Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media: Transmodal Performances of Working-Class Subcultures 3030968170, 9783030968175

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Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media Transmodal Performances of WorkingClass Subcultures Emilia Di Martino

Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media “This marvelous book offers a fresh perspective on class formations in the twenty-first century. Originally a derogatory epithet for a British underclass, the term Chav was to become the moniker for a gradiently inhabitable social identity, performable and negotiable through the behaviors that make Chav personae identifiable, and eventually to undergo ever-changing forms of reanalysis and regrouping in the lives of British citizens. By carefully tracing these developments through the last two decades, this book shows that any attempt to reify class formations—by criteria of disposable income, and the like—fails utterly to account for the manner in which class identities are created and transformed through the discursive interactions in which they live.” —Asif Agha, University of Pennsylvania “Present-day cultural forms challenge the social scientist for they arise, develop, prosper, dwindle, and fade away at a speed that is at odds with the usual pace of scientific investigation and academic writing; the word and the concept of ‘chav’ designate one of these phenomena, which are meteoric yet involve millions of people, their words, and their representations, intertwining in complex ways with previous and ensuing stylistic trends. Emilia Di Martino has successfully faced the challenge of the academic study of ‘chav’ and provided a sophisticate account of this fleeting yet global tendency.” —Massimo Leone, Università di Torino “Just when it seemed that everything had been said about the Chav, along comes this book to offer new insights. The author investigates the concept of Chav, tracing its origins from the early twenty-first century through to a detailed analysis of current usage in Tik Tok Chav Check videos. Thought-provoking in its argument that Chav has been re-appropriated, and may hold the potential for positive re-evaluation in some contexts, the book is certain to open up new academic discussions of the Chav phenomenon.” —Susan Fox, Universität Bern

“Indexing CHAV offers readers a much-needed—and tremendously smart and fun—model for linguistic ethnographic research in the online-offline nexus. Di Martino zeros in on one word, “CHAV,” and exposes a world of social history, social media, and human creativity. Her exploration refreshingly adds to an understanding of language rooted in context, history, and the way people make meaning in new ways, in new media, differently, every day.” —Betsy R. Rymes, University of Pennsylvania “Emilia Di Martino’s Indexing ‘chav’ on Social Media: Transmodal Performances of Working-class Subcultures is the first comprehensive inquiry of how the ‘chav’ as a concept and figure has developed over the last two decades. Impressive in scope, this in-depth analysis provides a highly nuanced reading of ‘chav’ which challenges most established research on this notion.” —Elias le Grand, Stockholm University

Emilia Di Martino

Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media Transmodal Performances of Working-Class Subcultures

Emilia Di Martino Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa Napoli, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-96817-5    ISBN 978-3-030-96818-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96818-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch / shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my parents. Poverty, the war, and early loss of their fathers denied them education. Their love, example, and belief in the value of studying and working hard has opened to us, their daughters, the doors to academia. To my sisters. Joy and torment. Giuliana May: every day, side by side in the same room, we supported each other, and together we reached an important milestone. Me at the finishing line of this book, you at the finishing line of seven exams in just a handful of months, all passed with flying colors. Davide Miles: every day, exchanging messages from one room to the other of the same apartment, we supported each other, and together we reached an important milestone. I am now at the finishing line of this book, and you are at the end of another long school year attended remotely, crowned by shared enthusiasm for your participation in the Model European Parliament, your new French certification, your growing interest in Economics and Philosophy, and your rising grades in Latin and Greek. Zoe Jade: you have often cheered me up with your video calls, your naughty smiles, your crafty little words, your drawings, and your writings––already so precise. I owe you too the strength needed to reach the finishing line.

Annalisa: thanks for our illuminating talking walks, which got us through many difficult moments. I am very grateful to the blind referees for their precious comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. They have had a huge impact on its completeness and quality. My gratitude to Lois Greenlees, who opened a window onto the chav phenomenon for me from an Italian home, all the while helping me to raise my children.

Preface

I set out to write this book to clarify to myself and anyone else who may be interested how and why the term ‘chav’ was first catapulted into British and international mass media in the first decade of the twenty-first century only to suddenly disappear in the second, and how some people gradually came to associate ‘chav’ with edginess and subcultural capital. My analysis was sparked by the resurgence of ‘chav’-interest on some social media platforms, particularly TikTok, where the ‘chav’ trend would currently appear to have “received more than 1 billion views” (Edkins, 2021: n.p.), in the Summer of 2020. The book is a piece of ethnographic research (insofar as it applies ethnographic research principles to the study and discussion of ‘chav’) written from the standpoint of a highly observant outsider both in terms of my relationship with ‘chav’ (being Italian-born and bred, Italy-based, non-chav, and never having been a chav) and TikTok (never having been a TikTok user either). In relation to ‘chav,’ hopefully this position endows me with watchful qualities which may prove crucial to a deeper understanding of the issue (an observant outsider may be able to spot things that insiders have come to take for granted), and the non-judgemental attitude required of academic writing. Concerning TikTok, the standpoint of a highly observant outsider sits well with the notion of netnography as a “specialized form of ethnography adapted to the unique vii

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computer-mediated contingencies of today’s social worlds” (Kozinets, 2010: 1). Netnography emerged in the 1990s as an interpretive method initially devised to investigate the consumer behavior of communities present on the Internet using data consisting of fieldnotes and the ‘artifacts’ of the specific Internet community studied (Kozinets, 1998). It has become a “widely accepted form of research […] used to tackle a large variety of topics, from applied questions of online advertising to more general investigations of identity, social relations, learning, and creativity.” (Kozinets, 2010: 1). About the topic of ‘chav,’ on the face of it, in the first decade of the twenty-first century the term was a pejorative epithet for (usually young) people whose appearance and demeanor were perceived as showing what was commonly seen as a lack of taste and education, as well as anti-social behavior. British academics clearly saw its figurative function as that of being a marker of class difference (for example, Tyler, 2008), one reminiscent of “Victorian and Edwardian accounts of the dangerous, immoral and libidinal poor” (Tyler, 2013: 163). At the same time, it became particularly relevant in a period when previous markers of class, such as access to education and consumer goods, would appear to have become less certain. In effect, many, even outside the UK, could see deep-seated class undertones in the term ‘chav’, as the online entry in Merriam Webster––which I refer to below both for its wide accessibility and for the number of usage examples it lists––reveals: Definition of chav British slang, disparaging : a young person in Britain of a type stereotypically known for engaging in aggressively loutish behavior especially when in groups and for wearing flashy jewelry and athletic casual clothing (such as tracksuits and baseball caps) Like Eminem, Lady Sovereign is a poster child for the white lower-­ middle class. She’s what’s known in the London press as a “chav”: a thieving, pot-smoking, gaudy-jewelry-wearing, white city kid with no ambition. (Martin Edlund, New York Sun, 12 July 2005)

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Chavs take a lot of explaining, but stereotypical adjectives are: binge-­ drinking, bling-loving, boob-displaying, Burberry-wearing. (Vogue, April 2006) “Chav”—the champion buzzword of 2004  in Britain, according to one language maven there—refers to something between a subculture and a social class. … the unofficial definition sounds rather condescending or even cruel: a clueless suburbanite with appalling taste and a tendency toward track suits and loud jewelry. (Rob Walker, New York Times, 2 Jan. 2005) (Merriam-Webster, 2021: n.p.)

The subsequent pages investigate the enregisterment of ‘chav’ in British popular culture, starting with the media forms that accompanied the word’s emergence and spread. I then move on to examine the recent revival of ‘chav,’ with the different and often competing meanings it performs in the semiotic objects that populate a series of social platforms, particularly TikTok. To do so, I adopt a linguistic anthropological perspective, which seemed the most suitable way of exploring (1) the semiotic processes through which the communicative sign ‘chav’ has become enregistered, i.e., it has come to point to certain styles, identities, and other human practices, stereotyping the chav; and (2) those currently triggering, while at the same time mirroring, its renegotiation. I account for this slippery phenomenon––which has already been subject to much mass media and academic discussion, so it is difficult to find a way through the various positions on offer and articulate a clear, definite stand––as a linguist because this is the position I occupy as an academic. However, while mostly looking at ‘chav’ as a constantly remediatized, enregistered indexical linguistic/semiotic phenomenon here, I am aware I cannot ignore the broader social and political debates with which it imbricates. I believe these may be the best entry point for readers to what has long been, in many ways, a very localized and specific set of practices. Hence the reason for an Introduction to follow this Preface: I thought it would be useful to guide the reader into the issue of ‘chav’, not only describing how the book came into being but also contextualizing my work as a linguist in terms of a (short) discussion of how ‘chav’ relates to class.

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Indeed, one thing that the reader may have noticed on first encountering this book is that class is explicitly made to dialogue with youth here. As a matter of fact, the subtitle (Transmodal Performances of Working-Class Subcultures) quite explicitly suggests that working-class subcultures is what is indexed by ‘chav’ in the social media activity, the book’s prime object of study (Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media). However, while recognizing and even foregrounding the fact that social class does contribute to shape young people’s lives, I feel it is equally important to warn the reader from the onset that, locating themselves across and beyond subcultural studies traditions (Williams, 2019), these pages, as an outcome of the study performed, set out to show that at least the working-class subcultures currently indexed by ‘chav’ in the social activity analyzed here would appear to be less unambiguously classed than other constructions of subcultural groups, including chav-related ones (see, for example, Hollingworth, Williams, 2009). Despite originally emerging (identifiably such through ‘othering’ processes performed by other social groups) from the material and symbolic resources available to a specific social class, ‘chav’ would indeed appear to be a class-open––even allegedly class-less in some instances––cultural practice in the social activity in question, rather than a class-specific response to the demands of some youth sections (see, for example, Buchmann, 2001). Traditionally, the most popular subcultures carried “the most potent political message against the status quo” (Coon, 2014: ix), through cultural practices performed as a self-defense mechanism against the dismissal of dominant culture. Social media currently facilitate the sharing of both ‘material’ and symbolic resources in ways unimaginable only a handful of years ago, making––among many others––the ‘chav’ repertoire available for both ingroup reappropriation and outgroup plundering. In addition, the technicalities constituting some of these media in particular set in motion complex semiotic dynamics requiring discernment between the chav resources used and how these are mobilized since even the most mainstream users’ intentions distinctly lend themselves to different interpretations and even ‘hijacking’. I believe these innovative uses of ‘chav’ mediate new values for it, potentially

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contributing to unsettling the category and making it available for further segmentation and (re)interpretation both in terms of individual identity creation, subculture construction and social transformation. Napoli, Italy

Emilia Di Martino

References Buchmann, M. (2001). Youth Culture, Sociology of. In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier. Coon, C. (2014). Preface. In The Subcultures Network (Ed.), Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change (pp. ix–xii). Cambridge Scholars. Edkins, D. (2021, July 3). TikTok’s ‘Chav’ Trend is Fueling Damaging Class Stereotypes. Insider. https://www.insider.com/chav-­meaning-­what-­is-­tiktok-­ trend-­working-­class-­stereotype-­british-­2021-­6. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Kozinets, R.  V. (1998). On Netnography: Initial Reflections on Consumer Research Investigations of Cyberculture. In J. W. Alba & J. W. Hutchinson (Eds.), NA  – Advances in Consumer Research (Vol. 25, pp.  366–371). Association for Consumer Research. Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. SAGE. Merriam-Webster. (2021). Chav. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. https://www. merriam-­webster.com/dictionary/chav. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Tyler, I. (2008). ‘Chav Mum Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain. Feminist Media Studies, 8(1), 17–34. Tyler, I. (2013). Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Zed Books. Williams, J. P. (2019). Subculture’s Not Dead! Checking the Pulse of Subculture Studies Through a Review of ‘Subcultures, Popular Music and Political Change’ and ‘Youth Cultures and Subcultures: Australian Perspectives’. Young, 27(1), 89–105.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Theoretical Framework 11 3 ‘Chav’ 29 4 The Chav 69 5 New Digital Media and the Chav155 6 Pulling the Threads Together and Expanding on ‘Chav’ in Social Media237 7 Concluding Remarks287 Bibliography299 Index359

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 “No Chavs” sign on a train in London in 2010. (© Marty Gabel (Marty Gabel generously allowed free reproduction of the picture), @fiskadoro on Flickr) 86 Fig. 4.2 Some user exchanges on “Our regional word for chav has been replaced by ‘chav’” in 2013. (Reddit, 2013: n.p) 94 Fig. 4.3 Still from Wasp. (Arnold, 2003; Youtube, 2017[2003]) 106 Fig. 4.4 Some users’ exchange on “Chav—What’s your definition?” on Singletrack116 Fig. 4.5 “No Hats or Hoodies” poster in the window of a fast-food restaurant in Enfield Highway, North London in 2007. (© Nina Grant (Nina Grant generously allowed free reproduction of the picture), @ninachildish on Flickr) 130 Fig. 5.1 User exchange on ‘IAMDDB Shade’ official video. (YouTube, 2017)169 Fig. 5.2 User exchange on ‘chav’ in 2011. (Lau17kyy, 2011) 187 Fig. 5.3 Blogger post on “10 Signs You Went through the Teenage Chav Stage” and some user comments on it. (Amy, 2016) 188 Fig. 5.4 Screenshot of results for ‘chav,’ January 2021. (Google Trends, 2021)200 Fig. 6.1 Some user exchanges on “How has Grime changed?” in 2013 (Reddit, 2018: n.p.) 251 Fig. 6.2 Still from About a Girl (Percival, 2001). (Youtube, 2014[2001]) 265

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.3 Some user exchanges on “Feminism: still excluding working class women?” on The F-Word (Amara, 2012: n.p.) 266 Fig. 6.4 Instagram #chavvy post by helenpimmsy (Helen generously allowed free reproduction of the picture). (@helenpimmsy 2020)275

1 Introduction

As I anticipated in the Preface, despite approaching ‘chav’ from a linguistic/semiotic (and cultural) perspective, I am aware I cannot ignore the broader debates in which it is embedded. ‘Chav’ as a stereotype and a cultural object is not divorced from wider political and historical phenomena, so we cannot fruitfully detach ‘semiotic ideology’ from all the other ‘ideologies’ involved. This composite is complicated by the fact that the idea of class commonly associated with it—what it actually is, and what the relevant structures, ideologies, and identities are—is no more straightforward than the idea of ‘chav’ itself: class is constantly negotiated in relation to all other kinds of practices and identities. I am confident that the issue would be more fruitfully accessed through unambiguous reference to the wider context. Hence this Introduction, which I hope clearly situates the linguistic/semiotic arguments presented in this volume in relation to precise historical and political events, and in this sense explicitly frames ‘chav’ in terms of class. To make my task manageable, rather than situating ‘chav’ against the British social and political debates in the descriptive sense, I will position my research on the recent resurgence of ‘chav’ against the backdrop of the classed experience canon in argumentative form. I will then open more windows onto social and political debates on ‘chav’ as I proceed in the treatment of individual chapters. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Di Martino, Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96818-2_1

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I mentioned before  that for (some) British people during the first decade of the twenty-first century, ‘chav’ was a signifier for class, status, or cultural capital, with the media generating—and contributing to perpetuate—this narrative. Recent re-appropriations have renewed the power of the concept as a topical issue, and they often seem to similarly align ‘chav’ with appearance in gendered and classed ways. However, I contend that equating ‘chav’ with ‘underclass’ in the most recent uses of the concept on social networks may not be the whole story. First of all, it is essential to clarify that those who equate chavs with the ‘underclass’ are actually conjuring up a somewhat complex idea. Coined and popularized in the US in the early 1980s, the term ‘underclass’ became “a key word in the British political, academic and media lexicon” (Lister, 1999[1996]: 1) over twenty years ago, thanks to two essays by Charles Murray; the first was penned in 1989 when he visited Britain “in search of the ‘underclass,’ courtesy of The Sunday Times” (Murray, 1999b[1990]). The second dates from 1993 (Murray, 1999a[1994]) when he “returned to warn that the crisis of the ‘underclass’ was deepening.” (Ibidem) The concept identifies a social group “distinct from the working class—in effect, a rootless mass divorced from the means of production—definable only in terms of social inefficiency, and hence not strictly a class in a neo-Marxist sense.” (Macnicol, 1987: 299) As Tyler argues, “while Marxist understandings of class are historically contingent and relational, where classes are formed through antagonism and struggle, the concept of the underclass describes an adjunct class divorced from the body politic proper.” (Tyler, 2013: 184) In equating chavs with the underclass, we are imagining them conceptually as those whom Marx named lumpenproletariat, a term which, in the English editions of The Communist Manifesto, was translated as “the ‘dangerous class,’ the social scum” (incidentally, ‘scum’ appears to have been a frequent collocate of ‘chav’ in the early twenty-first century), and the “passively rotting mass” (Marx & Engels, 1888[1848]: 27). As Tyler explains, Marx invented a

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new, abject1 “classless class” in order to “explain the failure of political efforts of the urban proletariat and their bourgeois supporters to effect a second French revolution”: caught up in the hysteria of naming, he lumped together “an entire plethora of disenfranchised people into one stigmatizing category, denoting dangerousness and expendability.” (Tyler, 2013, p.185) The result would appear to be that the binarism of class struggle is interrupted “by a third term [...] that resists the totalizing and teleological pretensions of the dialectic.” (Stallybrass, 1990: 81) However, Stallybrass contends that it was through the lumpenproletariat that Marx rewrote the concept of ‘proletariat,’ which actually also reaffirms the notion that even a class-for-itself is necessarily a relational category. Indeed, before Marx created the idea of lumpenproletariat, ‘proletariat’ did not apply to the working class but was “one of the central signifiers of the passive spectacle of poverty” (Stallybrass, 1990: 84). Although a more positive definition was probably already emerging elsewhere, “Marx had a crucial impact upon the articulation of the concept within a political project,” turning the proletariat from “a passively rotting mass [...] into the label of a collective agency.” (85) The lumpenproletariat was conceived of as “the leavings, the refuse of all classes.” Writing of Louis Philippe and the July Monarchy in The Class Struggles in France, Marx described the finance aristocracy as “nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the height of bourgeois society.” In his metaphorical characterization of “the lies and cheating by which the financial aristocracy lives, the moral pauperism of the rich” (86), through lumpenproletariat, Marx would appear to have anticipated some carnivalesque uses of ‘chav’ that more than one contemporary journalist has employed with the creation of such neologisms as ‘chavistocracy’ and ‘chavistocrat’ (cf. Sect. 3.2). Stallybrass also reminds us that Adam Smith’s distinction between productive and unproductive labor in The Wealth of Nations similarly cuts across social hierarchy and explains this mingling of ‘high and low,’ of ‘kings and clowns’ through the reflection that “the lumpen seems to figure less a class in any sense that one usually  See Kristeva’s contention that the abject “lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the [...] rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.” (Kristeva, 1982: 2) 1

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understands that term in Marxism than a group that is amenable to political articulation.” (88) Another interesting point that Stallybrass makes is that while Marx would seem to come to understand the lumpen in terms of race, such a definition is “partially undone by the sense of the lumpen as defining those who are most open to historical transformation” (Ibidem). Indeed, lumpenproletariat can be ambivalent in Marxist theory: Stallybrass notices, for example, that, writing of the lumpen making up the Mobile Guard in Paris, Marx held that they could never renounce “their lazzaroni character”; but, he continued, those same guards were “thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption.” (Marx in Stallybrass, 1990: 88) Hence Bakunin’s romanticization of the lumpen as the vanguard of revolutionary action and Engels’s derision of Bakunin as “a lumpen-­ prince whose proper sphere was Naples, the home of the lazzaroni” (cf. Stallybrass, 1990: 89). Diametrically opposite, Otto Bauer’s view of the lumpenproletariat as “particularly vulnerable to reactionary ideologies and movements” (cf. Bottomore, 1983: 292–3). Stallybrass explains these different readings of lumpenproletariat, interpreting the notion as constituting “a political process [rather] than as a specific social group.” (Stallybrass, 1990: 90). Despite the many similarities between the notions of lumpenproletariat and the underclass, Tyler contends that Marx employed the lumpen “to fashion factory workers as the proletariat par excellence, the underclass is a distinctly neoliberal concept, designed to expunge class struggle from political vocabulary” (Tyler, 2013: 186). Indeed, Westergaard sees in it the idea of class as “a matter of voluntarily adopted lifestyles2—good versus evil—essentially unconditioned by economic structure” (Westergaard, 1995: 117), a way of erasing class from the political lexicon. Tyler explains that “[t]he lumpen history of the underclass reveals that pejorative class  See Tyler’s contention (recalling Gilles, 2005), that “one of the architects of the New Labour project was the sociologist Anthony Giddens. [...] His departure from class centred on his belief that globalization and consumerism had transformed understandings of selfhood. In place of the conceptual framework of class, he argued for a mobile, flexible and individualized notion of selfhood in which life-chances related less to birth and more to an individual’s ability to script themselves into the neoliberal workplace through the adoption of the ‘right’ lifestyle choices.” (Tyler, 2013: 158) See Giddens, 1991; Giddens & Diamond, 2005. 2

