Page 60 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Processes of elective belonging 51

Overall, one mode of analysis is likely to suffer without the other. Similar
points can be made with reference to the mass and diffused audiencing of
cinema and a range of other cultural activities (Longhurst et al. 2007).
A similar sort of position can be derived from Butler but not in ways that
she might have anticipated. Thus, in her discussion of drag in Gender Trouble
(Butler 1999: 175), Butler argues that in drag, ‘we are actually in the presence
of three contingent dimensions of corporeality: anatomical sex, gender iden-
tity and gender performance’ and further that ‘we see sex and gender
denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their directness and
dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity’.
I think that the SPP does something similar for previous conceptions of
the audience and ordinary life such as the bounded affected/responding
groups of the individuals of the BPP and the incorporated/resistant groups
of the IRP. These are reconfigured and rethought within the attention to
the processes argued in the idea of the SPP. Thus to rewrite the quote from
Butler, I would argue something along the following lines – I see the audi-
ences of ordinary life as denaturalized by means of performing processes that
avow their directness and dramatize the cultural mechanisms of their fabri-
cated unity. It should be noted that this suggests some revision to the SPP. I
would now wish to emphasize the importance of the idea of performing
rather than performance (or indeed performativity) for the reasons outlined
so far.
A number of processes of social life are part of and constitute the per-
formance of elective belonging. These include decisions about where people
choose to reside and therefore how they can build belonging on this basis,
although residence should not be conflated with belonging. Examination of
residential belonging involves consideration of the different meanings of
places. This involves examination of other places that residents compared
their place of residence to. It also entails discussion of the role of work and
schooling for children in the generation of how people go about the processes
of performing elective belonging. It also requires consideration of the way in
which people use the media and how they imagine that they are cosmopolitan
or local. 1

Globalizing
Globalization processes have a number of different dimensions. First, it is
important to recognize that ‘the precise form and nature of global connections
depends strongly on the precise field of practice that is being studied’ (Savage
et al. 2005: 207). Thus, mediated forms of practice like music and cinema had
more spatial extension than residence. Global connections are uneven, but
need to be traced in their specific patterns. Second, it should be restated that
residential space is ‘a key arena in which respondents define their social pos-
ition’ (p. 207). More specifically it can be argued that:
The sorting processes by which people chose to live in certain places and
others leave is at the heart of contemporary battles over social distinc-
tion. Rather than seeing wider social identities as arising out of the field