Bread n Roses chapter, Fraser 2015.docx

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[Book Chapter by] Fraser, Heather. (2015). A hooligan in the hallway?
In Michell, Dee, Jacqueline Z. Wilson, and Verity Archer (eds), Bread N Roses: Voices from Australian Working Class Academics, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers

A quick Google images search shows hooligans as rough young males who swear, sneer, fight and get in trouble with the police. According to the stereotype they are often known as violent, anti-social troublemakers, particularly in large football crowds, who speak without grace, sensitivity or diplomacy. Hooligans are not renowned for their intellect or common sense. They take liberties, ignore the rights of others and behave in vulgar, aggressive and unruly ways. They have a habit of forming a mob, upsetting the existing social order and loitering in places where they don't belong. In turn, respectable people may feel they have the right to call security to have such shady and intimidating characters removed.
The title of this chapter comes from an event that occurred shortly after I started a new job as a senior lecturer. With twenty years of academic experience under my belt, I returned, as a single woman with two dogs, to my hometown to help my aging mother. I was already familiar with the university, as I had completed my masters there. It promised to be a good place to work but early on I started to wonder whether my move from a more radically inclined university located in central Melbourne, had been wise. In my first week an older professor, imported to become our head of discipline, organised welcome drinks for me and another new colleague. Many colleagues had gathered in our staff room and were helping themselves to drinks and food. When I went to pour a glass of red wine my new boss told me to wait saying that he had something special to serve me. With great confidence he laughed as he pulled out a bottle of red wine from his bag labeled Hooligan and poured it into my glass. I was stunned. I barely knew the man.
Had the gesture come from a working-class mate I may well have shared the laugh and shot something funny back. But this was my new male boss saying it to me on my second day of work, in public, in front of my new colleagues. And his tone was not affectionate or playful but slightly sneering. Nor was he making such a dig to the other new staff member whose politics were very similar to mine; the staff member with whom he had already shown an alliance and affection. While I could brush off not being 'special' or 'important' to this new boss, if not enjoy the privacy anonymity in relationships can provide, I was not prepared to allow a privileged white man to take such liberties. I was not prepared to laugh along nervously like my mother would in these kinds of situations. I looked for my moment to slide away and left un-amused and unimpressed, aware that I might be considered a killjoy.
From my job application, interview and publications, my hooligan-wine-pouring boss knew I held overtly politicised views about the rise of neoliberalism in the academy and my discipline of social work. Had I not been able to muster an uncharacteristically polished performance on the day of the interview, I suspect I would not be telling this story. In such a competitive market, I was happy to be offered the job. In this context, to pull back the veil of academic privacy is to risk being seen as angry and ungrateful; worse still, an angry uppity woman, which is an unattractive label to carry in an academy that as Ryan and Sakrey (1996) describe, has long clung to the illusion of emotional detachment and polite respectability so revered in middle and upper class white western life.