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epithets, whatever ideological project they serve, do not describe existing classes of people,” though, of course “[t]his is not to say that ‘underclass’ does not have significant ‘reality effects’” (Tyler, 2013: 186–187), and this is precisely what this book contends is also true of ‘chav’. The term does not describe existing classes of people: it is not an attempt to name a stable demographic category (although its force as a cultural trope would appear to be particularly pervasive in the case of certain groups—see note 39, Chap. 4), but a deliberately offensive (or playful) way to talk/write about people or fictional characters who look or behave in specific (non-mainstream) ways. This in no way detracts from the practical trickle-down effects of the term on the lives of real people.3 Let me mention, en passant, that the term lumpenproletariat is currently being reappropriated, as emerges in the choice of the editors of Lumpen: A New Journal for Poor and Working-Class Writing (people who self-identify as “working class writers and editors,” cf. Freedom, 2019) to name the journal in this way. Incidentally, one of those behind Lumpen is D. Hunter, the author of Chav Solidarity (2020[2018]), a book that witnesses, with other works I mention in Sect. 4.2, a significant sea-change in the public’s attitude to the precariat that occurred more recently in the UK and internationally, bringing about increasing awareness of classism. This change in public sensibility (and sense of responsibility) accounts for the near disappearance of ‘chav’ from the mass media in the second decade of the twenty-first century and the generalized perception of chav-­ bashing as totally unacceptable. In addition to chavs actually representing an “adjunct class,” not one “formed through antagonism and struggle,” or better, a political process or a concept, or “an exercise in conceptual contamination” (Lister, 2004: 110) (if we imagine them as the underclass), I argue that there is a distance between the more recent practices (‘chav’ representations on TikTok and other social platforms) and the previously existing narrative around the word ‘chav.’ The class antagonism which many had long perceived as inherent in ‘chav’ (despite ‘chav’ standing, conceptually, for something  Garland et al. have shown that violent and intimidatory behavior directed to ‘alternatives’ “can affect their physical and mental health, causing them to change the way they conduct their routine activities.” (Garland et al., 2015: 1065) 3

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else), has recently toned down, morphing in many instances onto a blurred idea of generational difference. Indeed, ‘chav’ emerges, in many current representations, as a temporary phase in the lives of many people, whose momentary demeanors some feel the need to ‘confess’ in order to perform a type of “affective authenticity.” This involves drawing attention to, rather than concealing, imperfections (cf. Sect. 5.4), which may have encouraged an appropriation of ‘chav’ by individuals outside the underclass. Of course, this attitude may also be read, in a cynical key, as one of the subtle manifestations of the strategic defense mechanism to which— recent research (for example, Friedman et al., 2021) has illustrated—people from privileged backgrounds resort in order to obscure class privilege.4 However, I think we should not underestimate its culture-changing potential. Younger generations view the world differently. The changes perceivable in ‘chav’ are also changes in “structures of feeling,” meanings and values which are “actively lived and felt, [...] a social experience which is still in process, [...] a cultural hypothesis” (Williams, 1978[1977]: 132). Mapping these different ways of thinking by identifying the competing indexicalities of ‘chav’ emerging in the recent resurgence of the term can help us become aware of the cultural changes now taking place in individual, idiosyncratic forms. While pointing to the shift—in the study of sociocultural phenomena—away from emphasis on community and continuity toward a perspective that emphasizes contact and change, Bucholtz and Skapoulli contend that, after a period of theorizing that located the dynamics of present societies in the bodies of social actors, current research focuses not only on bodies but also on spaces: “not just on people moving into new cultural locations and positions but also on new cultural resources flowing toward people” (2009: 2). In societies characterized by the global circulation of texts, visual images, and ideas, young people are particularly inclined to embrace and revise cultural flows, so  Friedman et  al. contend that people from privileged backgrounds often appear to attach little importance to their class origins, downplaying their upbringings and instead forging affinities to working-class extended family histories “to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously [casts] their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.” (Friedman et  al., 2021: 129) 4

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their identity practices “provide important insights into the ways in which broader categories and categorizations become fluid and porous” (Bucholtz & Skapoulli, 2009: 1–2). Mapping young people’s different ways of performing ‘chav’ cannot just help us chart the intangible qualities of emerging young cultures but can also give us clues into the “particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or a period” (Williams, 1978[1977]: 131). As assemblages of fragments drawn from a variety of different sources, TikTok videos, for example, can help us identify the “expressive micro-traits [...] building blocks with the help of which a feeling eventually surfaces” (Sharma & Tygstrup, 2015: 5). Of course, this does not mean that these videos fully evade the issues addressed by older debates on ‘chav.’ Hoggart reminds us that class issues are renegotiated but do not disappear: “Class distinctions do not die: they merely learn new ways of expressing themselves. Each decade we swiftly declare we have buried class; each decade the coffin stays empty” (Hoggart, 1989: vii). In uploading videos of themselves or other people asking whether they look chavs or not, TikTokers seem eager to continue the old ways: they seem to perform the mainstream political aesthetics of disgust of ‘chav’ (Tyler, 2008, 2013). Nevertheless, some TikTokers and users of other social platforms would also appear to perform, whether deliberately or unconsciously (or in virtue of the nature of the medium used, cf. Sect. 5.5),5 alternative representations and aesthetic practices of ‘chav.’ Furthermore, alternative representations of stigmatized subjects (Sect. 5.3)—Tyler explains quoting Gilroy, 2011—are useful “for imagining alternatives to the images and discourses of stigmatization” (Tyler, 2013: 148). I believe some of these representations do have the potential for “generating dissensus within the hegemonic perceptual and aesthetic field” (Tyler, referencing Rancière, 2004 and Panagia, 2010), as well as the potential for generating “a reconfiguration of the conditions of sense perception” (Panagia, 2010: 96) around ‘chav.’ In less fluid TikTok videos (more precisely, in videos where the creators very explicitly position themselves as pro-chav), class conflict is often  This does not take away from their agency since “consciousness and awareness are not simple matters, and agency does not equal or require awareness.” (Eckert, 2016: 78) 5

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watered down to mere generational difference, as I have already hinted. Is it possible to detect processes of class formation/redefinition in this toning down of class antagonism that was inherent in many ‘chav’ meanings for years? Building upon Thompson’s idea that “class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion” (Thompson, 1965: 357), Campling et  al. (2016) explain that classes have agency: class emerges out of “a dialectical process produced through the ‘friction’ of relations within and between multifaceted classes” (Ibidem: 1748). Despite looking at and discussing ‘chav’ from a linguistic/semiotic perspective, it is to be hoped that this book also provides an exploration of the “diverse and open-ended modes of existence of class relations” (Ibidem), and it sheds light, though sometimes only implicitly, on the processes/events/agents that are making classes take the forms they have at this specific historical moment in time. In particular, the book points to the emergence of new, more advanced, more socially reticulated forms of class subjectivity (cf. Sect. 6.2): subjectivities more open to otherness and international in outlook, all the while coexisting with traditional/mainstream ones. And of course, these representations sit side by side with representations that keep on performing the ‘traditional’ political aesthetics of disgust at ‘chav.’ Through alternating old and new, mainstream, and non-mainstream representations of ‘chav,’ the book outlines cartographies of ‘chav,’ that feature both diversions and continuities, highlighting the current fluidity of the concept, the relational dynamics in which it is involved, and each individual’s responsibility in the overall effects of social activity, despite the clear awareness that there are no single agents of change.

Bibliography Bottomore, T. (Ed.). (1983). A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (pp. 292–293). Cambridge. Bucholtz, M., & Skapoulli, E. (2009). Youth Language at the Intersection: From Migration to Globalization. Pragmatics, 19(1), 1–16.

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Campling, L., Miyamura, S., Pattenden, J., & Selwyn, B. (2016). Class Dynamics of Development: A Methodological Note. Third World Quarterly, 37(10), 1745–1767. Eckert, P. (2016). Variation, Meaning and Social Change. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 69–85). Cambridge University Press. Freedom. (2019, August 13). Interview with Lumpen: A New Journal for Poor and Working Class Writing. https://freedomnews.org.uk/2019/08/13/ interview-­with-­lumpen-­a-­new-­journal-­for-­poor-­and-­working-­class-­writing/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Friedman, S., O’Brien, D., & McDonald, I. (2021). Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self. Sociology, 55(4), 129–147. Garland, J., Chakraborti, N., & Hardy, S.-J. (2015). ‘It Felt Like a Little War’: Reflections on Violence against Alternative Subcultures. Sociology, 49(6), 1065–1080. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford University Press. Giddens, A., & Diamond, P. (2005). The New Egalitarianism: Economic Inequality in the UK.  In A.  Giddens & P.  Diamond (Eds.), The New Egalitarianism (pp. 87–100). Polity. Gilles, V. (2005). Raising the ‘Meritocracy’: Parenting and the Individualization of Social Class. Sociology, 39(5), 835–853. Gilroy, P. (2011). Paul Gilroy Speaks on the Riots August 2011, Tottenham, North London. The Dream of Safety: To Surrender to the Dream of Safety. dreamofsafety.blogspot.com/2011/08/paul-gilroy-speaks-on-riotsaugust-2011.html. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Hoggart, R. (1989[1937]). Introduction. In The Road to Wigan Pier (pp. v– xii). Penguin. Hunter, D. P. (2020[2018]). Chav Solidarity. Lumpen. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror (Leon Roudiez, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Lister, Ruth. (1999[1996]). Introduction: In Search of the ‘Underclass’. In R.  Lister (Ed.), Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate. Choice in Welfare (Vol. 33, pp. 1–18). Hartington Fine Arts. Lister, R. (2004). Poverty. Polity. Macnicol, J. (1987). In Pursuit of the Underclass. Journal of Social Policy, 16(3), 293–318. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (Samuel Moore, Trans.). (1888). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company.

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Murray, C. (1999a[1994]). Rejoinder. In L. R. Lister (Eds.), Charles Murray and the Underclass Debate. Choice in Welfare (pp. 81–96). Hartington Fine Arts. Murray, C. (1999b[1990]). The Emerging British Underclass. In L.  R. Lister (Eds.), Charles Murray and the Underclass Debate. Choice in Welfare (pp. 23–52). Hartington Fine Arts. Panagia, D. (2010). ‘Portage du Sensible’: The Distribution of the Sensible. In J.-P. Deranty (Ed.), Jacques Rancière. Key Concepts (pp. 95–103). Routledge. Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (Gabriel Rockhill, Trans.). Continuum. Sharma, D., & Tygstrup, F. (Eds.). (2015). Introduction in Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture (pp. 1–19). De Guyter. Stallybrass, P. (1990). Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat. Representations, 31, 69–95. Thompson, P. (1965). The Peculiarities of the English. Socialist Register, 2, 311–362. Tyler, I. (2008). ‘Chav Mum Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain. Feminist Media Studies, 8(1), 17–34. Tyler, I. (2013). Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Zed Books. Westergaard, J. (1995). Who Gets What? The Hardening of Class Inequality in the Late Twentieth Century. Polity. Williams, R. (1978[1977]). Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press.

2 Theoretical Framework

This chapter is devoted to methodological issues. Section 2.1 identifies the subject matter of the study (style), grounds it in a specific disciplinary field (linguistic anthropology), and clarifies that this book’s intended contribution to discussions on current uses of the chav concept ultimately lies in the illustration of how the meaning produced in some chav-related videos currently appearing on TikTok is essentially non-compositional: the resources appropriated mutate, even beyond their creators’ intentions. Section 2.2 explains that whereas I wrote the book to inquire into how and why the term ‘chav’ emerged into and then disappeared from British and international mass media, all the while generating subcultural capital for it (as I anticipated in the Preface), the idea also arose from the desire to apply to a currently familiar case the view, advanced in linguistic anthropology, that social processes, even large-scale ones, mostly occur offline. Mediatized moments provide massively parallel inputs to recontextualization. Along the chain of communication,1 these inputs acquire distinct formulations in distinct chain segments. The chav phenomenon presented itself as particularly worthy of attention due to its persistence: youth culture and terminology change fast, and the term ‘chav’ has long  Following Pierce, Gal and Irvine talk about “chains of abduction” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 105): “(c)hains of abduction imply communication, even if merely with oneself.” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 93). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Di Martino, Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96818-2_2

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passed its peak usage. However, surprisingly, it seems to have maintained a fascinating amount of staying power: teenagers and young adults from various countries are currently sharing and reappropriating semiotic objects relating to a concept that originated in one locality, bringing their various interpretations, backgrounds, and creativities into play. This certainly makes the notion of ‘chav’ worthy of academic interest, even if the particular term used to refer to it may soon fall out of use, as it seemed to be destined to in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This section also contains a methodological review of the themes and concepts of linguistic anthropology, and more specifically of embodied sociocultural linguistics, which are relevant for the treatment of the topic covered here. However, the approach taken is broad: disciplinary boundaries have not been retained as a matter of principle. An effort has been made to combine the intellectual capital of individuals working from different disciplinary perspectives and explore different ways of thinking.

2.1 Subject Matter; Focus; Aim The subject matter of this book can be encapsulated in ‘style as a semiotic meta-activity,’ or “the manner in which social action is taken” (Bucholtz, 2015: 29). And this in turn means, in layperson’s terms, that these pages are about how we as individuals do things. The study is grounded in linguistic anthropology, and more specifically in embodied sociocultural linguistics (Sect. 2.2 adds more detail on this), and its argumentative (new-contribution-to-existing-research) Chaps. (5 and 6) explore TikTok (and other social platforms’) content as multimodal digital semiotic acts of communication that generate meaning through the deployment of an array of resources2 integrating across sensory modalities. More specifically, these chapters focus on the currently viral phenomenon of Chav check videos, analyzing some of their creators’  Semiotic resources are intended as “system[s] of meanings that constitute the ‘reality’ of the culture.” (Halliday, 1978: 123) 2

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reappropriations of the supposedly linguistic features, mannerisms, music, and positioning of chav culture and the stance-­taking acts underlying these specific reappropriations. In particular, they discuss how the resources involved operate intersemiotically in the production of meaning expansion which typically occurs when semiotic choices become integrated with multimodal phenomena (O’Halloran, 2011; Machin & Mayr, 2012). Concepts developed and widely used within language research are applied to the analysis of multimodal digital semiosis in the conviction, on the one hand, that “for the most part, linguistic and nonlinguistic forms of style operate in very similar ways” (Bucholtz, 2015: 30); on the other, that language is a medium of socio-cultural worlds like media technologies, which are also powerful creators of socio-cultural worlds: “linguistic anthropological theories and methods are uniquely suited to an analysis of contemporary media practices” (Eisenlohr, 2011: 266). To critically engage with the multimodal digital objects in question, data presentation strategies currently in use within the tradition of embodied socio-cultural linguistics have been stretched to integrate text, audio, and dynamic visuals. The limited length of present TikTok videos (3–60 seconds) and their scarce use of text, combined as they are with the objective of this study, which is mainly explorative, make data handling which simultaneously accounts for the multiple ranges of semiotic phenomena at work in the digital objects in question, manageable for manual analysis. More complex semiotic objects and in-depth quantitative analysis of more accessible ones would require recourse to sophisticated software resources only partially available (Smith et  al., 2011; O’Halloran et al. 2012). The contribution that this volume intends to make to discussions on current uses of the chav concept can be narrowed down to the illustration of how the meaning produced in Chav check TikTok videos is particularly opaque or to adapt to instances of multimodal digital semiosis, a terminology commonly used in linguistics, always non-compositional.3 The

 Referring to idioms, Wood’s explains semantic opacity writing that “adding up meanings does not yield the whole” (Wood, 2015: 43). 3

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resources appropriated in the process of transmutation4 mutate, even beyond their creators’ intentions, in such a way that the emergent meaning requires a leap away from the linear, straightforward sense in all cases. The data analyzed were collected through ordinary Google searches performed in the Summer of 2020 when I became aware that Chav check videos were going viral amongst TikTok users worldwide. Indeed, the videos in question were not protected by any privacy settings: TikTok did require registration if a user wished to interact with specific users’ items (via comments, for example), but the main content (the creators’ full videos: both text and audio, and dynamic visuals) was public for lurkers.5 As part of TikTok’s introduction of stricter privacy controls for teenagers (Hutchinson, 2021), since February 2021, it has become mandatory to register even to simply access the main content. However, the Privacy Policy of TikTok still cautions, at the time of writing, that “[i]f you choose to engage in public activities on the Platform, you should be aware that any information you share may be read, collected, or used by other users” (TikTok, 2021: n.p.). Recent studies discuss the specific challenges posed by research involving online activity: for example, one cannot possibly justify the choice of sharing data beyond their original location “as ethical simply because the data are accessible” (boyd & Crawford, 2012: 672). Indeed, one can neither expect publicly accessible content to be “meant to be consumed by just anyone” (Ibidem), nor social media users to be “always aware of what is public and what is private in their postings, as they may not remember the agreements they signed up when first entering the platform” (Townsend & Wallace, 2018: 194). However, when focusing on the specific features of the online activity discussed here, it is easy to see that the content creators whose data I use hashtagged their videos precisely because they were hoping to reach as many people as possible. It is therefore reasonable to assume that they were aware of the public character of their postings (also boyd, 2014: 63–64’s consideration that “as content becomes increasingly persistent, teens are also much more aware of the unintended consequences of having data available that  Jakobson (1959: 233) refers to the “interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign systems” (intersemiotic translation) as transmutation. 5  Lauber-Rönsberg informs that “information accessible even to unregistered users is classified as public” (Lauber-Rönsberg, 2018: 39). 4

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could easily be taken out of context at a later time.” Ilbury, 2019: 228 confirms this: the young people in their study “demonstrated a conscious and active awareness of privacy issues surrounding social media use”). Predictably, this content has already been widely scrutinized, publicly evaluated, and mediatized (both text and audio, and video) not only by other TikTok users but also by professional and semiprofessional commentators (Coulter, 2020, Davies, 2020, Dawson, 2020, for example). Moreover, while it would most likely sound problematic to justify the extension of other professionals’ practice to academic research, particularly when the individuals in question are ordinary people who also happen to be young, I wish to make a point of arguing that exposing the kind of TikTok activity analyzed in this book beyond this platform in a way that might increase the chances of keeping permanent record of it, could in no way harm their future prospects if considered within the framework in which it is set here. Indeed, while such data are examined to interpret orientations that may be viewed as political in the broadest sense of the term, the data in itself do not fall within a list of indisputably sensitive data.6 The point this volume seeks to make is, as anticipated, that the meaning produced in TikTok videos is opaque, so no inferences can be made either on the ideological scope of the content, or on the content creators’ ‘real’ intentions. In short, while other people may probably opt for using the data outside this framework, in a way unsympathetic to the individuals in question, I can easily foresee a higher likelihood of one such unethical use outside the academia, and the point this book makes about the opacity of TikTok videos can be used precisely to contradict any possible attempt to justify unethical uses as these as stemming from the ‘unequivocal’ attitude of TikTok content creators. Consequently, and considering that on the one hand, only pseudonymization, not complete anonymization, would have been possible (for the very reason that the main TikTok content was public at the time of the research), and  While strongly encouraging researchers who work with social media data to embrace a responsible approach in using those data so as to ensure that “how we obtain and reuse such data is done to the highest possible ethical standards” (Townsend & Wallace, 2018: 190), Townsend and Wallace distinguish between less (“postings about, for example, the weather, recipes, or consumer preferences”) and more sensitive data such as criminal activity, financial problems, mental health issues, controversial political opinion and activism (Townsend & Wallace, 2018: 200). The TikTok activity examined in this book could easily be classified as a form of consumer preference. 6

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secondly, that the sole objective of this study is to promote scientific research and that there is to date no public book-length study available on the social reach and impact of TikTok, and, finally, that the aim could not have been reached otherwise, I have chosen to disclose the content creators’ names as evidence supporting the arguments I am about to put forward. I share the view of ethical decision-making “as embedded in the local details of research” (Whiteman, 2012: 9) and hope that the ethical stance I have taken in respect of the issues I have managed to identify sounds reasonable even if other researchers would have made different methodological decisions, had they been in my place.

