This book is a dialectic, and multi-perspective examination of classed traumas in late modernity. The primary anchoring question is whether and how class becomes a condition of possibility for coping with traumas. What does it mean to experience deindustrialization, crises, or domestic violence from a specific class position? Do the coping mechanisms differ along the lines of class, gender, race or ethnicity?
The text negotiates such questions, traveling back and forth from psychoanalysis to sociology, and from the global to the local, while critically engaging with memories, narratives, and myths engraved into social and personal histories. Through a dialogic quest for what is silenced, and what is salient within oral, written, and visual testimonies, it foregrounds what the upper classes prefer to neglect: the traumatizing core of the new class divide. Rather than idealizing, or vilifying the dominated, this study calls for an exploration of practices, narrations, and spaces whereby alienation and integration co-exist antagonistically, producing hybrid, fragmented, but also potentially transformative subjectivities.
This book will be of interest to scholars of humanities and social sciences, primarily for those studying social stratification and inequalities, sociology of emotions, identity theory, political psychoanalysis, labour history, and ethnography.
About the Author: Giorgos Bithymitris is a Researcher at the Institute of Social Research, National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) in Greece, with expertise in the fields of social stratification, and trade union research. His current research interest focuses upon the social and cultural components of classed subjectivities and their political implications. His most recent publications include The Red and the Black: Working Class and Nationalism in Ship Repair Zone (2022), Costumes, neckties and blue collars: traits of class voting 2014-2019 (2022) Mind the Gaps: The Class Dynamics of the Greek Parliamentary Elite (forthcoming chapter).