My childhood (1965-1984): In two directons, awkwardly
I grew up female in the 1970's and 80's, leaving home at the age of sixteen, from an outer suburb called Elizabeth with poor and working-class parents who wanted us to deny it. I often heard adults refer to me as bright but rebellious, "especially for a girl". I attribute some of my rebelliousness to me pushing against my bigoted white South African parents who unintentionally stimulated in me an interest in political ideas from an early age. Until I arrived at university, I did not, however, realise that these interests were a form of intellectualism rather than evidence that I was an annoying and oppositional child.
From my violent alcoholic father I learned to feel fear, anger and shame. I learned how to disassociate and act as if all was well when it was not. Only much later in my life did I appreciate how the pressures of army conscription and compulsory child rearing had taken their toll on him. From my devout Catholic mother, I learnt very early the importance of persistence, gratitude and most importantly, the need to be "feminine". She tried to teach me and my three sisters to wear dresses, cross our legs when we sat down and most importantly, protect our virginity before (heterosexual) marriage. I never told her the story of my boss calling me a hooligan because for her, this would be a shameful indictment of her daughter.
This is not to say that my mother was then, or is now, oblivious to my outspoken temperament. While I was a parentified child who took responsibilities for family life very early on, I was also expelled from school for "insolence" before I turned fifteen. Scared of what might become of me, she took out loans to send me to a middle-class boarding school. So, in my final year of schooling, I lived in the red brick, religious boarding house alongside girls from very different backgrounds.
In Elizabeth, boarding houses were squalid overpriced rooms that involved sharing a bathroom with strangers, either because you couldn't afford a proper house or the caravan park was full. In amongst this squalor, however, good times were sometimes had among residents. This Catholic girls boarding house was the reverse. Lovely to look at but an emotional pit of misery; as dramatic as Enid Blighton's (1946) Malory Towers but without the fun. So many of the girls seemed lost, lonely and disconnected from community, depressed but not permitted to say so. I soon learnt to keep this observation to myself, and how to "go under the radar". On hearing I was from the (dreaded) town of Elizabeth, and meeting my Scottish bricklaying boyfriend, Peter, the boarding house mistress decided to exempt me from all restrictions, allowing me to zoom off with Peter in his Holden Kingswood (car), returning whenever I wanted, without saying a word to my mother.
Peter was my first boyfriend and I loved him dearly. He was smart, in spite of leaving school at fourteen. Mixing with his friends and family made it harder for me to relate to the middle and upper class girls with whom I was boarding. I was stunned to learn they had been given credit cards by parents who sometimes arrived at the school like distant relatives might a funeral. These were parents who made a point to avert from my eyes or advise their daughters not to mix with girls like me. Apart from a couple of the rich girls with whom I spent time almost in secret, they needn't have worried. Ten years later when someone tracked me down for a school reunion I realised that I could barely remember a soul.
I do, however, remember being thrown out of my economics class for refusing to keep silent on my objections to "free trade" and "laissez faire" economics. In one class I proudly announced how I supported Keynesian economics, bemused by the fury this seemed to cause. What I did learn was how powerful vulgar behaviours could be in settings that considered themselves refined. One form of resistance involved me using my head cold to my advantage by blowing loudly at just the right moment when this economics teacher said something I objected to. Some of my classmates laughed but most were disgusted.
Looking back I can see that even then I was thought of as a hooligan of sorts, wild, bordering on feral, morally loose perhaps, certainly not from "a good family". It was a stereotype I seemed to have played into. Mid-year, when my best friend, a working-class student like me, committed suicide I got deeply depressed, gained a lot of weight, wore track pants and oversized shirts when I wasn't in uniform, moving around sullen and distracted. If I were making a point wearing the pejorative symbols of working-class life, it was a point I would make with great regularity in years to come. The beauty of such a slumped posture and sloppy wardrobe is the invisibility it affords in middle and upper class circles. People avert their eyes to sights they do not wish to see. I got good at being invisible quietly slipping away, only to appear at another point with a look on my face as if to suggest that I had been to all the classes all along.
Even so, I felt conflicted, awkwardly torn in two directions. It was my final year at high school and my mother had incurred debts to enable me this 'great opportunity'. Yet, there I was sliding into oblivion. After my friend's death I missed most of my classes, especially economics, so that I could sit in the nearby bowling alley feeding my addiction to Galacta, an electronic game similar to Space Invaders. I became so good at the game that 20 cents, the price of a game, could last me an hour. No one at the bowling alley or school said a thing, not the teachers, students or boarding house mistress. When time came for my mother to visit the school to hear how I was progressing, I was worried about what might be said. I needn't have worried because the comments they made were distant and pedestrian, apart from a History teacher who said that if I applied myself (read: came to class and did homework) I might be able to succeed. Fortunately, mum was so distracted by the 'classy' surroundings that she didn't seem to register.
I still smile at the image of my mother coming to open day one late Autumn afternoon, driving in the large wrought iron gates, through the circular driveway while 'us' girls in checkered school uniforms watched and waved from third story open windows. There, at the end of an expensive car entourage containing doctors, lawyers and builders—and 'their wives'—was mum, alone in her op-shop clothing and beat-up VW Beetle, window down, arm waving with a big smile. She was thrilled I was in a private religious school, the type of place that produced people who 'became somebody'; a place she could tell her friends about. And at the end of the year when I somehow managed to do more than pass, I was relieved she was none the wiser.