2.2 Reasons for the Study; Methodology In an article with the intriguing title “Meet mediatization,” Agha explains that social life has a mediated character every time people link up with each other in communicative activities at different levels of closeness, electronic technologies allowing varying degrees of mutual awareness, and possibilities of reciprocation. Communicative signs represent a bridge for those they connect: they mediate social relations, also through time. Mediatization is a particular case of mediation, which increases the complexity of interconnections, expanding the scale of exchanges generated by single messages and narrowing the gaze of social actors to a small sample of their own activities. It exponentially increases the emergence of a multiplicity of “acts of inference-by-hypothesis” (‘uptakes’): “Uptake”7 […] names an act from which other acts can follow. […]. Since the acts that do in fact follow produce signs of different artifactual duration (uptake in what?), and occur in participation frameworks of diverse kinds (uptake by whom?), which may unfold at varied thresholds of propinquity from each other (uptake where and when?), the outlines of the resulting social process readily remain obscure to the participants who shape it. (Agha, 2011: 166–7)

 Gal and Irvine explain that ‘uptake’ is “another word for conjecture [...], (re)actions in real time” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 95), or “acts of inference-by-hypothesis” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 93). 7

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Semiotic mediation encompasses mediatization, so social processes, even large-scale ones, mostly occur offline: the immeasurably more significant majority of semiotic activities in everyday life cannot be recycled in mediatized messages. What makes mediatized moments crucial is that they provide massively parallel inputs to recontextualization. This means that a vast number of people, who may at a later time recontextualize the messages they are responding to in many different ways, can treat fragments of mediatized messages as indexical8 presuppositions of whatever it is they do or make and interact with them across the chain of communication turning them into something completely different. Along the way, mediatized objects acquire distinct formulations in distinct chain segments. This book explores a moment along this chain of recontextualization within the new terrain offered by TikTok, focusing on the ‘chav’ phenomenon, particularly in light of the many reactions it has ignited. As anticipated in Sect. 2.1, the study is grounded in linguistic anthropology, and more specifically in embodied sociocultural linguistics. Linguistic anthropology views language as interdependent with culture and social structures, therefore foregrounding the significance of modes other than speech and writing in the study of how language shapes communication, constructs social identities and group memberships, and generates ideologies, thereby impacting the lives of individuals and communities. Particularly relevant to the present research are issues directly concerning linguistic anthropology, such as constructing identities, intersubjectivity, and ideology. Focusing on the latter theme first, the concepts of indexicality, enregisterment, iconization, and fractal recursivity are crucial: to start with, it is precisely “indexicality, the property of sign vehicle signaling contextual ‘existence’ of an entity” (Silverstein, 1976: 29) that language has in common with the rest of culture. The focus here is on nonreferential indexes, or ‘pure’ indexes, which “signal some particular value of one or more contextual variables” (Ibidem), more precisely on  Blommaert explains that “[a]part from referential meaning, acts of communication produce indexical meaning: social meaning, interpretive leads between what is said and the social occasion in which it is being produced” (Blommaert, 2005: 11). 8

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higher-order levels of indexical meaning (Silverstein, 2003), which encapsulate the power of language (which we may conveniently stretch to refer to signs in the economy of this study9) to encode stereotypes. It is via these stereotypes that identities ‘emerge’:10 Through indexicality, every utterance tells something about the person who utters it—man, woman, young, old, educated, from a particular region, or belonging to a particular group, etc.—and about the kind of person we encounter—we make character judgements all the time, and labels such as ‘arrogant,’ ‘serious,’ ‘funny,’ ‘self-conscious,’ or ‘businesslike’ are based almost exclusively on how people communicate with us. (Blommaert, 2005: 11)

Boundaries of acceptability are perceived to exist, signposting certain linguistic forms as appropriate because they resonate with the socio-­ cultural frames of specific communities: these repertoires of forms have undergone processes of enregisterment, becoming “differentiable from the rest of the language (i.e., recognizable as distinct, linked to typifiable social personae or practices) for a given population of speakers” (Agha, 2007: 168). Conversely, diversity (any degree of variation exceeding perceived boundaries of ‘acceptability’) is figured as being caused by differences in the ‘actual’ social characteristics of the individuals performing such uses. In other words, the clusters (i.e., the shared linguistic features) which are at the basis of language grouping11 construct and/or re-enforce relationships between language and social image, producing broader socio-cultural stereotypes:

 As Bucholtz explains, the general understanding underlying recent work on language and identity is that semiotics is the creation of social meaning “through the use of symbolic resources that include but are by no means limited to language” (Bucholtz, 2015: 29). 10  Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 588) contend that identity “is best viewed as the emergent product rather than the pre-existing source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore as fundamentally a social and cultural phenomenon.” 11  Language similarity and language difference is a powerful source of categorization and socialization. 9

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Linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group’s inherent nature or essence. (Irvine & Gal, 2000, 37)

Iconization implies “the attribution of cause and immediate necessity to a connection (between linguistic and social groups) that may only be historical, contingent, or conventional” (Ibidem). Fractal recursivity then replicates difference internally, producing contrasts of ever-smaller magnitude: a scheme of stylistic differentiation semiotically organizes relationships at many different levels. Identities, in fact, are co-constructed:12 negotiated, contested, constantly managed. Characteristics of individuals’ ‘inhabited’/‘achieved’ identities (the identities they claim for themselves) or elements of the contexts in which these individuals interact may promote or inhibit the usage of certain communicative elements resulting from self-monitoring. In particular, “the highlighting and exaggeration of ideological associations” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004: 381) stand out as stylizations: individuals tend to gravitate towards their ‘desired’ communities, performing styles which lie either beyond their standard repertoires or beyond the conventions of the specific context. These interruptions of the routine are, to varying degrees, conscious performances in which individuals position themselves in the specific situation and the social world at large, taking stances on specific trends13 and contributing to maintaining and changing them. They do so through appropriating enregistered (“recognizable as distinct, linked to typifiable social personae14 or practices,” Agha, 2007: 168) communicative forms in a process of stylistic bricolage. We could look at these enregistered forms as stylistic accessories (Di Martino, 2020): individuals are immersed in communication,15 which we may  As Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 598) explain, identities are a relational phenomenon: they are “intersubjectively constructed through several, often overlapping, complementary relations, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice, and authority/delegitimacy.” 13  Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 591) refer to multiple acts of stance-taking in specific contexts as “the positionality principle”: identities are produced through the relationships one takes up with what they say/write and how they say/write it, situating themselves in positions of acceptance or rejection of the dominant ideologies involved. 14  Characterological figures. 15  I refer to language in my previous work, but my focus is not only on verbal language. 12

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­ icture as a huge market; in this market, those accessories which are perp ceived to represent a worthwhile acquisition—due to their sounding/ looking ‘cool’ (Di Martino, 2019) or appearing to effectively match, suitably complement, or helpfully enhance a desired identity—do not just travel with individuals across situations; they are also ‘borrowed’ across individuals and reused for similar but also different ends: Over the last few years, this process of decontextualization and transportability of individual instances of verbal and non-verbal language has grown enormously thanks to mass media exposure (it has become a form of style mediatization), and this, in turn, has led to decontextualized and transportable instances of language, models that potentially lend themselves to easy borrowing and can be re-adjusted to novel contexts, situations and needs. (Di Martino, 2019: 6)16

Building on Coupland’s reflections on style (2007), in light of Agha’s notion of enregisterment, I have illustrated elsewhere (Di Martino, 2019) how these accessories work as identity sets that can be played with, applied and adjusted to different contexts. They are resources that can be drawn on, picked and mixed, and even acquire completely different meanings, producing indexicality shifts:17 in the new configurations, they may come to point to (index) something else.18 Working from a broader perspective, Pennycook (2017, 2018) uses the notion of semiotic assemblage to envisage the idea of a posthumanist sociolinguistics that “acknowledges that multisensory, multimodal and multilingual resources that converge at particular moments are worthy of our study if we are to overcome the narrowness of the humanist conception of language” (Pennycook, 2018: 70). This invitation to drop disciplinary boundaries resonates Bucholtz and Hall’s call for “an embodied  Cf. the notion of “prosthetic culture” in Sect. 5.5.  Objects and technologies also participate in the production of social meaning. 18  In Di Martino, 2019, I argue, for example, that as a consequence of her choice to remain faithful to her origins despite wide media exposure, a popular British singer, Cheryl (also discussed as a chav figure further down), has come to embody a characterological figure of her native variety of Northern England, Geordie. The singer’s skillful identity management, in a historical moment when attitudes to non-standard varieties were changing, has significantly contributed to the de-­ enregisterment of Geordie as a stigmatized variety, ‘laminating’ it with a layer of coolness. 16 17

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sociocultural linguistics” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016: 174) which aims not only to understand how the body is discursively constructed, but also how it is “imbricated in complex arrangements that include nonhuman as well as human participants, whether animals, epidemics, objects, or technologies” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016: 186). Amongst the scholarship produced in other fields that provided a basis for their work, Bucholtz and Hall mention ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, and the studies rooted in Halliday’s theory of social semiotics, which have analyzed “material and embodied phenomena through the lenses of critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis […], multimodality and visual communication […], and mediated discourse analysis.” Recent scholarship in these fields, which is relevant for the present study, features Norris & Maier, 2014, Jones et al., 2015; Djenar et al., 2015; Norris & Jones, 2017[2005]; Jones, 2021[2018]; Mortensen et al., 2019, Adolphs & Knight, 2020; Thurlow et al., 2020. Amongst the scholarship engaging with a posthumanist perspective, Bucholtz and Hall recognize, in particular, work that views objects and technologies as co-participants in the production of social meaning (Nevile et al., 2014; Goodwin, 2017) and analyzes semiosis as the process which emerges from such mutual co-construction (Jones, 2008, 2009; Arminen & Weilenmann, 2009; Goodwin & Samy Alim, 2010; Keating & Sunakawa, 2010; Thurlow & Jaworski, 2011, 2014; Licoppe & Morel, 2012). More recently, Jones (2020a, b; also Jones R. H., 2011) has called for the introduction of Barad’s notion of entanglement into the discussion: To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. (Barad, 2007: IX)

Applying Goodwin and Alim’s concept of transmodal stylizations (2010)—the articulation of new meaning through the performance of others’ voices—to interactions on TikTok, Jones (2020a) has shown how indexicalities become entangled in messy ways in the amateur videos produced by the users of this platform.

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While recognizing that current studies have managed to focus on the messy and creative bricolage that decentralized cultural flows enable, Bucholtz and Skapoulli contend that they fail to perform “fine-grained analysis of the everyday experiences of individuals and groups living at the intersection of multiple and seemingly conflicting cultural ideologies” (2009: 2). Such work frequently emphasizes macro processes, overlooking the microlevel of what social actors actually do “with the scapes that shape their worlds.” That is unfortunate: transnational and global cultural identifications unquestionably carry a particular ideological force; however, “it is in local spaces and communities that identities are tried out, embodied, and adapted in order to be made coherent” (Ibidem). Hence the need to study transnational processes locally and ethnographically, making use of less deterministic frameworks capable of capturing both the small-scale and the large-scale dimensions of processes. The last concept to be accounted for in the methodological framework forming the basis of this book is that of popular discourses on issues of academic relevance in the public sphere. I have discussed, on a previous occasion, the impact of metadiscourses on accent in the public sphere and the popularization of academic discourse on the same topic, which I have described as “a form of mediatization as the ‘staging’ of metalinguistic discourse in media reports” (Di Martino, 2019: 140). I have later become aware of the theorization of citizen sociolinguistics as a “response to the need for a new sociolinguistic methodology that accounts for and partakes of the social demands and affordances of massive mobility and connectivity in today’s world” (Rymes & Leone, 2014: 25; also Aslan & Vásquez, 2018; Rymes, 2020a, b). This is only one of the effects brought about by mediality, an area which is still underexplored and certainly deserves more attention from linguists: […] linguistic anthropological work on media has stopped short of exploring what may perhaps be the strongest contribution linguistic anthropologists could make to anthropological engagements with contemporary media. In my view this is the systematic comparison of language as a medium of sociocultural processes with the ways various contemporary media technologies are recognized to similarly mediate and shape such processes. (Eisenlohr, 2011: 266)

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Cross-pollination of ideas was inevitable working under the umbrella of linguistic anthropology since the far-reaching horizons of this branch of study are more towards anthropology than linguistics per se: the focus is on language since it plays a crucial role in the social lives of individuals and communities. This means that the approach taken in this book is broad: disciplinary boundaries have not been retained as a matter of principle, though the other academic areas involved have quite obvious connections with linguistic anthropology. An effort has been made to combine the intellectual capital of individuals working from different disciplinary perspectives and holding different ways of thinking, keeping a watchful eye on debates currently open within sociology and cultural studies.

Bibliography Adolphs, S., & Knight, D. (Eds.). (2020). The Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities. Routledge. Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge University Press. Agha, A. (2011). Meet Mediatization. Language & Communication, 31(3), 163–170. Arminen, I., & Weilenmann, A. (2009). Mobile Presence and Intimacy— Reshaping Social Actions in Mobile Contextual Configuration. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(10), 1905–1923. Aslan, E., & Vásquez, C. (2018). ‘Cash Me Ousside’: A Citizen Sociolinguistic Analysis of Online Metalinguistic Commentary. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22(4), 406–431. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press. boyd, d. (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press. boyd, d., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical Questions for Big Data. Information, Communications Society, 15(5), 662–679. Bucholtz, M. (2015). The Elements of Style. In D. N. Djenar, A. Mahboob, & K. Cruickshank (Eds.), Language and Identity across Modes of Communication (Series: Language and Social Processes [LSP], 6) (pp. 27–60). De Gruyter Mouton.

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Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2004). Language and Identity. In A. Duranti (Ed.), Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 369–394). Blackwell. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2016). Embodied Sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates (pp.  173–198). Cambridge University Press. Bucholtz, M., & Skapoulli, E. (2009). Youth Language at the Intersection: From Migration to Globalization. Pragmatics, 19(1), 1–16. Coulter, M. (2020, February 27). TikTok Videos Mocking Poor British People as ‘Chavs’ Have Racked up Millions of Views and Hundreds of Thousands of Followers. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.nl/tiktok-­popular-­ videos-­mock-­working-­class-­chavs/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Coupland, N. (2007). Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge University Press. Davies, K. (2020, September 15). How TikTok Resurrected the Problematic ‘Chav’ Stereotype. i-D. https://i-­d.vice.com/en_uk/article/y3z9gx/how-­tiktok-­ resurrected-­the-­problematic-­chav-­stereotype. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Dawson, B. (2020, July 22). The British ‘Chav’ Stereotype is Making a Comeback on TikTok. Dazed. https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-­culture/article/49858/ 1/the-­british-­chav-­stereotype-­is-­making-­a-­comeback-­on-­tiktok. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Di Martino, E. (2019). Celebrity Accents and Public Identity Construction. Analyzing Geordie Stylizations. Routledge. Di Martino, E. (2020, April 16). Sonorità Linguistiche e Nuovi Orizzonti di Senso. La quarantena con la cultura. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=d7Fg4oDQaK4. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Djenar, D. N., Mahboob, A., & Language, C. K. (Eds.). (2015). Language and Identity across Modes of Communication (Series: Language and Social Processes [LSP], 6). De Gruyter Mouton. Eisenlohr, P. (2011). Media Authenticity and Authority in Mauritius: On the Mediality of Language in Religion. Language & Communication, 31(3), 266–273. Gal, S., & Irvine, J. T. (2019). Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, M.  H. (2017). Haptic Sociality: The Embodied Interactive Constitution of Intimacy Through Touch. In C.  Meyer, J.  Streeck, & J.  S. Jordan (Eds.), Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction (pp. 73–102). Oxford University.

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Goodwin, M. H., & Samy Alim, H. (2010). ‘Whatever (Neck Roll, Eye Roll, Teeth Suck)’: The Situated Coproduction of Social Categories and Identities Through Stancetaking and Transmodal Stylization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(1), 179–194. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Edward Arnold. Hutchinson, A. (2021). TikTok Announces New Policy Updates to Better Protect Young Users. SocialMediaToday.com. https://www.socialmediatoday. com/news/tiktok-announces-new-policy-updates-to-better-protect-young-­ users/593329/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Ilbury, C. (2019). ‘Beyond the Offline’: Social Media and the Social Meaning of Variation in East London. Queen Mary’s OPAL #40 Occasional Papers Advancing Linguistics. https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/media/sllf-­new/ department-­of-­linguistics/documents/40)-­Ilbury%2D%2D-­PhDThesis.pdf. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Irvine, J. T., & Gal, S. (2000). Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (pp. 35–84). School of American Research Press. Jakobson, R. (1959). On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In R.  A. Brower (Ed.), On Translation (pp. 232–239). Harvard University Press. Jones, R.  H. (2008). The Role of Text in Televideo Cybersex. Text and Talk, 28(4), 453–473. Jones, R. H. (2009). Dancing, Skating, and Sex: Action and Text in the Digital Age. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(3), 283–302. Jones, R. H. (2011). C Me Sk8: Discourse, Technology and Bodies Without Organs. In C. Thurlow & K. Mroczek (Eds.), Language in the New Media (pp. 321–339). Oxford University Press. Jones, R. H. (2020a). The Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Synthetic Embodiment and Metalinguistic Entanglement on TikTok, online talk 3 Dec 2020. https:// www.latl.leeds.ac.uk/events/the-­invasion-­of-­the-­body-­snatchers-­synthetic-­ embodiment-­and-­metalinguistic-­entanglement-­on-­tiktok/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Jones, R. H. (2020b). Towards an Embodied Visual Semiotics: Negotiating the Right to Look. In C. Thurlow, C. Dürscheid, & F. Diémoz (Eds.), Visualizing Digital Discourse. Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives Series: Language and Social Life [LSL] (pp. 19–44). De Gruyter Mouton.

