Thinking with Bevereley Skeggs - Stockholms universitet

things a bit – or if it only can be thought of as a tactic, not reallyworking.But the dictionary also tells us that respectability can beperceived as a negative quality, something false that onlymanipulative people are interested in. Respectability can in thisway be interpreted as something to see through and to distanceyourself from; a laughable quality invoking connotations ofpretentious and pompous characters like Reverend EdwardCasaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It is something veryVictorian and middlebrow. Stressing this view on respectabilitymeans that the act of consciously and actively distancing yourselffrom what is perceived as respectability in a certain contextcan be seen as part of a successful deconstructive strategy in aBachtinian way aiming at disarming or mockery.In this way the OED confirms what Skeggs’ study tells us abouthow respectability works.If you look at the Swedish equivalent of the OED, SvenskaAkademins Ordbok [The Swedish Academy Dictionary] (SAOB),the general picture is the same: respectability is related to beinga respectable person, to moral issues and to ‘gott l. stadgat(borger¬ligt) anseende’. But there are important and interestingdifferences: the OED is much more elaborate and gives a morecomplex and paradoxical view of the concepts of respectabilityand respectable. In the SAOB there is no mention of respectabilityas a quality that you can pretend to be the owner of, and there isalso really no focusing on it as something negative, false.What then does the respectable homo academicus look like?What are the habits that make up the habitus of the respectablehomo academicus? As stated by Skeggs and Bourdieu, the bodyis where social class is materialized. And if you sum it up: ‘ARespectable body is White, desexualized, hetero-feminine andusually middle-class’ (Skeggs 1997: 82). Of course, it is oldnews; we all know that the homo academicus is this white,middle-class, heterosexual man working at a university in theWest. (The whole concept of homo academicus is a western one,78