […] have absolutely nothing to do with the working class themselves, but are about the middle-class creating value for themselves in a myriad of ways, through distance, denigration and disgust. (Skeggs, 2004: 118) Desire now finds, in what was once disgusting, a pleasure whose intensity it could never have known without that history of disgust. (Dollimore, 2001: 58