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Jones, R. H. (2021[2018]). Mediated Discourse Analysis. In K. Hall & R. Barrett (Eds.), Language and Sexuality Research. The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Online Ahead of Publication. https://www.oxfordhandbooks. com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212926.001.0001/oxfordhb­9780190212926-­e-­4. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Jones, R. H., Chik, A., & Hafner, C. A. (2015). Discourse and Digital Practices: Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age. Routledge. Keating, E., & Sunakawa, C. (2010). Participation Cues: Coordinating Activity and Collaboration in Complex Online Gaming Worlds. Language in Society, 39(3), 331–356. Lauber-Rönsberg, A. (2018). Data Protection Laws, Research Ethics and Social Sciences. In F. M. Dobrick, J. Fischer, & L. M. Hagen (Eds.), Research Ethics in the Digital Age. Ethics for the Social Sciences and Humanities in Times of Mediatization and Digitization (pp. 29–44). Springer VS. Licoppe, C., & Morel, J. (2012). Video-in-Interaction: ‘Talking Heads’ and the Multimodal Organization of Mobile and Skype Video Calls. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(4), 399–429. Machin, D., & Mayr, A. (2012). How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. Sage. Mortensen, K. K., Maegaard, M., & Milani, T. M. (Eds.). (2019). Mediatizing Intersectionality. Special issue of Discourse, Context & Media, 32. Nevile, M., Haddington, P., Heinemann, T., & Rauniomaa, M. (Eds.). (2014). Interacting with Objects: Language, Materiality, and Social Activity. John Benjamins. Norris, S., & Jones, R. H. (Eds.). (2017[2005]). Discourse in Action. Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis. Routledge. Norris, S., & Maier, C. D. (Eds.). (2014). Interactions, Images and Texts. A Reader in Multimodality. (Series: Trends in Applied Linguistics [TAL], 11). De Gruyter Mouton. O’Halloran, K.  L. (2011). Multimodal Discourse Analysis. In K.  Hyland & B. Paltridge (Eds.), Companion to Discourse (pp. 120–137). Continuum. O’Halloran, K. L., Podlasov, A., Chua, A., & Marissa, K. L. E. (2012). Interactive Software for Multimodal Analysis. Visual Communication, 11(3), 363–381. Pennycook, A. (2017). Translanguaging and Semiotic Assemblages. International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(3), 269–282. Pennycook, A. (2018). Posthumanist Applied Linguistics. Routledge. Rymes, B. (2020a). How We Talk About Language. Exploring Citizen Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press.

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Rymes, B. (2020b). Teenage Talk: It Doesn’t Just Change Language, it Changes Our World. https://citizensociolinguistics.com/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Rymes, B., & Leone, A.  R. (2014). Citizen Sociolinguistics: A New Media Methodology for Understanding Language and Social Life. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 29(2), 25–43. https://repository.upenn.edu/wpel/ vol29/iss2/4. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, Linguistic Categories and Cultural Description. In K.  H. Basso & H.  A. Selby (Eds.), Meaning in Anthropology (pp. 11–55). University of New Mexico Press. Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life. Language & Communication, 23, 193–229. Smith, B.  A., Tan, S., Podlasov, A., & O’Halloran, K.  L. (2011). Analysing Multimodality in an Interactive Digital Environment: Software as a Meta-­ Semiotic Tool. Social Semiotics, 21(3), 359–380. Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2011). Banal Globalization? Embodied Actions and Mediated Practices in Tourists’ Online Photo-Sharing. In C. Thurlow & K.  Mroczek (Eds.), Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media (pp. 220–250). Oxford University Press. Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2014). ‘Two Hundred Ninety-Four’: Remediation and Multimodal Performance in Tourist Placemaking. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(4), 450–494. Thurlow, C., Dürscheid, C., & Diémoz, F. (Eds.). (2020). Visualizing Digital Discourse. Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives  (Series: Language and Social Life [LSL], 21). De Gruyter Mouton. TikTok. (2021). Privacy Policy. https://www.tiktok.com/legal/privacy-­policy. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Townsend, L., & Wallace, C. (2018). The Ethics of Using Social Media Data in Research: A New Framework. In K. Woodfield (Ed.), The Ethics of Online Research (pp. 189–207). Emerald Publishing Limited. Whiteman, N. (2012). Undoing Ethics. Rethinking Practice in Online Research. Springer. Wood, D. (2015). Fundamentals of Formulaic Language. Bloomsbury.

3 ‘Chav’

This chapter explores the surface aspects of ‘chav’ (etymologies and vocabularies). Section 3.1 attempts to trace the spatio-temporal coordinates of the ‘chav’ phenomenon (the most widely accepted hypothesis being that it came from Romany and peaked in use in 2004), suggesting a possible means by which the term might have migrated into English from Romany. It also explores some of the folk etymologies that have emerged to make sense of ‘chav.’ Section 3.2 explains why the term appears to have generated so much interest: on the one hand, international focus on public engagement (interactions between experts and non-experts) has made research more accessible and more readily available in the media in recent years; on the other, the issue did prove to have specific significance, as its staying power, ubiquity and lexical productivity reveal. It also provides a taster of ‘chav’ uses in different contexts: the term and its inflections have been applied to objects, events, and individuals of different social standing. The common variable during the first decade of the twenty-first century was almost invariably its derogatory quality.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Di Martino, Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96818-2_3

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3.1 Entry into Public Discourse; Folk Etymologies ‘Chav’ entered British public discourse at the turn of the twenty-first century, quickly becoming recognized within academia as “the new terminology in which socially marginal groups are characterized, classified and understood” (Hayward & Yar, 2016[2011]: 530). In addition to ‘chav,’ the 2006 Oxford English Dictionary already included the adjective ‘chavvy’ with the derogatory meaning of “(c)haracteristic of a chav; ostentatious, gaudy”1 (Little, 2011: 41). Employing observational linguistics methodology2 with the assistance of software and electronically-held texts to face the challenge of tracking and tracing lexical change over time, Renouf explored the “lexical productivity” (Renouf & Baayen, 1996) and creativity of British media using a diachronic corpus (1989–2005) of over 700 million words extracted from broadsheet journalism (The Independent and The Guardian). These were supplemented by additional web-based text (Kehoe & Renouf, 2002; Renouf, 2003; Renouf et al., 2003, 2005, 2009, 2014; Renouf & Kehoe, 2006). Conceding that the lack of dating information for the web data inhibits the reliable diachronic study that a designed diachronic corpus permits (Kehoe, 2006) but also referencing a coherent intellectual path pursued since 1990, Renouf has plotted periods and years of peak productivity of a series of terms including ‘chav’ through the construction of graphs of individual prefixal and suffixal patterns over time. The scholar contends that her hypotheses about the relationship between meaning and surface textual patterning have proved to be sound. This allows her to cumulatively develop algorithms for automated systems capable of identifying lexical and lexico-semantic phenomena in text  This should be understood against Weber’s consideration that every society is organized into groupings characterized by distinctive lifestyles (based on consumption) and worldviews, just as it is divided into different classes (Weber, 1966). 2  Lipka (2003) has introduced the concepts of participant observation (clarifying that the participant observer need not be a linguist) and observational linguistics, defining the latter as a “novel subcategory of Empirical Linguistics in opposition to Corpus Linguistics, which employs a rigorous methodology and which, on the basis of counts and statistics, claims representativeness. PO stems from anthropology and has also been used in sociolinguistics.” (Lipka, 2006: 30) 1

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across time. The procedure “involves ‘feeding’ a specific time chunk of chronologically sequenced, fresh textual data through a set of software filters that detect novel words as well as new collocational environments of existing words” (Renouf, 2007: 63). Renouf identifies the characterization of “sub-sets of UK society, through their clothing, behavior or other attributes and associations” as an area of lexis of recurrent interest in British culture. She then chooses to narrow the scope of her query to the lexico-social attributions of two currently topical (and therefore linguistically-active) areas: words for young people of low social status and life-style, e.g. chav, neet, and hoodie words for highly-paid people appointed to trouble-shoot in industry, government and other institutions, e.g. tsar (Renouf, 2007: 75)

Focusing her attention on ‘chav’ (which she presents as a neologism), Renouf states that the lexeme first emerges in her data in a series of dialectal uses in the nineties: chavo (1995), chaveys (1997), chava (1999) as a Romany (and possibly also Essex rural) term for a young child. However, it was only in 2004 that the term would be ‘revived’ to refer to “a young British person of low education, having insufficient means to live away from home though sufficient to indulge in the purchase and wearing of hitherto socially-prestigious items of clothing, such as Burberry caps3 and other fashion accessories” (Ibidem).

 Currid-Halkett provides the background to this fashion trend (See also Sect. 4.2):

3

In the late 1990s, in an effort to obtain a greater market share, Burberry’s famous checked plaid, found on the inside of its tailored but old school trench coats, began to appear on many other goods, including umbrellas, wallets, and cell phone cases. The newfound ubiquity of the plaid (dubbed “chav check,” a pejorative) reduced Burberry from the uniform of English aristocrats to an ironic, reinterpreted badge of youth subculture. Emblazoned across scarfs, ties, and hats, counterfeit versions began showing up on the black market and being coopted by “chavs,” [...] who had a penchant for knockoff designer logo-tastic goods [...] The re-appropriating of Burberry’s status by this group caused a public relations nightmare for the company by alienating their core consumer base (Currid-Halkett, 2017: 13).

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The current Oxford English Dictionary also highlights this Romany origin: chav, n. Etymology: Probably either < Romani čhavo unmarried Romani male, male Romani child (see chavvy n.), or shortened < either chavvy n. or its etymon Angloromani chavvy. Brit. slang (derogatory). In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2020)

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Dent, 2013[2012]) hypothesizes that the derivation from Romany—Dent dating its use in this language back to the middle of the nineteenth century (2007: 153)—came about through old Polari ‘chavy,’ meaning ‘child’.4 Supplementing academic research with participant observer data (Lipka, 2006, cf. note 2), it is possible to trace the presence of ‘chavi’ in late-nineteenth-century literature. Indeed, Tréguer (2017) reminds us that Theodore Watts-­ Dunton5 used the word in The Coming of Love (1897), where Rhona, a Romany woman, is made to utter the following words: The wind, that mixed the smell o’ violet Wi’ chirp o’ bird, a-blowin’ from the land Where my dear Mammy lies, said as it fanned My heart-like, “Them ‘ere tears makes Mammy fret.” She loves to see her chavi lookin’ grand, So I made what you call’d a coronet, And in the front I put her amulet: She sent the Hand to show she sees me yet. (Douglas, 2020: 53)

 See also Richardson, 2005. The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English provides the following definition of chav(v)y: “A child: Parlyaree: from ca. 1860 Ex Romany chavo or chavi.” (Partridge, 1984: 202) 5  As Maxwell effectively sums up: “For most readers of Victorian literature, the name Theodore Watts-Dunton carries little weight; if he is registered at all, it is a peripheral figure—a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites and the companion of Swinburne in his latter years. Few know that he was once regarded as one of the most important critics of his generation, or that he achieved considerable fame late in his career with his best-selling novel Aylwin (1898), which was one of the literary successes of its year.” (Maxwell, 2007: 1) 4

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Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Dent, 2013[2012]) also mentions a possible connection between ‘chav’ and the northeastern dialect term ‘charver’ or ‘charva’.6 Identifying archetypes of the Charver Kids in ‘The Kappa Slappers’ of the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances and in Wayne and Waynetta Slob in the comic Viz,7 Nayak describes them as members of a Tyneside youth subculture and, in certain respects, as “the living embodiment of urban mythology”: Charvers were boys and girls who resided primarily in the Nailton district, were reputed to be burglars or ‘joy-riders’ and had developed a particular style of dress and body language. Renowned truants from school, the group were notoriously difficult to track down and interview over long periods as they had amongst the poorest school attendance records. (Nayak, 2003: 82)

Applied to any young person of unemployed or lower-class background exhibiting a particular subcultural style, the term had various inflections, Nayak reports, and also came to be linked, in the fieldwork he conducted in the Nailton neighborhood, to a hybrid combination of the allegedly archetypal lower-class names Sharon and Trevor (i.e., Shar/ vor) and ‘Charwallah,’ a term designating Indian tea-servants. The favored apparel of Charver Kids appears to resonate strongly with the dress code that would later be used to identify the chav: Brightly coloured tracksuits, including brands such as Kappa or Adidas, were worn with Nike trainers and various sports accessories [...] The overall appearance—fake tan, heavy jewellery, bleached hair—was interpreted by other youth as a signifier of ‘bad taste’ and a wilful display of lower-class  BBC, 2005 conflates the two terms, actually devoting its column Inside Out to Charvers and clarifying that “Charvers are also known as chavs, townies, ratboys, scallies, and scutters. Commonly chavs in the south and charvs in the north.” (n.p.) Bennett has traced back ‘chavvy’ in the lyrics of the punk band Sham 69’s song Hersham Boys, from 1979, in a clearly South-Eastern working-class context. It is used “as a vocative in greeting, and perhaps as a derogatory one.” This suggests it being a feature of South East English slang, through Romany and developing more specific regional associations due to its phonological similarity to the town name Chatham in Kent. (Bennett, 2011: 10) The hypothesis would also be supported by the use of ‘chavvy’ similarly indexing class and region as “a mocking switch into a local non-standard dialect” on the Chatham Girls website, launched in 2002 (Ibidem). 7  See Studlar’s recent contention that—due to persistent emphasis on her tainted class identity— the 1920s and early 1930s movie star and cultural icon Clara Bow may be the archetype of the celebrity chav discussed in Sect. 4.2 (Studlar, 2020). 6

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credentials. And yet in boldly exhibiting their subcultural style the Charvers were also overturning these negative inferences [...], their stylistic activities were a celebratory statement of their ‘underclass’ identity and ‘hardness.’ (Nayak, 2003: 89–90)

The term ‘charver’ (also Kehily & Nayak, 2014) is apparently attested to have emerged in the early 1990s after the Tyneside riots8 (BBC, 2005), thus making room for an analogy with the 2011 London riots. Indeed, Jones (2020[2011]: 37) refers to the August 2011 events9 as “chav riots” (also Ray, 2014). Nayak (2006) explains that it was the ‘gangsta’ reputation of this subculture that served to place them alongside the “combustible masculinities” (Campbell, 1993), fueling the 1991 riots. Both Movers and Shakers (2006[1999]: 232) and the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (2010[2008])10 date the term ‘chav’ precisely: 1998,11 with Movers and Shakers locating it geographically in the southeast of England, despite both dictionaries clarifying that “the notion that it is connected with Chatham, the name of a Kent town associated in the popular imagination with chav culture, is almost certainly a post hoc rationalization.”12 (Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang 2010[2008]: 46) Renouf contends that her data clearly show that the base term ‘chav’ emerged in 2004: it “at once rose precipitously to the top frequency ranks of voguish media vocabulary, and has remained there ever since.” (2007: 75) Not surprisingly, that year—for the first time—Oxford announced a  “In September 1991, the West End of Newcastle was hit by riots that spread across Tyneside after two joy-riders died in a police chase on the Coast Road at Wallsend to the east of Newcastle.” (Pinder, 2020: n.p.) 9  “The event that triggered social unrest was the death of Mark Duggan, shot by police in Tottenham Hale, London, on Thursday, 4 August 2011 during a failed attempt to arrest him.” (Kułakowska, 2015: 232) 10  John Ayto is the sole editor of Movers and Shakers (2006[1999]) and one of the editors of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (2010[2008]), the second editor being John Simpson. 11  The citation, reported in Bennett 2011 as appearing in the 2004 Oxford English Dictionary description of ‘chav’ as Word of the Year is as follows: “Travelling from Maidstone to Chatham every day was bad enough. I was born in Brompton so am I a Chav or what?” (uk.local.kent 1998). Dent also suggests that ‘chav’ might have been used in Kent as a derogatory epithet for the Romani people in the area (Dent, 2004: 143). 12  Bennett hypothesizes that “(i)f chavvy was used primarily by working class speakers in the South, it is possible that it started being used by others to refer to these speakers by metonym, i.e., a word used by some perceived group came to be a word used to refer to that group.” (Bennett, 2011: 11) 8

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word of the year, revealing it was ‘chav’.13 This would cause controversy, with Oxford countering that, for a word to be shortlisted and named “word of the year,” it is: “[...] judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.” (BBC, 2021: n.p.; Oxford Languages, 2021). Writing in The Guardian over six years later, Toynbee—who has a keen eye for spotting offensive uses (cf. Sect. 3.2) of what is now sometimes referred to as “the C word” (Midgley, 2010: n.p.; Jones O, 2011a)—sees in it the “quintessence of Britain’s great social fracture”: That word slips out. This time it was used by a Lib Dem peer on the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Baroness Hussein-Ece tweeted: “Help. Trapped in a queue in chav land. Woman behind me explaining latest EastEnders plot to mate while eating largest bun I’ve ever seen.” [...] She would presumably never say nigger or Paki, but chav is acceptable class abuse by people asserting superiority over those they despise. (Toynbee, 2011: n.p.)

Writing in the same newspaper to comment on both the heated exchange started by Toynbee’s piece (which received well over 1100 comments), and on the debated origin of the word ‘chav,’ Langman subscribes to its spontaneous emergence: This is chicken and egg time. Before the egg hatches, the observer isn’t sure what sort of egg it is. It hatches. The chick appears. The egg is retrospectively labelled a chickenegg. More to the point, perhaps, it is most often eaten. It’s only when conditions are right that the chicken is allowed to appear. And so it is with words: a new word is used, then defined. Chav seems to have come about severally and spontaneously in response to a need. (Langman, 2011: n.p.)

An aspect I believe has not been foregrounded in previous attempts to trace back the origins of the term is its nature of borrowing from a less prestigious14 to a more prestigious language, the predictable direction of  The Daily Mirror (2004) soon followed, renaming 2004 “The year of the Chav.”  “Gypsies [...] have a long history of social exclusion in British culture. Words such as ‘pikey’ and ‘gyppo’ have long occupied the space of social exclusion and Otherness that ‘Chav’ also now occupies.” (Little, 2011: 47–48) 13 14

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borrowing in such conditions traditionally being the opposite. Predictability, of course, does not imply inevitability since languages do borrow both ways in contact situations. What is interesting, in this case, is that ‘chavi’ did not designate, in Romany, a concept or an entity which was unfamiliar to an English speaker and had suddenly become socially salient, which would have easily justified the need to ‘incorporate’ the term. Unless the unfamiliarity was perceived for some to exist, not necessarily in a judgemental way, at a broader, more abstract level, for example, in the chavis’ outward appearance (clothing, jewelry, etc.) and attitudes (namely the raising of ‘chavis’). Kehily and Nayak bring attention to the fact that supposedly chav adornments such as “sovereign rings and large hooped gold ear rings are also associated with Travellers” (Kehily & Nayak, 2014: 154). As for the second aspect, the user of a collaborative Web-based community called Everything 2 (E2 for short) claims that ‘chav’ was a collocate of ‘drop’ in the expression “drop a chav” (“give birth”) for decades before it was catapulted into headlines: For decades, “chav” was part of a traditional phrase used by Londoners. “She dropped a chav” was used to mean “gave birth.” In this context, chavs are simply kids, apparently deriving from “chavi,” a Romany word meaning “boy.” So we have an etymological contender that fits the bill. (UnclePhil, 2004: n.p.)

The statement must be read with a pinch of salt: E2 as a database of interlinked user-submitted written material (encyclopedic articles similar to those on Wikipedia15) is moderated for quality. However, it does not have “an enforced neutral point of view.” The user base appears to lean to the left politically, but conservative voices are represented; “debate nodes (of any kind, political or not) are rarely tolerated, well-formed points of view from any part of the political or cultural spectrum are.” (Everything 2, 2012: n.p.; Wikipedia, 2020) It is hard to say whether UnclePhil’s comment above can count as a ‘well-formed’ point of view, particularly considering the co-text of the statement, which appears to be clearly critical of chavs. However, even if it were the result of retrospective  Some users actively contribute to both E2 and Wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2020).