My twenties and thirties (1985-2004): Lives are not essays
After leaving high school I tried to become a registered nurse because it paid an income that I could share with family. However, after being constantly criticised for being not being fast enough, good enough at cleaning or subservient enough to the doctors, I left in despair. It was the best move I could have made, opened up to me through the then free tertiary education policy in operation and income-support benefits to tertiary students.
In 1985 I enrolled to do social work at an unremarkable Institute of Technology. I was six weeks from marrying Peter but this fell apart when he adamantly objected to me going to university. Determined not to repeat my mother's life, I returned his ring and moved into a share house in the city. I found tertiary study both exciting and intimidating, never having stepped foot on a city campus before. Physically, the old buildings were impressive, giving me a sense of importance. I juggled paid youth refuge work with my studies and student unionism. I drank, smoked and swore, and in front bars of pubs, fending off unwanted male attention from time to time. I wore badges acknowledging my socialist feminism, talking politics late into many nights with anyone willing.
I felt "at home" with so many client experiences, rolling my eyes that we needed to study such topics as poverty. Yet, I also noticed how some of my peers wore expensive shoes and accessories with their flawless and faintly made up complexions, erect ballet like postures, talking about their holiday houses and trips overseas. I learned the difference between deliberately looking poor and actually being poor. I admit there were times when I secretly wished I had come from an affluent family.
After graduating, I practiced social work across the methods of casework, group work, community work, social policy and research. At a party a lecturer randomly asked me if I'd be interested in tutoring, saying I was "a natural". She gave me my first break and while I was exhilarated I was also filled with anxiety of being an imposter.
Four years later my first proper university job came at James Cook University (Cairns) where I tried to strike the pose of what I imagined a real academic looked like. In the words of Goffman (1968), I tried to "pass" as middle class. Mostly this involved a form of pretension in speech, elongating words to stress not just their importance but my own. It also involved careful attention to my diet, posture, clothes, hair and personal mannerisms. I still cringe when I think of it.
By the mid-1990's I had moved to Melbourne and started embracing my rogue elements. While trying to bring together academia and activism I had disputes over the real, over universal needs and human rights. Starting my PhD helped give me the confidence to fight harder for class recognition. I started to understand the heckler in me and spent most of my social time with those who did too, such as Linda Briskman, who went on to become a human rights professor.
At the end of the 1990's I was employed at a more prestigious university in Melbourne. Now in the inner circles of respectable academia, I served on an ethics committee with men who wore cravats with their suits. I noticed eyes running over my clothing, and how much people could recoil at how I spoke, not just what I was saying. I learned, somewhat painfully, that while plain straightforward talk may be formally esteemed, it is susceptible to private scorn. Yet, it was excellent grounding for the grassroots activist work I would go on to do for RMIT's Community Advocacy Unit, a unit I would lead for five years to come.
It was in my thirties when I learned that resistance in middle-class academic terms is often a highly individualised affair mostly involving acts of self-advocacy, either for a reduced workload of some kind, such as a place at the table of decision making and/or access to funds, support staff or leave. It often occurs through smiling faces and gritted teeth. Silence is another weapon often shown by senior academics at school or departmental meetings. Giving off an atmosphere of sullen brooding, some of the associate professors and higher do not seem to waste their breath in public meetings but use private, office and corridor based negotiations backed up with emails carefully selecting which recipients get to see which piece of the information puzzle.

In my forties (2005-2014): Border Crossings
I am not the first to suggest that the concept of 'working class' stands in contrast to, and often opposition with, cultures considered professional and/or intellectual. Some readers may balk at the idea of me daring to describe myself as working class, even in roots, given I am a white European who has now enjoyed the benefits of tenured university life for more than two decades. Being called a hooligan, however, and so recently, shows how our markers of class, including my 'cheap' clothes, footwear and haircuts mark me as working-class. While I have long felt as if I cross borders, especially those relating to (social) class, it has been in my forties that I have wrestled more consciously with the concept and the feelings associated with straddling working and middle-class worlds.
For the first time I got married in my mid-forties, and to a man who is a meat processor in a 1950's style slaughterhouse, returning me more squarely to my roots. It was an unexpected meeting. We met on a dog beach through our respective dogs. While our dogs liked each other, I initially avoided him because I thought he looked like a "redneck". His shaved head and Australian flag sticker on the back of his ute (pick-up truck) evoked images of the Cronulla race riots, an unfair stereotype he has not let me forget. If someone had told me that I, a Greens voting feminist, was to marry a man like Bruce and develop an interest in baking cakes that would be carried to his factory job, I would have laughed. Because the conventional script for working-class girls who manage to graduate from university is to move away from their humble beginnings, not return to them through marriage. It is a message I seem to have internalised.
The irony is that my relationship with Bruce is the happiest, safest and most reliable that I have ever experienced. If I were ever inclined to be pretentious or superior, it would not be in his presence. Through my relationship with Bruce, I am often reminded of the sheer drag and exhaustion of "menial, unskilled work"; the low wages, the sore feet, being ordered around and not by name (also see Ehrenreich, 2001). I hear how his workmates cannot afford to pay their bills or put their air-conditioners on in a heat wave, even though they work full time. In spite of my now decades of middle-class resources and status my experiences of childhood poverty and the ingratiating servitude poverty brings still weighs heavily.
More than twenty years on, I still cannot get over how many liberties middle-class people have and take, and universities are the perfect cultural site to study this. I remain amazed by the language of middle-class people who refuse work requests on the grounds that it is: 'not their area', 'not their interest' or even 'not their inclination'. Like saying no to an offer of a chocolate they politely but steadfastly hold their position that they will not be doing whatever is being requested. Mostly it does not occur to me to say this. However, on occasion I have learnt to use the middle-class turn of phrase, "I'm not comfortable with that", which I might otherwise mock. I do so if I need to say no to a middle-class person, as it seems to be more face-saving than saying, "Sorry, I can't or won't do what you are asking".
Similar to many border crossers who no longer belong in one place or the other, I often feel torn. On the one hand I enjoy a tenured and properly remunerated career, complete with cultural capital and an enviable level of flexibility and personal autonomy that few other workers enjoy. On the other, it is a life where work and home are not clearly separated, which means forsaking public holidays and other forms of "free time", sometimes desperately needed. Similar to most workers, including the growing ranks of underpaid and often underemployed casual workers, 'we' academics also face relentless rounds of organisational change, market strategising and the injunction to grow markets and increase audience sizes to account for the widening gap in government funding and university expenditure. Not so similarly, we are often treated with respect by others in our orbit, allowed to engage in stimulating and creative work and given the chance to express our dissent, even if the styles in which this is to be done is narrowly prescribed. So the nature of academic identity is mecurial particularly with the rise of neo-liberalism and New Pubic Management into publicly funded universities.
At home, I live in a small log cabin in a small beach community, where I am often referred to as "Bruce's missus". With three young dogs and a cat in our care, our house is regularly untidy and disorganised. We sometimes pay our bills late, after threats to disconnect essential services. Fatigue and time pressures are part of our life. I have long stopped ironing my clothes. I come home at night tired and often find myself slumped on the couch eating nutritionally deficient food and watching junk television shows. I am part of the masses.
In this context, terms such as "scholar" and "public intellectual" can seem pretentious, as though they suggest I possess some magical individual quality that distinguishes me from the masses. I suspect many of the students I teach envisage my life quite differently, in spite of the stories I tell them to the contrary, in the courses I teach such as "Reasons for Social Work", "Social Work with Diverse Populations" and "Human Rights Based Social Work Practice". Rather than feel ashamed of these aspects of my life, I celebrate my ordinariness. I feel more confident that I remain connected to working-class life, even if it is loosely; that this gives me more credibility to conduct studies such as a feminist memory work recently undertaken called "What helps and hinders working-class women complete social science degrees?"

