“The concept of performativity points to the ways in which we are produced by the weighty structures (at once material and ideal) that preexist us, and highlights the extent to which the reproduction of inequality does indeed happen behind our backs.” (Bettie, pg. 192)
Check out this link to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/22/136498042/quirk-cachet-why-geeks-shall-inherit-the-earth
As I listened to this segment I kept thinking to myself, “what would Julie Bettie have to say about this book? “ I would have normally been very intrigued at this sociological/psychological approach to prove the unimportance of high school cliques and popularity. As bullying becomes a greater issue for today’s teenagers, I think a book that gives hope for the outsider or geek is both academic and service-oriented. Bettie took away my blind appreciation, however. Robbins does a good job of proving some of Bettie’s concepts (like passing) and does a good job of making her work more relevant for those she used for research, but in the end, as Bettie has left me to understand, she is missing a huge point: class matters.
From what I can tell from the interview and the excerpt, Robbins, like Bettie, is examining students based on their general whereabouts within the cafeteria social structure that is high school. Like Bettie, she recognizes that it is minority students (or from hard-living situations) who find themselves on the outside. In the interview and introduction to her book she makes mention of Bruce Springsteen, J.K. Rowling and Tim Gunn as outsiders turned successful millionaires. Her “quirk theory” basically states that those little differences that cause social anxiety in middle and high school will eventually turn you into a social icon. Robbins assumes that all those geeks will eventually go to college and graduate school and get their dream jobs and be able to laugh at the quarterback at their ten-year reunion. What about those who can’t afford college, Robbins? How will they become millionaires?!
She has taken great effort to study the psychology of popularity and makes it known that as much as various players in Bettie’s game work hard to maintain an identity, cliques do the same. There is also an understanding that people work hard to “pass” as popular, but there is little room for changing groups, unless you practice some great performativity (Bettie’s words, not Robbins’).
What I really liked about Robbins’ approach, as opposed to Bettie’s, is that she worked with her seven “characters” to attempt to get them to a better place, on a strictly psychological level, however. This is more proof of their separate audience, but to a degree, Bettie could have worked with each of those with the pre-existing working-class outcome, she just didn’t (or at least doesn’t make note of it). Robbins noticed a lacking self-esteem of a cheerleader and challenged her to make a move, make a change, to pass into a new group. Robbins claims that the challenge was successful and the cheerleader regained some dignity, but I can’t help but feel that such a challenge was “easy”, I mean, the cheerleader was probably doing pretty alright financially.
Actually, I’m not sure any of Robbins’ characters were hard-living folks. It’s possible that they were, but if anything, this proves Bettie’s point that class just isn’t recognized as a disparity. Robbins can talk about race, ethnicity, sexual preference, how one spends their free-time, what clothes they prefer to wear, but she can’t explicitly say, class matters. I wonder if she had read Bettie if her “challenges” would be less about making it work within another clique and more about how we can all change the institutional problem of class-disparity. How would our approach to anti-bullying campaigns be different if we were explicit about class and income-disparity? Not to say that we shouldn’t be honest about our racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, but I can’t help but wonder if sustainable anti-hate isn’t only born out of a serious understanding of how class affects our society.
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