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rationalization, the “etymological contender” put forward may provide a window into the type of mental processes which could have enhanced the possible borrowing while also helping to figure out how the term came to designate certain specific individuals. If ‘chav’ does come from the Romany ‘chavi,’ the unfamiliarity perceived in chavis’ outward appearance (clothing, jewelry, etc.) and the attitudes around them (namely the raising of ‘chavis’) must have become socially salient at some point. Salience, in turn, possibly developed out of an analogy—not necessarily emerging from or feeding on critical implications (I can easily picture a University graduate telling a friend they have not seen in a while, tongue-in-cheek or just trying to make the exchange run more smoothly through recourse to a funny tone which revives “the good old times,” that a third friend “dropped a chav”)—surfacing between members of two different linguistic and cultural communities. Agha (2007: 196) explains that “implicit typifications are rendered more explicit through ‘uptake’ and response in subsequent speech events.” Hence the term’s entry into common usage and its semantic evolution. Let me stress again that UnclePhil’s does not necessarily count as a ‘well-­ formed’ point. However, the information was later incorporated word for word (Larkin, 2005) in Metrolingua, “(a) blog about language, writing, books, translation, and observations in Chicago and beyond” (Metrolingua 2020: n.p.), in addition to being re-posted in a few forums (mrtoad, 2008, for example). Moreover, the information would appear to sit well with the data gathered in informal conversations by Bennett (2011: 9), with other data the latter mentions,16 and with Dent 2005. As Renouf (2007: 74) explains, “(n)ovelty is in part a linguistic response to a real-world event.” Attempting to account for the reasons underlying such a response (which is another way of wording the “social salience” I was hinting at above), Hayward and Yar contend that a shift occurred at the start of the twenty-first century in the locus of identity construction by which the popular media position social marginality, i.e., in the production–consumption dyad: the discourse of the underclass, which traditionally turned upon “a (perceived or real) pathology in the working  The punk band Sham 69’s song Hersham Boys, from 1979 and an article in the Chatham Girls website (Bennett, 2011: 9–11). 16

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classes’ relations to production and socially productive labour” morphed into the concept of the ‘chav,’ which was “oriented to purportedly pathological class dispositions in relation to the sphere of consumption.” (Hayward & Yar, 2016[2011]: 529, emphasis in the original).17 Indeed, the two scholars identify a connection between the decline of the underclass terminology from public discourse and the rapid rise of ‘chav,’ showing how the significance of consumption in the construction of identity—academic exploration of which dates back to the eighteenth century—has long-standing roots in Western industrialized society. Conspicuous consumption became an aspect of social class differentiation at the turn of the twentieth century, and its role in the construction of working-class youth subcultures became particularly meaningful between the 60s and the 80s. It then triumphed over other modes of self-­ expression during the last few decades of the twentieth century, when increasingly flexibilized and insecure employment greatly contributed to shifting the focus from production to consumption. While previous characterizations of the underclass excluded them from social membership due to their inability or unwillingness to work, current popular discussion of the ‘chav,’ Hayward and Yar contend, focuses on the ‘excessive’ participation in forms of market-oriented consumption which are deemed ‘aesthetically’ impoverished: [...] ‘chavs’ and ‘chavishness’ are identified on the grounds of the taste and style that inform their consumer choices. Recent popular discussions correspondingly focus upon: clothing (branded or designer ‘casual wear’ and ‘sportswear’), jewellery (‘chunky’ gold rings and chains), cosmetics (‘excessive’ make-up, sunbed tans), accessories (mobile phones), drinks (‘binge’ drinking, especially ‘premium lagers’ such as Stella Artois), and music (R&B, hiphop). (Hayward & Yar, 2016[2011]: 534)

 This should be understood by reading it against Veblen’s notion of conspicuous consumption (See also further below in this section), i.e., the consumer practice of purchasing goods of a supposedly higher quality or in greater quantity than necessary in order to display economic power (Veblen, 2005[1899]). Current research on status goods identifies ‘Veblen effects’ “when consumers exhibit a willingness to pay a higher price for a functionally equivalent good.” (Bagwell & Bernheim, 1996: 349) 17

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Little elaborates on the concept from the perspective of youth subculture, drawing attention to the fact that chav style may be an attempt to escape this group’s circumstances “through consumption and an unconscious act of homage to what they believe to be a ‘better’ way of life”: “they do not wish to create something different from other groups that have come before, or other class groups, but something comparable to groups of higher social standing.”18 (Little, 2011: 24, emphasis in the original) In this, they would appear to be “the end product, and arguably victims, of western capitalism at its most extreme” (Little, 2011: 27).19 Little contends that definitions of ‘chav’ that focus “on the council housing aspect of lower/working class youth culture” are foregrounded and exploited negatively “because the very things that Chavs seem to aspire to—a sense of ownership, privacy, territory, etc.—are the very things that their parent culture had removed from them be it through the Thatcher years or the decay of the manufacturing industries and the accompanying loss of a sense of community.” (Little, 2011: 47) Currently, ‘chav’ is not always used derogatively. It is also evocative of a clothing-, accessory-, make-up- (Sect. 6.2), life-style (Sect. 5.4), a stage of life (Sect. 5.4), and a social type (Sect. 6.3) in a non-judgmental, sometimes appreciative, way.

 On this point, see McKenzie’s view that even buying counterfeit designer items may be seen as a way of giving oneself a sense of value (McKenzie, 2015: 110). This would appear to be confirmed by field research: cf. Hamilton 2012 as quoted in note 18 further below (Chap. Chap. 4). 19  On this point, see also Barnard, who contends that, whereas the clothing and fashions of chavs appear evidence of the latter’s “fecklessness, otherness and worthlessness,” and an indication of their laziness and lack of self-respect from a middle-class perspective, such a view should be contrasted with the view of this fashion possibly representing a hypothetical reaction to the consumerist dream of a life of leisure: 18

[...] having been taken in by, or having bought into, the consumerist dream of a life of leisure and luxury-branded clothing, and having had that dream broken by unemployment, the clothing is now a way of shoving that broken dream in the faces of the dominant middle classes. To some members of this chav culture, the clothing now means ‘you sold us this consumerist fantasy and you made us unemployed and unable to take part in it; therefore we will wear this stuff to remind you of the fact and of the threat that you see us as.’ (Barnard, 2014: 102)

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At some stage, the word spread well beyond the South East (or the North East), quickly proving to be very productive (Sect. 3.2 will show some of the new—sometimes complex—word coinages with this affix; cf. Plag, 2018[2003]). This linguistic productivity, which is evidence that ‘chav’ was a successful linguistic novelty (also note 24 on hypostatization)—also manifested itself in the emergence of folk etymologies, CHAV as an acronym of Council House And Violent probably being the most easily recognizable and widespread one. A 2005 New York Times article corrects such wrong usage; however, evidence of its proliferation lies in its further generative force (the phrase “council house facelift” in the very same piece of writing): Male chavs wear tracksuits and baseball caps; female chavs pull their hair tightly back in buns or ponytails, a style known as a “council house facelift,” from the term for public housing. [...] The derivation of the word chav, which began to be widely used about a year ago as the problem of binge drinking in Britain’s towns and cities became a huge national issue, is murky [but] the theory that it is an acronym for Council Housed and Violent is most likely untrue. (Lyall, 2005: n.p.)

The acronym20 CHAV has also been interpreted as standing for Council House Average Vermin and Council House And Vermin, as it is possible to gather from this extract (the author’s journey to Dolly Parton’s Tennessee provides the occasion for comparing/contrasting British and American youth), reported here as evidence of the acronym spreading well beyond the United Kingdom: [Some explanations are that] the British term chav [...] is an acronym for Council House Average Vermin (“council house” being the rough equivalent of accommodation provided by welfare) [...]. Unlike the white-trash stereotype, which targets the moral failings of poor whites, the chav stereotype is aimed at working-class aspiration. It derides low-income youth who wear branded sportswear, designer labels, and gold jewelry, an attitude that is as much about keeping people in their place as it is about taste. (Morales, 2014: 85) 20  Backronym, actually, since the phrase has been constructed ad hoc so its initials appear to be the acronym of the target word.

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The acronym is also mentioned in the Urban Dictionary’s current entry 53 for ‘chav.’ The Council House And Vermin version features in a song with a clear black feel about it (Sect. 4.3 for a discussion of the chav as a ‘contaminated’ white), ‘Come Out the NG,’ in addition to being mentioned in forums and humorous websites: I know it ain’t too easy out here my brother trust me (trust) I know it ain’t too easy out here my brother trust its peak (peak) Nowadays when I run round the town I feel so lucky (yeah) Cause I realised the road we take in life is not concrete (nah) Them a say them young boy run round the road are ruffians (yeah) Them a say them young boy come out the council house and vermin (yeah) Yo I seen some shit as a young boy out in Nottingham (yeah) Yo I seen some shit as a young boy and it was concerning (Come Out the NG 2016)

The Southern Daily Echo also suggests “Council House Associated Vermin or the more succinct Cheap and Vulgar.” (Thompson, 2007: n.p.) Another folk etymology emerging from ‘chav’ is in the blend Cheltenham average,21 which has been attributed to the pupils of Cheltenham Ladies College, who supposedly crafted it as a term of abuse for “the less-eligible young men of the town”: Rob Garnham, the mayor of Cheltenham, was less than pleased with the suggestion, pointing out that: “I am a Cheltenham Mr Average and I’m definitely not scum.” He went on: “As someone who speaks for the people of the town, I’m sure we feel insulted by the term. People should come and see Cheltenham and realise what it’s really like.” (Tweedie, 2004: n.p.)

The information is ‘backed’ in a 2008 Times issue (“It [Cheltenham] is reputed to have given the world the word ‘chav,’” de Bruxelles, 2008: n.p.), and is used by London-based painter and street artist (Reid, 2008) Inkie as the title to one of his works, with a clearly positive frame in this case:  Writing in 2008, Howse (n.p.) still has to point out that “Chav does not derive from ‘Cheltenham Average’ or ‘Council House and Violent.’ It comes from a Romany word for ‘boy.’” 21

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Painted as part of Cheltenham Paint Festival 2018, this iconic image represents the CHAV or Cheltenham Average painted in a religious style to accentuate their beauty with a classic William Morris background (Inkie, 2021: n.p.).

The etymological rationalization also features as a piece of advice in a 2015 Cosmopolitan article (“The word chav came from Cheltenham. It originally meant Cheltenham average, but don’t call us it. Ever.” Baxter-­ Wright, 2015: n.p.). Reanalysis of this kind through folk-etymology is a good example of how we as individuals try to impute sense compositionality to stereotypes which are precisely that: mere stereotypes.

3.2 Vocabularies (Lexical Items and Phraseological Extensions) The Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins (Cresswell 2010[2002]: 81) explains that the term ‘chav’ was “popularized by websites and the tabloid press, [...] caught on quickly, and soon women and older people too were being described as chavs. New words appear all the time, but chav caused great excitement to word scholars when it came on the scene.” This impression of ‘excitement’ on the part of academia may be due to the greater availability of research popularization in the media in recent years. Indeed, public engagement (interactions between experts and nonexperts) has been brought to attention as the locus where the university’s task of taking into account the public’s concerns and aspirations, developing and improving services provided in order to empower them should be performed.22 This, in turn, has fed a growing interest among nonacademics for semi-­ academic accounts of social phenomena, with a  A 2012 Green Paper warns that “[t]he time when Universities could assume that they will be funded, no questions asked, is long past” (E3M, 2012: 5). The document explains that ‘Third Mission’ is simply a shorthand for trying to evaluate how universities respond to societal needs, other than academic scholarship and mainstream teaching. To help academics identify possible actions, the Green Paper suggests trying to answer such questions as “How is the university’s expertise used to extend the education of non-traditional learner groups? [...] How does the University exploit, in the service of society, the fact that it constitutes a large group (typically thousands) of fit, creative and intelligent people in one academic community, who could contribute in the local community, but also nationally and internationally, to problem solving and development on a massive scale” (E3M, 2012: 9). Also see Di Martino 2019b. 22

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gradual increase in popular metadiscourses on issues of particular interest in the public sphere (a form of mediatization as the ‘staging’ of metalinguistic discourse on debatable topics). In the specific case at hand, Crystal’s live webcast on ‘chav’ (BBC, 2006), Hayward’s interview for ABC News (Bambuck, 2009), and Bennett’s podcast “Everything you ever wanted to know about the word ‘chav’” (University of Birmingham, 2012) are just a few examples. However, the “excitement to word scholars” also comes from the consideration that ‘chav’ appeared to catch on quickly: Since 2003 we have seen the emergence of an entire slang vocabulary around chav, which includes terms such as chavellers cheques (giro and benefit payments), chavtastic, chaving a laugh (laughter at chavs), chavbaiting, chavalanche (large group of chavs), chavalier (chav car), chavspeak, chavspotting.23 (Tyler, 2008: 21)

Dent writes about ‘chav’ as “a century-old word, returned with such a force that compounds and derivatives [...] emerged at lightning speed” (Dent, 2007: 144–145), “a near-perfect example of the speed at which today’s new words can spread” (Dent, 2007: 153). Indeed, the term quickly gained wide acceptance and became familiar to many, possibly due to media ‘hammering’ of lengthy descriptions of chavs which helped to visualize the ‘category’ of individuals in question, all the while memorizing the word.24 Renouf, Dent and Tyler all mention “incorporation into the name of the website, chavscum.co.uk., a site pandering to, while ridiculing, the eponymous membership” (Renouf, 2007: 12–13) as one of the events that accelerated recognition of the term. Frequency was then accompanied by productivity. Indeed, in addition to the lexical  About chav-spotting, see Bennett, 2013.  Lipka (following Leisi, 1975) refers to the reifying effect of words as ‘hypostatization.’ He describes it as the phenomenon by which “the existence of a word implies the existence of a single entity denoted by it” (Lipka, 1992[1990]: 16). What also applies in our specific case is that “nouns tend to profile conceptual content as ‘things,’ as object-like entities with neat boundaries in space and a stable existence across time. This property of nouns makes them particularly good candidates for reification.” (Schmid, 2008: 6) I am containing this concept in the little space of a footnote due to its belonging to the field of lexicology (which is precisely why it popped up in this section of the book). I am going to use other notions to account for the same phenomenon which are more familiar within the field of linguistic anthropology in Chap. 4. 23 24

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enrichment offered by the range of non-affixational non-morpheme-­ based productivity observed at the end of Sect. 3.1 (blends and backronyms), ‘chav’ has also displayed good productivity through affixation. In the data Renouf gathered in her analysis of British media, the fertility of ‘chav’ appears to be the result of a double trend: on the one hand, the word appears to refer “to the British social sub-class of poor youth,” on the other, it is also used in connection with the Royal Family and other wealthy and aristocratic members of British society, “with the clear implication that the lives of the privileged are similarly tasteless and undistinguished.” Renouf mentions ‘chavocracy,’ ‘chavistocrat’ and ‘chavocrat’ as examples of the latter trend. I am going to provide one instance for each of these inflections of ‘chav’ with a little more context than that offered by Renouf, not only to show that the semantic play on words emerging from the substitution of one meaningful segment by its antonym is intended to refer respectively “to Charles and Camilla, to rich people and to Prince Harry” (Renouf, 2007: 77) but also to help the reader appreciate some of the types of wordplay produced around ‘chav.’ These specific examples are a form of non-humorous wordplay contained within serious argumentation: a form of “reactive neologizing” and “political posturing via neologisms” (Renouf, 2014: 184). They are interesting first of all because they tell us how widespread ‘chav’ is: wordplay is situated at the level of recognition, and the authors of the articles from which the extracts are taken are assuming their readers know both the meaning of ‘chav’ and are ready to elaborate on it following their argumentations. The function of the wordplay is to bring into the open a ‘surprising’ conceptual association foregrounded by the argumentation. In short, these may be seen as possible ludic innovations, “based on establishing new semantic/conceptual relations” (Winter-Froemel, 2016: 39): “the evolving neologism does not juxtapose two meanings, but creates a new one” (Schole, 2018: 203) around which readers are invited to converge to pose resistance. The authors feel the need to account for (or echo) a perceived change (cf. Winter-Froemel, 2018: 230) in the essence and status of the British monarchy and resort to these neologisms to name this change: A bickering chavocracy that marries in register offices should suit advocates of a bicycling monarchy. But suddenly, a finger buffet, with all that subtext

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of pastel Crimplene and gift-wrapped toasters, strikes the media as too naff for words. (Riddell, 2005a: n.p.) I imagine it will be some time before the tulip-shaped skirt becomes de rigueur at Pangaea or wherever it is soap stars and chavistocrats hang out these days. It’s a great image: Girls Aloud falling out of a limo in bubble coats, Alice bands and opaque tights. Aah, a girl can dream. (The Guardian, 2005: n.p.) [T]he Today programme inquisitor did not explore Harry’s line on why African children are so special (‘Give them a tennis ball and they think it’s Christmas’) or seize on his hint that British children are less sweet. What tribe, exactly, was he thinking of? The undereducated, Asbo-breaching loser who ends up on remand in Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution devising six ways to kill himself with a bedsheet, or the polo-playing chavocrat who wears Nazi gear to a party and gets into a drunken brawl outside a nightclub? (Riddell, 2005b: n.p.)

The history books of the future will tell us if these are just ephemeral phenomena. Dent (2004) had already listed ‘chavistocrat.’ Greig also used the neologism in a Tatler piece on the royal family referring to “Mike Tindall’s bovine rugby haircut, Zara’s tacky bikini-marked back” as signs that the British monarchy is in danger of losing its aura: “One wonders if the royals are in danger of becoming more chavistocrat than aristocrat” (mentioned in McNamara, 2018: 32). Another example of linguistic creativity applied to ‘chav’ listed in Dent (2004) is ‘Chavsville,’ used as an epithet for the town of Romford. The town of Bridgend would later steal the spotlight, due to inclusion, alongside a handful of other places, in Chavtowns.co.uk, a website featuring reviews of UK towns “ruled by Chavs”: Welcome to Chavsville BRIDGEND has been labelled a haven for teen mums, benefit cheats and drug users on a controversial website [...] Brackla Street Centre, home to the Gazette newsroom, is “a particular haunt where teenage mothers with bad skin blow smoke merrily over their malnourished offspring, and

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where uber-chav grandmothers in their late 30s exchange tales of pub glassings at high volume, while their Elizabeth Duke bling pointlessly rattles.” (WalesOnline, 2005: n.p.)

Yet another example of the lexical productivity performed by ‘chav’ is ‘chaviot’: it apparently denotes a “souped-up car” (Evans, 2005: 37), probably to imply the “annoying modifications that chavs do to their cars” (stereo, under-car lighting, gigantic exhaust, name tags, oversized rims, tinted windows; also ‘Chaverati’ in The Daily Mirror, 2008): The chav[...]’s set out to make you notice him with a fully modified, hairy nutsack of a car, testosterone on four wheels, a phallus capable of doing 90 on a 30 road. He achieves this through a careful mix of shouting, hideous girlfriends, glow-in-the-dark pomp, the glory of the subwoofer and all other manner of twisted genius attention-seeking protuberances. (Jones, 2009: n.p.)

Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable (Ayto & Crofton, 2011 [2009]) explains that ‘chav’ is unisex, but a female of the species may also be referred to as a ‘chavette.’ Indeed, this is another inflection on Renouf ’s list, and one of the few instances of the suffix ‘-ette’ that “look likely to survive” alongside bachelorette, hackette, and ladette according to Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Butterfield,  2015: 276). Whereas ‘chav’ may have both positive connotations as a term reappropriated in some forms of nonconformist “Chav pride” culture25 (Tyler, 2008; Young, 2012; cf. Sect. 5.4) and neutral to positive connotations when denoting a clothing-, make-up-, and life-style, a stage of life, or a social type, ‘chavette’ always appears to be loaded with pejorative undertones thanks to its double stigmatizing imprinting.26

 Writing in 2007, Dent already believed that the term was losing “some of its pejorative edge.” (Dent, 2007: 154) 26  There are synergies of interrelations (intersectionality, Crenshaw, 1989) in ‘chavette’: class and gender are co-constitutive in patterns of oppression and marginalization. Social categories are mutually constitutive in the (re)production of power imbalances: “meaning is constructed through the entanglement of different categories as specific sites of experience and positioning” (Maegaard et al., 2019: 2). See also Lennoxa et al., 2018. 25

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Research on the slang used by students at the University of Leicester over a seven-year span (2004–2011) includes ‘chavvy’ and ‘chavalicious,’ and both adjectives are reported to mean “like or characteristic of a chav” (Coleman, 2014: 52). ‘Chavalicious,’ in particular, appears to be one of the many coinages with the suffix ‘-li(s)cious generated by the trend started by Wayne World’s ‘babelicious’ (the term being used, in the film, to describe top model Claudia Schiffer): ‘sacrilicious’ (The Sims) and ‘substantialicious’ (Mars bars advert) (Dent, 2007: 86–87), for example. Considering the precedent, it would have been predictable that, unlike the formally similar neologisms listed above (‘chavocracy,’ ‘chavistocrat’ and ‘chavocrat’), ‘chavalicious’ is perceived as a form of wordplay in the broadest sense. As in the previous examples of wordplay, in ‘chavalicious’ a specific element of an existing form is substituted on the sublexical level; however, in this case the intention would not seem to be that of establishing new conceptual relations: on the face of it, the neologism— an adjective—“reveals a (near-to-)equivalent meaning and juxtaposes the new and original form” (Schole, 2018: 203). The ludic function would appear to be primary: the receiver is confronted “with an expected meaning in the disguise of an unexpected form,” (Ibidem), the novelty being in the stimulation, through the wordplay, of a sensory pathway not directly connected to the perception of the object in question, in a sort of synesthesia that would imply the production (or enjoyment, depending on the side one focuses on) of considerable pleasure. The following exchange from The Student Room, the UK’s largest online student community, shows how ‘chavvy,’ ‘chavalicious,’ and also ‘chavish’ could pop up in a conversation amongst young people and facilitate complicity in the early twenty-first century, but also how it might be exploited to invite in-group convergence to a tongue-in-cheek attitude— thus hijacking the ludic function one would have expected ‘chavalicious’ to perform—through ‘cannibalization’: the student who starts the conversation appears to assume that The Student Room users disapprove of ‘chav’ and are able to tell what can be rated as ‘chavish’: Johnni Is this jacket a bit chavish? [link deleted] These retro windbreakers are generally indie-esq but recently become very popular with my local chav

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community especially wearing the Superdry version. [link deleted]  I’m being picky i know and i should’nt care but damn myself dh00001 i dont see anything wrong with it seabird i love them on lads! i’d say get it. as long as the rest of your outfit isn’t chavalicious, you’re not going to look chavvy. (The Student Room, 2008: n.p.)

