Bodily Inscriptions

Beverly Skeggs says that the working-class is physically marked as a result of the physical labor they have to partake in along with the fact that they are unable to afford certain things like dental care or new clothing. These physical inscriptions visibly label working-class people as working-class and impact women the most because of the beauty standards that women are constantly compared to and attempting to measure up to.

Beauty standards are not only often racist and fatphobic, but they also take part in furthering the divide between the lower class and every other economic stratum. For some reason, in our society, it is not enough to economically oppress someone and keep them from things like proper medical attention due to high costs. It is necessary to go a step further and tell them they do not look attractive enough to be considered desirable in our society.

In Frozen River, the opening scene that pans slowly up Ray’s body as she is getting dressed shows how she has aged far faster than she should have given the age of her children. The bags under her eyes that are clearly from exhaustion accentuate how physically tired the rest of her body looks. She is thin, demonstrating a clear lack of nutrients due to the inability to afford anything other than popcorn for dinner. By choosing to show audiences this clip of her basically naked, vulnerably exposed, the director is not only showing us the physical toll poverty has taken on her body. Viewers are also penetrating an intimate experience in her life by being able to perceive her so directly which seems to parallel the ways in which physical inscriptions sometimes serve as an invitation into the personal life of the “marked” person.

Seeing people wear certain uniforms or have certain ailments that are only still present in their life because they were unable to receive proper medical care when it first occurred can signal lower-class status. This can go the opposite way. Someone can look at another person walking down the street, see that they are wearing Christian Louboutins, and know they are wealthy. However, the latter is a choice. More often than not, people of the working class are not purposely conveying their class status to observers. The inscription is just part of being in the working class. People of higher classes are choosing to convey to others that they belong to a distinct class, one that is not widely considered shameful. When bystanders can tell the class status of a wealthy person, it is because the wealthy person is allowing it. Working-class people do not enjoy this same privacy and control over their physical appearance and thus how they are perceived by others. By making one of our first encounters with Ray be her in a very vulnerable state, the director was immediately creating this parallel between the film and the uncomfortable, voyeuristic way in which working-class life is often viewed. As if these are people who do not get to consent to which aspects of their lives will be shared with the world.

Violence in Working-Class Motherhood

Motherhood is difficult enough to begin with. In heterosexual partnerships, mothers usually end up bearing most of the burden of child rearing. This is not only because they are the ones that house the child for 10 months, but also because society has dubbed women the caretakers. Fathers are rarely held to the same standard mothers are and yet often given twice the praise for simply parenting.

Even looking beyond the social pressure, to care for a child takes time, energy, and money. All three of these things are often scarce for working-class women. A lot of working-class women spend all of their waking hours and energy trying to make money. Adding a child into the mix either means reallocating some of the time you spend making money to time you will spend physically watching the child or taking some of the money you make to pay someone else to watch the child. Either way, children add financial burdens and seem to contribute to the already established lack of control most working-class women feel.

Being poor removes a certain amount of autonomy. You have less choices about what kind of work you can do, what kind of house you can live in, what kind of transportation you have. Opportunities are limited for working-class people and if you are on government assistance, you have even less autonomy because you are required to make a budget and submit to drug tests and inspections of your daily life if you wish to continue receiving that government aid.

Because of this removal of autonomy, working-class motherhood can be violent. Feeling powerless in one’s own life creates a lot of rage and sometimes it seems a mother’s children are the only outlet for this rage. The victims of a violent system that make their lives incredibly difficult, working-class women feel they have no choice but to lean into the violence of motherhood.

In the novel Under the Feet of Jesus, there are references to La Llorona, the woman who had to kill her children because she was too poor to feed them (Viramontes 11).

In the film Precious, Precious was physically and verbally abused by her mother daily.

The mothers in both of these texts were poor women who did not have the means to give their children a desirable life. Women whose children would have lived a violent existence even if it had not come directly from the mothers. The mothers just decided to participate in it because of the rage they felt at their own powerlessness but also because that is the form their love took. While their actions are inexcusable and unconscionable, recognition of patterns like these pushes us to ask better questions, such as: What kind of conditions created a situation in which a mother had to mercy kill her children or stay with her and her daughter’s abuser? What are we doing wrong as a society to have created the space for these things to happen? Because it seems that if Precious’s mother had the opportunity to leave her husband and know she would survive on her own, or if La Llorona had the ability to feed and house her children somewhere, then both narratives would be completely different.

"Blowin' Smoke"

This song by Kacey Musgraves seems to encapsulate the idea of working-class aspirations perfectly. With the lyrics “We all say that we’ll quit someday/When our ship comes in, we'll just sail away,” Musgraves presents the desire to quit a low paying job and leave the town she feels stuck in, demonstrating her continued ability to dream about something more than what she currently has as a working-class person.

This song is interesting because of its narrative form. She explains briefly the lives of a few waitresses, all of whom need the money they get from working at the restaurant. All of whom want to quit their job because it is not worth the money they make. But most of whom continue working and just threaten to quit. In this song, we see a collective desire for upward movement and a recognition that these waitresses deserve an income that matches the effort they put into their work and grants them a little dignity. At the same time, however, we see the way their class status has forced them to feel static because they understand that they are just “blowin’ smoke.” They are accepting the fact that they are not actually going to do anything about these aspirations they have because it does not seem plausible. Society has told them that their current placement in the social hierarchy is a permanent one. That is what they have internalized and so movement away from their current lifestyles does not seem to be in the cards, even if they all continue to dream about it.