Sunday Times article

[Emma Moore]

Dear all,

Thanks for all the thought-provoking responses I received re. The Sunday Times article I posted. My students really engaged with the article, and I feel that their study of it helped them to understand the full extent of the rather abstract discussions we had been having in class. More than anything, the students were surprised by the ways in which their views of the article had shifted by the end of the seminar. I found that the article drew out the following issues:

-	the range of categories evoked as oppositional to “White WC Male” (e.g. gay, female, black, bourgeois, the police, the _white_ MC) and the fluidity of category boundaries this illustrates
-	the existence of unequal category oppositions (e.g. comparing Liddle’s refs to male and female cf. “pretty girl” vs. “black youngster” when discussing murder victims)
-	the “double-edge” of reification (cf. Wenger 1998) (e.g. his rather limited interpretation of WC culture)
-	the issue of category internal and cross-category erasure (e.g. where are the black, female individuals out there in Iraq?)
-	the semantic derogation of various identities (e.g. his derogatory use of the term “sister paper”);
-	the notion of legitimacy in evoking category boundaries (e.g. is Liddle – a white MC male – the legitimate commentator on the white WC category boundary? – several of my students were offended by his patronising tone).

In relation to this last point, I guess this is what I found most offensive about the article – whilst he defends the White WC male against prejudice, he only manages to reinforce dominant (and negative) discourses about the WC in his article. I agree with Scott – there is a very valid class argument to be made, but Liddle makes it appallingly (irony or no irony)!

Best,
Emma.


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Dr Emma Moore
Lecturer in Sociolinguistics
Department of English Language and Linguistics
University of Sheffield
5 Shearwood Road
Sheffield
S10 2TN
UK

Phone: +44 (0)114 222 0232
Fax: +44 (0)114 276 8251
E-mail: e.moore at sheffield.ac.uk
Webpage: http://www.shef.ac.uk/english/language/staff/emmam.html

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