Final comments
It may be tempting for middle and upper-class people to believe that gender and class-based oppression no longer exists in countries such as Australia. Yet, such a belief is a fantasy—an illusion of equality—effectively silencing those of susceptible to being labelled hooligans, even when we are women, have PhD's and academic tenure.

References
June Allan, Linda Briskman and Bob Pease, (Editors), Critical Social Work; theories and practices for a socially just world, (2nd ed), Crows Nest, Allen and Unwin, 2009.

Leon Anderson, "Analytic Auto-ethnography" in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35, 4, August 2006, pg 273-395.

Anne Bishop, Becoming an ally: breaking the cycle of oppression. Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2002.

Enid Blighton (1946) First Term at Malory Towers, London, Metheun

Robin M. Boylorn (Editor) and Mark P. Orbe (Editor), Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life, Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press, 2013.

C.L. Barney Dew and Carolyn Leste Law (Editors), This Fine Place So Far From Home, Academic Voices from the Working Class, Philadelphia, Temple University Press 1995.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, New York, Holt Paperbacks, 2001.

Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams and Arthur P. Bochner "Autoethnography: An Overview", Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), 2011, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1101108.

Heather Fraser, "Doing Narrative Research: Analysing Personal Stories Line by Line" in Qualitative Social Work, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 179-201, 2004.

Heather Fraser, Dee Michell, Liz Beddoe and Michele Jarldorn, "Working-class women social science students' experiences of university", under review for International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

Purnima George, "Taking a Detour from a Journey: A Critical Auto-Ethnography on an Incomplete Term in Academic Administration", Critical Social Work, 12, 2, 2012: ISSN 1543-9372.

Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the management of a spoiled identity. London: Clays & Penguin, 1968.

Patricia McNamara, "Feminist Ethnography, Storytelling that makes a difference" in Qualitative Social Work, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp161-177, 2009.

Bob Mullaly, Challenging Oppression and Confronting Privilege, A Critical Social Work Approach, Toronto, Oxford University Press, (2nd ed), 2007.

Bob Pease, Undoing Privilege, Unearned Advantage in a Divided World, London, Zed Books, 2010.

Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey, (Editors), Strangers in Paradise, Academics from the Working Class, Lanham, University Press of America, 1996.

Andrew C. Sparkes, "Autoethnography and narratives of self: Reflections on criteria in action" in Sociology of Sport Journal, Vol. 17, Issue 1, pp. 21-41, 2000.

Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London, Zed Books, 1999.