‘Chavalicious’ does not imply, in this context, the production of pleasure on the part of the object in question (a jacket). The synesthetic neologism seems to have the function of implying a criticism, on the part of the user, of the habit of overindulging in clothes enjoyment: in short, it appears to be a critique of dressing up for pleasure and a tribute to dressing down. The critique widens to other aspects of life in the following extract (a guide for people experiencing time off work): “An ecology centre in Ibiza” I hear you exclaim. “Ibiza—the land of chunder, booze and all things chavalicious?” I hear you question. And rightly so—despite the image it may have, Ibiza island is simply astounding and the eco-centre is set in a stunning location in a beautiful valley and can really help you unwind and ease up any tension, whilst meeting some truly fantastic people and learning all about how a more sustainable way of living is within reach of every one of us. (Arena, 2011)

It is also present, if not overt, in this other extract (from a crime novel),27 where ‘Chavalicious’ is the name of a club: even when the word would appear to be used positively, the surrounding context functions as a contradicting counterpart, framing it differently: ‘Does it have to be this Saturday? Only I did say I’d do a pamper night with the girls from Chavalicious.’ ‘No, it really has to be this Saturday because that’s when he’s...’ It was better to leave the fighting as a nice surprise for when he got there.  This is the only partly positive context I could find on checking the first 100 results of a Google search of ‘chavalicious’ when I became aware that Chav check videos were going viral among TikTok users worldwide in the Summer of 2020. The word would still appear to carry negative connotations at the time of writing. 27

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‘He’s what?’ ‘Er, when he’s going to be there’ ‘Right.’ I knew she didn’t believe me but the way I saw it, I was doing her a favour. Those Chavalicious girls were all right but they were a bit dull. A night down the cage fighting contest was much better option. (Stone, 2020: 147)

Incidentally (but still very much in tune with the praise of understatement connected to the term), ‘chavalicious’ acquired a reputation of its own after XFactor judge Tulisa was left feeling embarrassed at the suggestion it might be a possible name for her new fragrance (McCormack, 2013). Both Dent (2004) and Renouf (2007) list ‘chavtastic’: like ‘chavalicious,’ it is a neologism produced via creative suffixation. ‘Chav’ is added here to an allomorph of the suffix -ic from ‘fantastic.’ It is a form of creativity that does not detract from the word’s recognizability, all the while suggesting the playful character of the target word: an “intentional and formally ingenious way of associating the semantics of two or more words in a new morphological object.” (Renner, 2015: 119). When analyzed in context, though, the function I could still detect recently (checking the first 100 results of a google search of ‘chavtastic’ I performed in the Summer of 2020 to get an idea of its use in context) appears to be one of criticism:28 MICHELLE Mone has been branded “chavtastic” after showing off the Christmas decorations in the grounds of her mansion.29 The 46-year-old posted a short clip showing off at least 22 trees adorned with bright fairy lights outside her opulent Isle of Man mansion. The entrepreneur also installed a reindeer light show above her and billionaire partner Doug Barrowman’s front door. (Garton, 2017: n.p.)

 Dent (2004: 143) had emphasized, instead, the light-hearted aspect of the ‘chav’ terminology (focusing on ‘chavspotting’ and ‘chavtastic’). Also, see Little (2011: 50) on this. 29  Edensor and Millington illustrate how Christmas displays outside of a house evoke conflicting cultural values and have become “a site for class conflict mobilized around contesting ideas about space, time, community, aesthetics and festivity, highlighting how the symbolic economy of class conflict moves across popular culture.” (Edensor & Millington 2009: 103) 28

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In addition to ‘chav’-based derivations through combination with less conventional affixes and affix-like elements such as the ones we have just seen, including The Telegraph’s warning “to get ready for a verbal chavalanche” (i.e., “an onslaught of Burberry-wearing Smirnoff Ice drinkers descend on one’s local”) (Pook, 2004: n.p.), Renouf notices a striking predominance of ‘chav’ compounding in her data with colloquial or youth terms like ‘spotter,’ ‘spotting,’ ‘fave’ (‘favorite’), ‘rap’ and ‘central’; and stresses the creativity of the term also in pun-making, bringing attention to “chavs and chav-nots”,30 which “appears to have caught on particularly, by analogy with ‘the haves and the have-nots,’ meaning ‘the rich and the poor.’” (Renouf, 2007: 14). In the study performed on the slang used by students at the University of Leicester, Coleman (2014: 52) also found the phrasal verb “to chav it up.” Several instances of its use appear to be connected with Jeremy Kyle, known for hosting The Jeremy Kyle Show from 2005 to 2019. The show featured guests attempting to resolve issues with people in their lives, often related to relationships, sex and drugs, and Kyle has often been the object of parody for this reason (The Student Room, 2010). This has also earned him the reputation of “King of Chavs” (Lassut, 2013). The band I, Ludicrous devoted their song “Chav it Up” to him in 2008. It is interesting to notice that ‘chav’ has also stimulated forms of term reappropriation linked to its Romany origins: in 2008, On Road Media was commissioned to set up a network for young Gypsies and Travellers, called Savvy Chavvy: this was meant to be, also in the name, “an example of how marginalized groups can be empowered to find their voice on the web and challenge stereotypes” (On Road, 2008: n.p.), with The Guardian praising Savvy Chavvy for reclaiming ‘chav’ from its use as a term of abuse (Courtney et al., 2009: 123). In the community forum’s mission statement we read, “Savvy Chavvy gives young members of an often misrepresented and marginalized community the opportunity to take control of how they are portrayed.” (Savvy Chavvy, 2009: n.p.) It is not clear, though, if this commendable initiative is still active or has migrated to other spaces: I could not trace any activity after 2015.  See Sect. 4.2 for more context. Also, Lockyer, 2010a, b, c.

30

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Following these timid attempts at reappropriation, ‘chav’ virtually disappeared from mass media usage, with the phenomenon of chav-­ bashing—remarkably prominent in tabloid newspapers and TV shows in the first decade of the twenty-first century (cf. Sect. 4.1)—radically condemned or self-banned, during the second decade, particularly the last five years. The release of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (Jones, 2020[2011])—a book-length investigation into the political and economic reasons which led to the alienation of the working-class in contemporary Britain, offers itself as a mirror of the forces stirring towards this major change. Authored by Guardian columnist Owen Jones, the book—which coincidentally republished in September 2020 in the wake of the viral phenomenon of Chav check videos—received wide attention not just in domestic but also in international media: “How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?” he [Owen Jones] asks. He writes, “It seems as though working-class people are the one group in society that you can say practically anything about.” Here he ignores fat people, but the two groups in the public mind often overlap. How this came to pass in Britain, which has long revered its stalwart working class, is Mr. Jones’s primordial subject in “Chavs.” The book poses this principled question: How did the salt of the earth come to be viewed as the scum of the earth? (Garner, 2011: n.p.)

Jones’s book came to represent a useful signpost that pointed to watershed awareness: its widely recognized presence on the national and international scenes took on the function of alerting people at large to where they were standing ideologically and politically when choosing to use the term ‘chav’.31 The complex reasons from which this awareness  See Tyler’s argument that “[t]he positive critical reception to Jones’s book, and his subsequent media celebrity, has worked to stabilize the meaning of the term chav on the liberal left as a pejorative name for an indigenous white working class.” (Tyler, 2013: 170) See also the considerations made by the Fabian Society: 31

You cannot consider yourself of the left and use the word. It is sneering and patronising and–perhaps most dangerous–it is distancing, turning the ‘chav’ into the kind of feral beast that exists only in tabloid headlines. The middle classes have always used language to distinguish themselves from those a few rungs below them on the ladder–we all know their old serviette/napkin, lounge/living room, settee/sofa tricks. But this is something new. This is middle class hatred of the white working class, pure and simple. (Fabian Society, 2012: n.p.)

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emerged are beyond the scope of this book, so I will only mention and very shortly explore them in passing here: both Brexit, with the rightwing press attempting to appeal to those lower class voters who were disappointed with the failure of “the Labour Party, to speak for regional or working-­class interests” (Telford & Wistow, 2020: 553; also Winlow et  al., 2015), and, more importantly, the rise of the left produced a major sea-change in public attitude to the precariat both in the UK and internationally, with an increasing awareness of classism, and moves in a number of countries to legislate against discrimination on the grounds of “social origin.” Combined with the growing awareness of the rise of a true young precariat class (Wawrzyniec, 2011; Standing, 2016), this changing social climate also invited a fresh attitude to the representation of poverty, which—it was clear to many—seriously risked increasing the vulnerability of the defenseless: the media’s different response to and portrayal of the individuals involved in two disappearance cases that occupied the thoughts and conversations of many in 2007–2008, provided powerful evidence for this need for change. In the two weeks that followed Madeleine McCann’s disappearance from an upmarket holiday resort in Portugal in 2007, a public appeal from The Sun raised over £2.6 million in reward money for her return, whereas a similar appeal only raised £25,500 when Shannon Matthews disappeared from a council estate in northern England in 2008 (Greenslade, 2008); the difference was considerable also in the scale (Moreton, 2008) and nature of media coverage: Whereas the middle class McCann family elicited widespread sympathy from journalists and public figures, the working-class Mathews family faced public censure, moral indignation and ridicule (see Mooney & Neal, 2009-2010). Imagined as representative of a wider social stratum, a curious episode involving one troubled family became emblematic of what the journalist Carole Malone (in Jones, 2020[2011]: 22), called ‘a sub (human) class that now exists in the murkiest, darkest corners of this country [sic].’ (Law & Mooney, 2012: 115)

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The Matthews story offered itself as further evidence of the risks lurking behind “the hyperbolic generalisation” employed by some journalists and public figures when dealing with such cases as these: generalizations were “used by Tony Blair (in a speech to the Wellingborough Labour Party in 1993) and Cameron himself to make sweeping statements about the ‘moral chaos’ (Blair) of our ‘broken society’ (Cameron, 2008)” (Cain, 2013: n.p.). The “facialisation of poverty” thus enacted was perceived by some to perform the function of an attention diversion strategy which distracted from systemic injustice (Cain, 2013; also Nunn & Biressi, 2010; Coleman et al., 2012) while ultimately aiming to support the government’s prime target of austerity after the global financial crisis of 2008 by shifting responsibility for solving it to the general public. Such hidden agenda would appear to be pursued also through such TV programs as Benefits Street—a controversial (cf. Collier, 2014) documentary series broadcast by Channel 4 in 2014 and 2015 which followed the lives of people living on James Turner Street (Winson Green, Birmingham), an area reported to have 90% of benefit-claimers amongs its residents—and On Benefits and Proud (Channel 5, 2013). Applying Bourdieu’s reflections on television, particularly TV journalism (1999[1996]) to “poverty porn” (cf. Lissner, 1981) television at large, Jensen, for example, contended that this genre appeared to embed new forms of ‘commonsense’ about welfare, worklessness and social security in ways that made them appear as doxa (Bourdieu, 1977[1972]), i.e. self-evident truths, which required no interpretation. Consent, the scholar argued, was attained also through “the apparently ‘spontaneous’ (in fact highly editorialized) media debate [...]: particularly via ‘the skiver,’ a figure of social disgust [re-­ animating] ideas of welfare dependency and deception.” (Jensen, 2014: 1) Allen et al. showed how these shows were in turn mobilised by some politicians as evidence of a society plagued by welfare dependency: In January 2014, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, invoked Benefits Street as ‘evidence’ to justify punitive austerity driven benefits cuts and workfare reforms. Benefits Street, he argued, revealed ‘the hidden reality’ of the lives of people ‘trapped’ on state-­benefits. (Allen et al., 2014: n.p.).

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Moreover, recalling Hall et al. (2015[1978], as quoted in Dowling & Harvie, 2014) and Harvey (2014), they later explained that such a portrayal of austerity as a moral crisis may be understood as a form of “‘ideological displacement’ that defends the logic of neoliberal capitalism by scapegoating vulnerable groups.” (2015: 909). In this climate, chav-bashing finally became largely socially unacceptable, though it continued to occur, to an extent, in social media. Meanwhile, changing attitudes to poverty both emerged in and took shape with major artistic works such as the 2016 movie directed by Ken Loach “I, Daniel Blake,” a harsh reflection on the British welfare system (Gibbs & Lehtonen, 2019; Di Martino, 2019a: 94), as well as “a celebration of the decency and kinship of (extra)ordinary people who look out for each other when the state abandons its duty of care.” (Kermode, 2016: n.p.) A further “protest against the dehumanization of poor and workingclass communities” (Siddiqi, 2020: n.p.) was acted by P.D. Hunter’s Chav Solidarity (2020[2018]), a self-published sobering account of the author’s childhood spent stealing food from bins. Indeed, while foregrounding the realities of growing up in extreme neglect and deprivation, the book is also “an appeal to extend our arms towards each other.” (Siddiqi, 2020: n.p.) Hunter, self-describing as “an ageing chav, whose first twenty five years depended upon the informal economy, including sex work, robbing, and dealing” (Hunter, 2020[2018]: 131), suffered and, in turn, inflicted violence before reaching compassion, being enlightened—while forcibly hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital—by the work of two other inmates of the past and less recent present: Antonio Gramsci and Angela Davis. Following his release, he gradually became involved in left wing activism, “particularly anarchist movements, in the Nottingham area— which included not only visible frontline grassroots action, but also supporting the emotional and psychological wellbeing of those arrested during the 2011 riots in England as well as offering sympathy and comfort to their families through hearing their stories and sharing his own.” (Campbell, 2020: n.p.) Far from embracing the middle-­class utopia which is the happy ending sought by many trauma memoirs, Hunter questions it, “exposing the toxicities on which it is built, the marginalized upon whose labour it stands. His interest lies with the pain and isolation of the overlooked, and with a system that benefits from their

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marginalization.” (Siddiqi, 2020: n.p.) In this, he seems to be applying Gramsci’s consideration that real change can only happen through countering the dominant cultural hegemony,32 i.e., the process through which those at the bottom of society consent to their own ‘domination’ by those at the top, accepting their ideas, theories and values as ‘normal’. Indeed, through the articulation of a ‘spontaneous’ philosophy of chav solidarity, Hunter would appear to be pursuing a cultural ‘war of position’: “resistance to domination with culture” (Gramsci, 2007[1948–1951]: 168) to build a more inclusive society. Paraphrasing Kapoor 2015’s reflections on Queer and the Third World, Hunter would appear to be attempting to ‘queer’ traditional discourses of ‘chav’ as deviantly strange—perverse, abnormal—not through disowning and purging such queerness (i.e., denying it) but by embracing queerness as the site of destabilizing politics. It appears that what was generally considered acceptable in the first decade of the twenty-first century was no longer acceptable in the second one, particularly the last five years of the 2010s. With chav-bashing largely socially unacceptable, there was now a need to beware of using ‘chav’ to refer to those previously identified through the label. Hence what would appear to be an increasing use of the term to reproduce a similar relation of difference—social grouping based on different personal choices (cf. the concept of “class fraction” in Bourdieu, 1996[1979])—within the middle/upper classes themselves (cf. the concept of fractal recursivity in Sect. 4.2). Indeed, evidence that ‘chav’ is still productive, and therefore that the issue is still active in people’s minds, is the Tory party’s renaming of Sajid Javid, member of Parliament and one of the first British Asians to hold one of the Great Offices of State (he was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2019 to 2020), as “Sajid Chavid”: Polly Toynbee @pollytoynbee · 4 apr 2019 ‘Sajid Chavid’ – that’s the disgusting Tory ‘chav’ insult from other leadership bidders, says Spectator, as he’s “never seen an opera.” Unspeakable party. (Toynbee, 2019: n.p.)

 A word most likely derived from Ancient Greek ἡγεμονία, whose root is ἡγεμών, meaning “leader, ruler, often in the sense of a state other than his own” (Williams, 1985[1976]: 144). 32

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Here the light-heartedness of the wordplay is increased through formal complexity: it is a case of medial overlapping: the left source word has been back-clipped and the right one fore-clipped, with segment overlapping at the inner edges. ‘Chavid’ also deliberately mixes two similar-­ sounding words. In this blend the prosodic structure of the two words (which is the same) is retained: the syllabic length and the stress pattern are preserved, so the wordplay is performed at many different levels. Like the first examples presented in the opening part of this section, this is a case of political posturing via neologizing, and again ‘chav’ is used to criticize and offend: the derogatory potential of the term still appears to be well represented in its inflections. Hopefully, this section has provided the reader with a deep immersion into the significance of the ‘chav’ phenomenon language-wise. As already appears in part, the term and its inflections have been applied to objects, events, and individuals of different social standing. The common variable is its derogatory quality, except for recent reappropriation in “chav pride” culture33 and in descriptions of a clothing-, make-up- and life-style, of a stage of life and of a social type in a non-judgmental, sometimes appreciative way.

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mrtoad. (2008, December 9). ThaiVisa. https://forum.thaivisa.com/ topic/221370-­tv-­usernames/page/7/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Nayak, A. (2003). Race, Place and Globalization. Youth Cultures in a Changing World. Berg. Nayak, A. (2006). Displaced Masculinities: Chavs, Youth and Class in the Post-­ Industrial City. Sociology, 40(5), 813–831. Nunn, H., & Biressi, A. (2010). Shameless?: Picturing the “Underclass” after Thatcherism. In Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture (pp. 137–157). Palgrave Macmillan. On Road. (2008). https://www.onroadmedia.org.uk/work/savvy-­chavvy-­a-­ social-­network-­for-­young-­gypsies-­and-­travellers-­in-­the-­uk/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Oxford English Dictionary. (2020). Chav. Oxford University Press. Oxford Languages. (2021). About Word of the Year. https://languages.oup.com/ word-­o f-­t he-­y ear-­f aqs/#:~:text=What%20is%20Oxford%20Word%20 of%20the%20Year%3F&text=Every%20year%2C%20candidates%20 for%20Word,a%20word%20of%20cultural%20significance. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Partridge, E. (1984). A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Routledge. Pinder, M. (2020, August 7). Newcastle’s West End: Elswick to Newburn – In Pictures. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/ aug/07/newcastle-­west-­end-­elswick-­to-­newburn-­in-­pictures. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Plag, I. (2018[2003]). Word-Formation in English. Cambridge University Press. Pook, S. (2004, December 16). My Word, Get Ready for a Verbal Chavalanche. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1479133/My-­ word-­get-­ready-­for-­a-­verbal-­chavalanche.html. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Ray, L. (2014). Shame and the City – ‘Looting’, Emotions and Social Structure. The Sociological Review, 62(1), 117–136. Reid, J. (2008, February 6). Banksy Hits Out at Street Art Auctions. Sky News. https://web.archive.org/web/20111117022803/http://news.sky.com/home/ business/article/1304043. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Renner, V. (2015). Lexical Blending as Wordplay. In A. Zirker & E. Winter-­ Froemel (Eds.), Wordplay and Metalinguistic / Metadiscursive Reflection: Authors, Contexts, Techniques, and Meta-Reflection (pp. 119–133). De Gruyter.

