Under a Middle-Class Gaze

Ch. 5. P. 153–182.

Mylonas Y.

Departing from Bourdieu’s (2010) seminal text Distinction, scholars (Ben-nett, 2013; Eriksson, 2015) argue that mass media organise their representa-tional frames on social affairs under a middle-class gaze, which suggests to audiences the preferred ways of looking at things. The media’s middle-class positioning affirms core bourgeois values shared and aspired to by the middle-class. The middle-class forms the ideal social position, setting a “middle-class normative” (Skeggs & Wood, 2012: 52) that is reproduced by the media through the ways that representations are framed. In this context, the working class and the poor often lapse into the position of the “underclass” ( Jones, 2015), associ-ated with different forms of social and individual problems and pathologies, and charged with violence, ignorance and despair. Skeggs (1997) noted that the weight of upper-middle-class values, lifestyles and aspirations establish-es a general disidentification with the working class position.

Keywords: socio-cultural stereotypes, mass media, economic classes

In book

The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics

Mylonas Y. Leiden: Brill, 2019.