The Australian sociologist Rose Butler and her Australian anthropologist colleague Eve Vincent just published Love Across Class. From 2020-2022 they interviewed 38 people by telephone and Zoom call and more or less together. Covid-19, y’all. They examined emotional intimacy amidst “class-discordancy,” when the two halves of a married couple are from different classes, like when Rip Wheeler shacks up with Beth Dutton. “Hypergamy” is when a woman marries “up” a caste or class system; “hypogamy,” when she marries “down.” Hundreds of thousands of American men partake in “global hypergamy” as they seek, find, buy and fetch brides from Asian and Eastern European countries. Love Across Country, eh?
The fortunes of one of Butler and Vincent’s couples, William and Tanya, had risen and crashed with the 2013-2016 mining boom. Poor, laboring class William had made good money and had invested wisely in properties. When he and Tanya met a financial advisor William dressed in “daggy shorts, daggy shirt.” Tanya was pregnant at the time with their second baby. Pushing her first in a “shitty, cheap pram,” wearing “thongs and my singlet, which looked not much different to my husband’s,” and feeling “full of belly, full of pimples (p. 25),” they sought financial advice. Initially, the bank manager dismissed them with some pamphlets. But when he learned of William’s income and that upper-class Tanya came from money he sat up in his chair, shuffled his papers, corrected his posture and tut-tutted his way into giving financial advice.
Like Australia and France, the U.S. is a deeply racialized and ethnically stratified social formation. It also pretends to egality and covers up a lot of hurt. The American sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb coined a term in 1972 as they studied “the hidden injuries of class.” The Australian sociologist Diane Reay investigated the “psychic landscape of class.” The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu found “class” in distinctions of “taste” and symbolic and social capital. That snooty bank manager in Australia “read” class on the bodies and clothing of a class-discordant couple (if daggily so). How many class-discordant couples have risen and fallen in U.S. history? How many have fallen in love and tried their best to stay in it, struggled to handle finances singly and together, outside and inside the home?
‘Class’ isn’t just produced, Butler and Vincent show, in a doctrinaire marxian manner. Their respondents highlighted the consumption and leisure activities that brought them together but the nontransparent communication that pulled them apart. In Fiji I researched self-assessments of HIV transmission risks by interviewing both halves of intimate partnerships—but unlike them, separately. In one focus group interview of six Christian pastors, the woman respondent, a Christian pastor herself, suddenly realized the import of our discussion of HIV infection and antiviral therapies. I captured her gasp on tape: “wait, what’s the name of that drug? Wait--that’s what my husband is taking.”
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