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Renouf, A. J. (2003). WebCorp: Providing a Renewable Data Source for Corpus Linguists. In S.  Granger & S.  Petch-Tyson (Eds.), Extending the Scope of Corpus-based Research: New Applications, New Challenges (pp. 39–58). Rodopi. Renouf, A.  J. (2005). Phrasal Creativity Viewed from an IT Perspective. In A. Hamm (Ed.), RANAM (Recherches Anglaises et Nord Americaines): Language Chunks and Linguistic Units (Vol. 38, pp. 113–122). Université Marc Bloch. Renouf, A. (2007). Tracing Lexical Productivity and Creativity in the British Media: ‘The Chavs and the Chav-Nots’. In J. Munat (Ed.), Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts (pp. 61–92). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Renouf, A. (2009). Corpus Linguistics beyond Google: The WebCorp Linguist’s Search Engine. In R. Siemens & G. Shawver (Eds.), New Paths for Computing Humanists. Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 1, no. 1. Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI). https:// digitalstudies.org/articles/10.16995/dscn.138/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Renouf, A. (2014). Neology: From Word to Register. In L.  Vandelanotte, K.  Davidse, C.  Gentens, & D.  Kimps (Eds.), Recent Advances in Corpus Linguistics. Developing and Exploiting Corpora (Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics 78) (pp. 173–206). Rodopi. Renouf, A., & Baayen, H. (1996). Chronicling the Times: Productive Lexical Innovations in an English Newspaper. Language, 72(1), 69–96. Renouf, A., & Kehoe, A. (Eds.). (2006). The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics (Language and Computers, 55). Rodopi. Renouf, A.  J., Kehoe, A., & Mezquiriz, D. (2003). The Accidental Corpus: Issues Involved in Extracting Linguistic Information from the Web. In K.  Aijmer & B.  Altenberg (Eds.), Proceedings of 21st ICAME Conference, University of Gothenburg, May 22–26 2002 (pp. 404–419). Rodopi. Richardson, C. (2005, January 17). What Brings you Trolling Back, then? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/17/gayrights. comment. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Riddell, M. (2005a, February 27). Let Them Eat Vol-au-Vents. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/feb/27/monarchy.comment. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Riddell, M. (2005b, September 18). Rein in the Windsors. The Observer. https:// www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/sep/18/monarchy.comment. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Savvy Chavvy. (2009). About WSA. https://wsa-­global.org/winner/savvy-­ chavvy/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021.

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4 The Chav

This chapter moves from surface aspects of ‘chav’ as a term to inside aspects of ‘chav’ as a semiotic object, attempting to illustrate how it could emerge, how it came to be recontextualized in diverse figures and events, and how it is still circulating through social space, creating temporary unities among disparate events, and morphing into ever changing objects. The suggestion is that, ultimately, ‘chav’ appears to be just another way of wording ‘difference.’ Section 4.1 explores the emergence of ‘chav’ as an enregistered emblem and reflects on its dissemination through “physical artifacts.” In particular, through mass mediated ones characterological figures have surfaced. Wide and diversified uptake of both artifacts and figures has followed through each individual’s personal metasemiotic work. Section 4.2 analyzes some of the events through which ‘chav’ has been progressively recontextualized in diverse figures and events through different acts of performance and diversity of uptakes. Section 4.3 focuses on the intimidating and fearmongering undertones of the semiotic construct, exploring the fil rouge running between the chav, the hoodie, and the black.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Di Martino, Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96818-2_4

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4.1 Emblematic Function of the Sign: Constructing the Chav Several studies have focused on the denigrating nature of most public representations of chavs in the media in the first decade of the twenty-­ first century (among them: McRobbie, 2004; Lawler, 2005; Raisborough & Adams, 2008; Lockyer, 2010a, b, c). In one of the first comprehensive accounts of the phenomenon, Little has summed up its nature and scale: Chavs seem to be disliked by almost all other social groups. As their negative portfolio-in-progress in the national press would suggest they certainly have a very black-and-white relationship to ‘the media’ and other social formations. The popularity of websites such as chavtowns.co.uk and chavscum.co.uk would also stand testament to this, as would the various Facebook.com groups such as “4000 chavs a year die from Tesco cheap booze. Every little helps :).” (Little, 2011: 9–10)

Discussing the phenomenon more recently, the scholar still stresses the complete lack, on the part of chavs (identified as a subculture), of identity capital: “the Chav exists in an anomalous ‘no man’s land.’” (Little, 2020: n.p.) Moving on from the more surface aspects of ‘chav’ (etymologies and vocabularies), which were the focus of Chap. 2, in this chapter I am going to illustrate how these surface elements come to be contextualized and recontextualized in events and circulate through social space, “creating unities among disparate events” (Agha, 2007: 74). In other words, I am going to reflect on the discursive construction of the chav, starting from its attested re-emergence in 2004 (Renouf, 2014). Ever since the advent of mass media, change in society has become a subject of media representation through metalinguistic discourse. An October 2004 Daily Mail article reveals that the complex chav issue was already morphing into one-dimensional caricature: It is enough to make a Chav feel so proud that he might even take up reading. A book by the publishers of the Oxford Dictionary has declared ‘Chav’

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to be the word of the year for 2004. It takes over from ‘sex up,’ which gained currency during the controversy over the Government’s Iraq dossier in 2003. Chav was a word coined to describe the spread of the ill-­mannered underclass––a rival to the American trailer trash. (MailOnline, 2004: n.p.)

A September 2005 New York Times piece shows an awareness of the chav phenomenon within American conscience: Male chavs wear tracksuits and baseball caps; female chavs pull their hair tightly back in buns or ponytails, a style known as a “council house facelift,” from the term for public housing. […] Chav behaviour––outrageous spending sprees, drunken brawls, inappropriate public displays of affection, screaming matches with loved ones in bars, destruction of property, late-night stumbling and/or vomiting––provide celebrity magazines here with much of their material. (Lyall, 2005: n.p.)

Departing from the language-descriptive tradition of representing neologizing as an isolated event, Renouf ’s more recent work, based on a study applying a corpus-based approach to the diachronic study of a very large corpus of mainstream UK news texts, has developed a new perspective on neologizing as a communal and cumulative activity (2014). The scholar contends that specific coinages associated with a major topical event will spread to a broader set of associated uses, thereby causing an incipient kind of ‘register.’ I wonder if in-depth lexical study may identify in emerging expressions like the above “council house facelift” the signs of an incipient ‘register’: “a particular set of words and phrases coming together to characterize (and report on) reality at a certain time, attracting to them particular collocates, synonyms, and semantic and grammatical features” (Renouf, 2014: 175). A ‘register’ emerges due to the fact that “people participating in recurrent communication situations tend to develop similar vocabularies” (Ferguson in Biber & Finegan, 1994: 20). The fragmentary constellation of words mentally collocating for the above’s and other journalists’ writing at around the same time as suitable expressions of ‘chav’ may later appear as a potential register at its birth. Hayward and Yar (2016[2011]) try to account for ‘chav’ becoming a ubiquitous term within popular discourse by illustrating its

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long-­established associations with notions of marginalization and social exclusion. We have seen that the origins of the term may be traced back to the Romany dialect word for small child, ‘chavo,’ or ‘chavi,’ and that more recent usage in colloquial expressions is attested in an area popular with Gypsy travelers since the early nineteenth century, North Kent in the South East of England (Sect. 3.1). More precisely, Hayward and Yar inform us, in 2003, the Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary connected the term to Chatham girls. One wonders how much the picture of Chatham girls emerging in The Observer the previous year weighed on the decision: Meet the Chatham Girls, known as ‘Chavs,’ whose fashion sense and reputation for easy virtue have earned them a global following as worthy successors to their northern neighbours. For years, Essex Girls,1 typified by actress Denise van Outen, held the monopoly on short-skirted peroxide-blonde stereotypes, prompting questions in Parliament and essays by Germaine Greer. But today the costume-jewellery crown has passed to their rivals from Chatham––young women, it is claimed, whose forebears were kicked out of Essex ‘for being too tarty.’ (Rowan, 2002: n.p.)

Also, it is easy to see how the description,2 through frequent reverberations in other media,3 displayed the potential to turn into what Agha calls an “enregistered emblem”: An emblem is a thing to which a social persona is attached. It involves three elements; (1) a perceivable thing, or diacritic; (2) a social persona; (3) someone for whom it is an emblem (i.e., someone who can read that persona from that thing). When a thing/diacritic is widely recognized as an emblem—when many people view it as marking the same social persona— I will say that it is enregistered as an emblem, or is an enregistered emblem.

 “Essex girls” is still a working cultural construct, which continues to be conflated with the chav (Woods, 2014; Carter, 2019). 2  On this point, consider Bennett’s discussion of chav-spotting texts as a way of recontextualising people “as phenomena to be spotted, in ways equivalent to types of vehicle or tree” (Bennett, 2013: 150). 3  The social Other is produced through repeated acts of positioning and evaluation. 1

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‘Enregistered’ just means ‘widely recognized,’ and there are degrees of it. (Agha, 2007: 235, emphasis in the original)

Indeed, the picture mobilized all the elements needed to produce an emblem: the gold hula-hoop-sized earrings, the chunky clown medallions, glittery Moschino shoes, figure-hugging sweatpants and “the tribal cry of ‘Naa wot a’meen?’” in the journalist’s list constituted the diacritic, i.e., the “prosthetic extensions” (Agha, 2011: 33) of the social persona; in other words, the gateway (clothing, accessories and language) to entry into chavness. In a beautiful essay which explores the semiotic processes by which speakers attribute sensuous qualities to speech registers, Gal (2013) illustrates how qualities are, for Peirce, “abstract potentialities” that can be experienced only when embodied in material occurrences. Through the description performed just above (“Meet the Chatham Girls, known as ‘Chavs,’ whose fashion sense and reputation for easy virtue have earned them a global following […] whose forebears were kicked out of Essex ‘for being too tarty’”), Chatham girls become real-time instantiations4 of such abstract qualities shaped by conventions (i.e., by cultural categories) as tawdriness and promiscuity. In short, the description also potentially makes ‘chav’ an enregistered emblem, or trope of the cheap, tawdry slut, of which Chatham girls appear to be embodiments, or ‘qualia’5 (Peirce, 1998[1903]). Same thing in Qualities, projected onto social categories–– Gals informs us, “emerge from and are harnessed to political projects”:

 “Instantiations of types, in real-time encounters, are the tokens of types […]: they occur as part of singular, real-time events. It is only in the realm of […] the humanly experienced, real-time world that signs and objects can be noticed, taken up, and connected by people’s conjectures” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 94, emphasis in the original). 5  “Potentials of quality […], when embodied and experienced as cultural categories, are qualia […]. In the everyday world, it is qualia and tokens that conjectures take up and connect.” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 95, emphasis in the original) On qualia, also see the Special Issue of Anthopological Theory edited by Harkness and Chumley (2013). In particular, Chumley and Harkness contend that “qualia are not just subjective mental experiences [The Encyclopedia of Consciousness defines them as the “‘raw feels’ of sensory experience such as the redness of red, the timbre of an instrument, or the scent of a specific flower,” Haynes, 2009: n.p.] but rather sociocultural events of ‘qualic’—and qualitative—orientation and evaluation” (Chumley & Harkness, 2013: 3). 4

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The justification or explanation for those projects––their ability to motivate action––hinges in part on the taken-for-granted, self-evident experience of contrasting qualities and the values that such qualities signify. (Gal, 2013: 33)

A good number of studies focusing on intersections of gender, sexuality and class researched the chav phenomenon as it manifested itself in the first decade of the twenty-first century, showing how discursive constructions of femininity clearly appeared to vilify working-class women. Among them is Lawler, 2002’s analysis of the broadsheet press coverage of the so-called riots in Paulsgrove, a series of disturbances which occurred on an estate in Portsmouth, where residents took to the streets to protest against suspected paedophiles living in the area. The working-class women, represented for a mainly middle-class readership, Lawler contends, were being constituted as Other to a middle-class norm. Similarly interesting is Cherrington & Breheny, 2005’s conclusion that most research on the issue of teenage pregnancy carried out up to then was based on the assumption that pregnancy in adolescence is undesirable, and that research knowledge can, and should be, applied to reduce rates of teenage pregnancy. Ringrose & Walkerdine, 2008’s research also contributed to re-inforcing evidence that middle-class values were the dominant perspective, with the consideration that television programs such as the Channel 4 health show You Are What you Eat (2004–2007) and BBC 3’s How to Get Your Dream Job and Spendaholics clearly represented successful femininity as bourgeois, and yet normal and attainable. There followed Hamad’s arguments that Channel 4’s reality documentary series The Fairy Jobmother’ appeared to have a bent toward profiling working-­ class women, and to elict fear to spur “jobless single mothers into proactive self-governance, and not to unpack the inherent gender inequalities of welfare reform” (Hamad, 2014: 240). Frampton 2018’s study suggested that reality programmes such as Young Mums’ Mansion (2008), documentaries following teenage mothers-to-be in Underage and Pregnant (2009) and the portrayal of girls feeling broody in Pregnancy: My Big Decision (2009) also impacted on the way people “encounter personal practices and daily experiences” (Frampton, 2018: n.p.). Frampton also provided examples of how teenage pregnancy and motherhood were

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represented differently in three 2005 and 2008 Daily Mail and Guardian articles based on the social class of the girl. Similarly polarized discourse often emerged also in teenagers’ conversations, in class-based forms which highlighted middle-class femininity “as the epitome of localised and everyday neoliberalism,” and pathologized chavs as ‘others’ “in need of regulation, management and governance” (Francombe-Webb & Silk, 2016: 652). Recent studies provide evidence of individuals still constructing their identities on the basis of their distance from ‘chavvy’ individuals (Appleford, 2021; see further below). Some researchers take this to be palpable evidence of the persistent reality of class which clashes against a political rhetoric which “evades any reference to social class—instead opting to focus on choices, behaviours, attitudes and expectations” (Francombe-Webb & Silk, 2016: 652), proving that despite being the “absent presence” (Woodward et al., 2014: 427), class still matters. The radical transformations undergone by the British welfare state over the past half-century (Sloman, 2019) and the emergence and pervasiveness of a ‘neoliberalism’ “capable of colonising territory right across the political spectrum” (Jackson, 2016: 823) appear to be the results of a new philosophy which prioritizes economic rationality as the criterion against which major decisions in all social sectors should be weighed, not only at the collective level of state policymaking but also at the personal level of individual choice-making (Schram & Pavlovskaya, 2018). Stretching the view of a subjectivity susceptible to neoliberal governmentality to include long-term implications in terms of psychological ethics, some researchers emphasize the gradual emergence of an ideological climate “in which persons are not obliged to consider, let alone take responsibility for, the welfare of others” (Sugarman, 2015: 103). From an individual-based perspective, incentives to responsibility and self-regulation appear to be pressing (Hollingworth & Williams, 2009), with subjectivities “defined against those who are other/not-me” (Bradley, 2014: 431) on the basis of response to such incentives. Indeed, the self is expected to construct, maintain, and accrue its value through repeated acts of investment in economic, symbolic, social, and cultural capitals (for the concept of capital and the metaphor of accumulation and investment implied in it, cf. Bourdieu, 1986; Lamont & Lareau, 1988; Aschaffenburg & Maas, 1997; Robson, 2003).

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‘Chav’ is a “value-boundary register,” in the sense that “its social value is articulated in different ways from different social positions” (Agha, 2015: 312) and discursive stancetaking on ‘chav’ performs “interactionally projected acts of self (vs. other) positioning” (Ibid.). So, to brand someone as a ‘chav’ is to produce “contextually relevant socio-political relations of similarity and difference” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004: 382) and to take on a metapragmatic stance that evaluates the individual described as ‘chav’ as deviating from a presumed standard. In other words, ‘chav’ is an enregistered style of conduct (Agha, 2007), and its prosthetic extensions (clothing, accessories, language, etc.) constitute “the most transparent (easily reportable) subset of its stylistic repertoires” (Agha, 2015: 319). Given their transparency, such stylistic repertoires receive disproportionate attention and end up being treated, through metonymic reduction, as the register itself. The style of conduct of another class is “handy in stigmata of downward or upward mobility, organizing behaviors and aspirations within the group” (Agha, 2015: 318); the self- and other-positioning that emerge out of the implied logics are not overtly articulated in The Observer article reported above, but insinuated in subtle descriptions of ‘othering’.6 The article opens with “You can spot them”7 and closes with the opinion of a store detective aged 20, Sarah Rose, who wears “large hooped earrings, a heavy Nefertiti necklace charm, and scrunchee-capped hair,” but does not seem too bothered by the slur: “When you tell people you’re from Chatham, people look at you as if to say, ‘Aha––you’re one of those slags.’ I’m certainly not” (Rowan, 2002, my emphasis). The circular structure enclosing the text reveals how ad hoc juxtapositions and covert lexicalization of othering can be powerful rhetorical strategies. The discursive construction of the chav through physical and behavior description goes hand in hand with construction through moralizing discourse (also le Grand, 2015).

 By using ‘othering’ here, I intend to convey the manner in which social group dichotomies are represented in discourse through binary oppositions which lead to judgments of superiority and inferiority between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ 7  The critical stance is encoded in the linguistic choice of having the pronoun ‘them’ precede the presentation of the individuals it is meant to substitute. Through this discursive practice, chav girls are positioned unequally on the femininity scale and categorized as alien. 6

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Agha (2007) explains that norms of ‘appropriate’ behavior are cultural models with asymmetric social distribution. Variation is taken to be emblematic of differences in social grouping, i.e., it is reflexively reanalyzed as revealing something about a supposed divide whereas, in reality, variation in behavior is emblematic not of differences but of distinctive social practices in which members of many groups may engage. The role of metasemiotic activity in shaping and propagating norms of ‘appropriate’ behavior is not always obvious and yet, in some cases, some of the uptakes and recontextualizations along the communicative chain are visible. We can only hypothesize (as I have tried to do in Sect. 3.1) the small-scale encounters that have shaped the larger scale processes leading to the emergence of ‘chav’ as a semiotic register,8 but studying the social-­ semiotic activities through which ‘chav’ has gradually come to be expressed as well as the processes through which such activities have become valorized may appear to be slightly easier. It is less difficult because a part (however small) of the local social-semiotic activities which have converged in the wider overtly recognizable practice in which many people seem to have engaged in the first decade of the twenty-first century, chav-chastising, is still open to scrutiny, as quotations reported in academic pieces, even if no longer accessible online. For example, Tyler has written extensively (2006, 2008) about the wave of chav hate encouraged by a website launched in 2003, chavscum (cf. Sect. 3.2), whose tagline read “Chav Scum: Britain’s peasant underclass that is taking over our towns and cities.” Writing for The Times, Hume clearly identifies some activity occurring online (“internet discussion forums”) as a practice of chav-chastising. They are ugly, ignorant, violent, thieving scum. Their “culture” is alien to civilisation. Keep them away from decent people. They should be neutered. You can’t say that sort of thing about minorities these days, can you? Not even in anything-goes internet discussion forums? Well apparently, you can, just so long as you are talking about the one group whom it still seems publicly acceptable to hate: the chavs. (Hume, 2004: n.p.)  Agha defines a semiotic register as “a register where language use is not the only type of sign-­ behavior modeled, and utterance not the only modality of action.” (Agha, 2007: 81); register is a cultural model of action which links “repertoires to stereotypic indexical values” (Ibidem). 8

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Looking retrospectively at the year 2004, Gidley and Rooke identify the emergence––in many popular websites and well-selling books (all active or published that year) inspiring chav disgust or hate––of “a veritable chav hate genre” which “spells the return, in spectacular form, of the racializing and moralizing tropes we identified in the Victorian bourgeois” (Gidley & Rooke, 2010: 106). These practices (and many other which have reached us through journalism or research) are obviously a disgrace. However, Agha (2007) also illustrates how register formations (a model of language, style, life etc.) change in the social domain, that is they become known to larger groups of people, also in many other different and often unintentional ways. The dissemination of a semiotic register like ‘chav’ would depend on the wide circulation of messages typifying the language, style, life choices of the specific social domain (the demographic group targeted as ‘chav’). Such messages are borne by a variety of physical artifacts, the mass mediated ones naturally being invested with more permanence despite the real mover towards dissemination ultimately being personal uptake and further recontextualization. In particular, mass media representations contribute to the emergence of characterological figures and expand the social domain of individuals acquainted with register stereotypes, allowing them to respond to such register stereotypes. Again, the response can be varied. We can react to representations in many different ways, aligning or disaligning with them, or even transforming them through our own personal metasemiotic work. Between 2000 and 2007, the sketch comedy series Little Britain achieved huge popularity first as a radio show (2000–2002) and later as a television series (2003–2007). Vicky Pollard, a character played by comedian Matt Lucas who would later come to be perceived as a working-class chav engaging in anti-social behavior, appeared from the first series, probably an heir to Waynetta Slob, a comic character performed by actress Kathy Burke which screened in the 1990s (Tyler, 2008; Parker, 2010). Interviewed on the inspiration behind the character in recent years, Matt Lucas explains that while studying film and television at the University of Bristol, he happened to come across a boy in the course of a documentary social experiment who was unable to articulate an answer to a very easy question (“How are you?”) on video. When he later watched the video

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with David Walliams (Little Britain’s other author and performer), they decided to turn the character into a girl, and people probably identified or felt they knew someone like her (Lucas, 2016). Whenever brought into conversation, Vicky Pollard spreads gossip with no connection to the situation at hand, speaking “in an incomprehensibly fast regional (Midlands) accent” (Tyler, 2008: 27), constantly reassuring her interactants that, though delaying the point, she is “getting there.” She wears a pink-colored Kappa tracksuit, her hair pulled up in a ponytail. Newspapers and magazines featuring articles on the chav phenomenon would sometimes accompany them with a picture of her pushing a pram even after 2011.9 In the series, she gets accused of shoplifting, becomes pregnant and swaps the baby for a CD. Much of the comedy “derives from Lucas’ performance of incomprehensible teenage banter” (Ibidem). In particular, it comes from Vicky Pollard’s humorous responses to legitimate questions from some authority figure (Lockyer, 2010c): Social Worker: Vicky, where is the baby? Vicky Pollard: Swapped it for a Westlife CD. Social Worker: How could you do such a thing? Vicky Pollard: I know, they’re rubbish. (Little Britain, Series 1, Episode 7)

Despite being the target of harsh criticism from those who felt that unkind stereotypes about working-class people were being unnecessarily reproduced and perpetuated (in particular, Jones, 2020[2011]), the show also offered what has been described as “an iconographic embodiment of the stigma associated with the abnormal and marginal” as a reflexive device drawing attention to “the power laden processes of labelling” (Montgomerie, 2010: 96). Indeed, the show did feature the potential to inspire empathy for the characters through narrative and comedic point of view (Montgomerie, 2010; Lockyear, 2010c). However, uptake was  A 2016 Telegraph article on “athleisure wear” still pictures Vicky Pollard in her Kappa tracksuit with six kids of different ethnicities, each in their pram, lining up in front of her (Proud, 2016). 9

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varied and not all of it went in the most desirable direction (Hadfield et al., 2007; Paton, 2010; Ellis-Sloan & Tamplin, 2018). In June 2020 Little Britain was removed from BBC iPlayer, Netflix and BritBox for its use of blackface,10 Lucas and Walliams apologized, but the show may make a comeback soon as Little Brexit, with Vicky Pollard being still sought-for merchandise: While Lucas and Walliams’ idea of light entertainment left a lot to be desired, it is viewers who must shoulder the blame for its success; at its peak, Little Britain was watched by 10 million people. Along with sold-out tours, it did a roaring trade in merchandise––you can still buy Little Britain-themed costumes online, including Vicky Pollard’s cerise tracksuit, complete with bulging belly, and a Desiree costume so disgraceful that just looking at it feels like a hate crime. (Sturges, 2020: n.p.)

Iconographic representations depend on applying a code to a set of signs imbued with meaning. What sparked debate about the representation of chavs in Little Britain was its stereotypical ‘accuracy’: the show was often used “as a shorthand within ‘serious’ debates about the decline of social and educational standards” (cf. Tyler, 2008: 28), and “a YouGov poll at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2006 revealed that most people working in television thought Vicky Pollard was an accurate representation of Britain’s white working class.11” (Jones, 2020[2011]: 127) Focusing on the strictly linguistic side of this “shared code,” and comparing and contrasting Vicky Pollard with other representations of chavs in the media, Bennett has identified failure to communicate as a typical ‘routine’: In Little Britain (BBC 2003–2006), The Catherine Tate Show (BBC, 2004–2007) and The Armstrong and Miller Show (BBC 2007–present), characters identified as chavs persistently fail to communicate effectively  This choice may be seen as part and parcel of the “diversity commitments” philosophy that BBC has explicitly espoused (BBC, 2020). 11  The expression “white working-class” should be used cautiously. Bhambra (2016) clearly articulates the issues with using it and how it often expunges the multi-ethnic nature of the working class: the working class is not white. However, the term “Essex girl” has been historically applied to white women belonging to the working class. 10

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with those around them. In particular, they fail to communicate according to the norms of particular state institutions––schools, courts, the army […] it might be argued that this can be understood as suggesting that those disenfranchised are in effect their own worst enemies, excluding themselves from participation in ‘mainstream’ society by dint of their own communicative incompetence. (Bennett, 2012: 19–20)

Failure to communicate, combined with early-age pregnancy in the case of women, adds up to previously identified aspects (clothing, hair style, accent, promiscuity, etc.) to make up the semiotic register of ‘chav’ as a reflexive model of behavior. Vicky Pollard thus becomes a characterological figure of ‘chav’: an “image of personhood that is performable through a semiotic display or enactment,” as Agha puts it (2007: 177). Public sphere representations do not directly (or worse, deliberately) determine individual views: Contemporary mass media depictions are themselves the products of individuals caught up in larger historical processes; and the ‘uptake’ of such messages by audiences involve processes of evaluative response that permit many degrees of freedom. (Agha, 2007: 202)

Agha (2007) clearly illustrates how interpersonal effects depend on matters of uptake and response. An individual can trope upon a register, but its most widespread social consequences depend on how such up‘takes’ are incorporated into institutions that reproduce it. In our specific case, an unfortunate series of events led to identifying the fictional character of Vicky Pollard with real Vicky Pollards, thereby creating further uptakes and outraged reactions but also additionally mediatizing the chav register: When a 19-year-old woman from Tyneside was this week barred from her own home under the terms of an anti-social behaviour order, the national media (including this newspaper) were as one in turning to a single representative to illuminate the subject: “the real-life Vicky Pollard” […]. It is a tribute to the wit of the creators of Little Britain—which has won a string of awards—that its dystopian characters and Swiftian satire has struck a popular chord […]. But […] attempting to hijack that image for its own

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ends, tabloid Britain is creating something more dangerous: a stereotype that dissolves the difference between fiction and reality, and allows “real life” cases to be traduced into a media pigeonhole. (The Guardian, 2005b: n.p.)

The referents, or things talked about (‘chavs’), are discursive projections in the artifacts we are discussing (the TV series Little Britain). This means they are referents of discursive signs which, “once delineated through a semiotic sketch, may turn out to be entities whose existence is verifiable through further semiotic activity, in which case we speak of ‘real’ things” (Agha, 2007: 85). The chav has been described as a media-­ created stereotype (cf. Hayward & Yar, 2016[2011], for example). However, a media routine turns into a durable stereotype through constant and wide reverberation: “it is most effective where the ratified construct is presupposed in so many diverse practices that the question of its contingency does not readily arise” (Agha, 2007: 77). Comedians, but also journalists, may have unintentionally played a role promoting heightened reflexivity on chav style,12 through uptake in the subsequent activities of others, by incorporation into their daily, routinized practices. While a critique of the comeback of snobbery would appear to be the occasion generating the following piece of writing (currently only available via academic sources13 and some forum posts) by The Daily Telegraph, the author echoes the neo-snobs’ words in remarkably vivid detail, featuring “prison white”14 trainers, which would seem to represent a good collocate of “council house facelift” (the New York Times journalist’s choice in the text previously presented) as a good descriptor of ‘chav’: They are the sullen, pasty-faced youths in hooded tops and spanking-new ‘prison white’ trainers who loiter listlessly on street corners; the slack-jawed girls with mottled legs, hoop earrings and heavily-gelled hair who squawk at each other in consonant-free estuary English and frighten old ladies on buses. They are the non-respectable working classes: the dole-scroungers,  See Androutsopoulos’s reflections about language and identity, 2014.  See, for example, Hesslewood, 2008; le Grand, 2013. 14  Prison whites are “expensive trainers favoured by rap stars and their acolytes; the implication is that such shoes are worn by young black men, who are de facto criminals” (Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2011[2010]: n.p.). 12 13

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petty criminals, football hooligans and teenage pram-pushers. (Lewis, 2004 in le Grand 2004: 218)

In order to disagree or negate something, that something gets activated in our brain first, which apparently re-enforces it (Lakoff, 2004). So the wealth of detail accidentally produced by the journalist to criticize the comeback of snobbery actually risks performing the opposite function: encouraging more hate. Probably more so when the journalist frankly admits, towards the end of the article, to not condemning chav-­chastising activity per se. Just the style used to perform it: […] the main reason for Chavscum’s success […] is that it gives us permission to poke fun at the lower orders again. Snobbery didn’t disappear after the 1960s: it just changed direction. The people whom society once revered—toffs, intellectuals, the respectable middle-classes—suddenly found themselves the objects of derision, while working-class culture was venerated above all else. Both varieties of snobbery—traditional or inverted—have their perils, but on balance, I prefer the former […] traditional snobbery at least aspires towards some worthy goals: education, ambition, courtesy. (Lewis 2004)

Practices do not come, Agha warns, with clear labels: “(w)e can understand their social consequences only if we understand their semiotic organization” (Agha, 2007: 13). Language is not just a medium for ideas but a shaper of ideas: it is always and inevitably political (Cameron, 2012[1995]). Overrelaxed use of language or desire for overzealous reporting might produce unpredictable effects along the communicative chain. Like in some of the texts presented above, clothing, accessories, make­up, hairstyle, accent have in these stretches of texts a unifying texture: they fit together as descriptors of ‘chav’: they are diacritics (prosthetic extensions) indexing (pointing to) positions held or taken within chav life projects in which others also play a part. They typify qualities. They are signs of a particular type of conduct: object-signs or behavioral displays of chavness, or stereotypic social indexicals of the chav.

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More specifically, in the last of the texts just presented, sullen, pasty faces; hooded tops; white trainers; slack-jaws; mottled legs; hoop earrings; heavily-gelled hair; consonant-free estuary English intertwine with images of prison; of loitering listlessly on street corners; of frightening old ladies on buses; of dole-scroungers; of petty criminals; of football hooligans; of teenage pram-pushers. This intertwining effect might produce metasemiotic typifications, cross-modal iconism. A unifying form of metasemiotic treatment imbues diverse object-signs with comparable value. All the signs appear to be indexically congruent; they may be judged to have the same indexical value: they may be taken to all point to chavness. Through recontextualizations along the chain of communication, in discourse, the chav as an individual becomes embodied in perceivable signs. The formulations of ‘chav’ resulting from local semiotic activities may be negotiated, transformed, and ratified by other interactants during further interactions. Indeed, chav performances and chav construal are semiotic events mediated by everyday human activities. Private conversations on the issue, as well as overtly or covertly chav-related reactive journalism and online discussions are all communicative or semiotic encounters that disseminate and shape the formulation of ‘chav’; they are emergent social happenings constituted by their participants’ mutual orientation to the object-signs of ‘chav’ or the chav message as a whole,15 semiotic activities that evaluate chav behavioral signs as appropriate or inappropriate to particular scenarios of social-interpersonal conduct. Part of the emerging semiotic product and projection may come to be taken completely for granted (as no longer in dispute) in subsequent semiotic activity if a considerable number of local sketches of the chav happen to be congruent with each other: […] cultural processes of communicative transmission bring […] constructs to the attention of other members of society, making them more widely known and, thus, presupposable in use by larger segments of the population; when such processes are highly institutionalized, the products  Agha explains that “communicative encounters–whether they involve two people, or two million–are fragments of communicative chain processes” (Agha, 2007: 69). 15

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of semiotic activity may even come to form a routinely accepted background reality for very large groups of people. In such cases we may speak of socially routinized metapragmatic constructs […]. They are ‘constructs’ in the sense that they are made and unmade through semiotic activity; they are ‘social’ constructs in that they are invoked in use and construal by many people. (Agha, 2007: 29)

This is what produces enregisterment:16 diverse behavioral signs (both linguistic and non-linguistic) get functionally reanalyzed as cultural models of action: as behaviors capable of indexing stereotypic characteristics. Articulation and re-articulation of the cultural models of action through referential acts in discursive interactions produce a universe of actual and imagined chavs––near or far, interactionally ratified or contested. This may have tangible social effects since “acts of referring create emergent interpersonal alignments between speech participants” (Agha, 2007: 84). To those who––in their opinion––see a conspiracy in the hate wave around chavs, this journalist provocatively replies that he would like to be counted in (“A conspiracy against chavs? Count me in,” reads the title), reinforcing his point through a first-hand report of brushing off a chav: CYCLING PAST Inner London Crown Court the other day, I was nearly flattened by an angry chav in his pimped-up motor. […]. A little further on a pedestrian who’d seen the incident flagged me down and said: “Do you know, he damn nearly ran over a woman with a pushchair on a zebra crossing as well? He tried parking in the court’s car park, was told he couldn’t and went ballistic. I expect he’s probably late for his trial.” […] The reason Vicky Pollard caught the public imagination is that she embodies with such fearful accuracy several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive all-female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye; dismal ineducables who may not know much about English or History, but can damn well argue their rights with a devious fluency that would shame a barrister from Matrix Chambers. (Delingpole, 2006: n.p.)  Enregisterment is performed through “processes and practices whereby performable signs become recognized (and regrouped) as belonging to distinct, differentially valorized semiotic registers by a population” (Agha, 2007: 81). Variation is reanalyzed into register distinctions through ideology. 16

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Fig. 4.1  “No Chavs” sign on a train in London in 2010. (© Marty Gabel (Marty Gabel generously allowed free reproduction of the picture), @fiskadoro on Flickr)

Similar reactions must have been occurring offline. See, for example, Fig. 4.1, where a “No Smoking” sign was covered by a “No Chavs” sticker on a train in London in 2010. Wilkinson, too, reports spotting tangible hate signs in a shop window: Post-punk’s complex tensions of class and education have been eerily re-­ animated in a social context where there’s an ever-growing disconnect between the precarious lower rungs of the working class and those whose cultural and educational capital has placed them at the centre of the ‘flat white economy.’ This is often culturally expressed as a division between despised ‘chavs’ and savvy ‘hipsters.’ Recently I spotted a fanzine for sale in an independent record shop in Brighton, its cover adorned with the phrase ‘Die Inbred Chav Scum Die! Die!’ and an illustration of its author’s fantasies rendered in twee cartoon graphics. (Wilkinson, 2016: 192)

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das Nair and Hansen inform us that even some LGB establishments had a ‘chav-free’ policy in the 2010s (das Nair & Hansen, 2012). Linguistic anthropology does not acknowledge privileged status to such durable objects as mass media objects: emphasizing these objects “fixates on the physical persistence of the durable object,” obscuring the processes through which the sign-values of such an object emerge or change (Agha, 2007: 3). It is hard to trace ‘chav’ in tokens of discourse that have a fleeting durational existence outside ad hoc interviews or research projects explicitly focusing on the ‘chav’ issue (Yardley, 2008; Kehily, 2017, for example). However, I am going to try to at least account for the existence of spoken utterances that can “order and shape social relations of a much more perduring kind, ones that persist far longer than the initial speech token itself, whether through uptake in the subsequent activities of others, by incorporation into widely routinized practices that rely on and replay them, or by conversion into artifacts of a more durable kind” (Agha, 2007: 3). Analyzing the discourses of 30 women on maternal obesity (and its links to diabetes mellitus in pregnancy) emerging from their auto/biographical narrative interviews, Jarvie (2013) reports two instances of ‘chav-branding’: one woman, who was experiencing extreme isolation due to both partner and family rejection, related being accused of being a ‘chav’ and being reported to Social Services by her own sisters; another woman reported being labeled as a chav by her family. This research would appear to confirm the reflections of a previous study reporting on young mothers being marginalized and ‘branded’ through such stigmatizing terms as ‘chavs’ and ‘pramface,’ concerning mass media representation of mothers (Hadfield et al., 2007). Ellis-Sloan and Tamplin (2018) describe the opposite, but still related, case of a client constructing her identity on the basis of her distance from ‘chavvy’ parents. Paton (2010) tells of a young resident of a neighborhood in the state of gentrifying, similarly constructing his identity based on his distance from such groups as ‘chavvies’ and neds. Valentine and Harris, who worked on 30 individual case studies with research participants recruited from Leeds, report the parallel case of an individual talking about the stigma of coming from a council estate and the inherent sense of inferiority it engenders precisely due to ‘chav’ being strictly associated with such estates. Moreover, the

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scholars also disclose the language in which the concerns of some middle-­ class participants “about the potential encroachment of uncivilised or unruly ‘Chavs’ into everyday public places” were expressed (Valentine & Harris, 2014: 86). Focusing on an educational environment, Spencer et al. report of adolescents attending school in a middle class area deliberately avoiding talking like chavs, and describing the latter as animals (“they’re like the boys are like monkeys, and the girls are like squeaky squirrels17 who like slap people if they even look at you”) while discursively constructing thick communication barriers between groups (“I can’t even understand them”) (Spencer et al., 2013: 136). Maxwell and Aggleton, who concentrate on young women attending private school, find “an association between the term chav and girls just sleeping around, as well as notions of tact and restraint” (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2010: 6). Digging precisely into the theme of the sexualisation of young women as an issue of growing concern within contemporary Western cultures, Howard et al. interviewed six mothers whose daughters fell within the age range 8–12, revealing how these would construe bad parenting through recourse to chav-branding discourse (Howard et al., 2016). As for the professional environment, Addison showed that the chav was explicitly named in employees’ discussions about the ‘right’ way to be at work in the studies she performed, illustrating how crucial this is to get ahead in the workplace: indeed, the chav was not only stigmatized, but also singled out for fear that chav culture may contaminate ‘legitimate’ culture (Addison, 2016). Writing in 2011, Jones reports a personal experience involving chav hate, which gives permanence to an object of fleeting durational existence: […] at a friend’s dinner in a gentrified part of East London one winter evening. The […] conversation had drifted to the topic of the moment, the credit crunch. Suddenly, one of the hosts tried to raise the mood by throwing in a light-hearted joke. “It’s sad that Woolworth’s is closing. Where will all the chavs buy their Christmas presents?” Now, he was not someone who would ever consider himself to be a bigot. Neither would anyone else present: for, after all, they were all educated and open-minded professionals.  Loughnan et al. 2014 shows that a perception of animality is a cross-culturally valid component of low-SES (Socio-Economic Stereotype). 17

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Sitting around the table were people from more than one ethnic group. The gender split was fifty-fifty and not everyone was straight. All would have placed themselves somewhere left-of-center politically. They would have bristled at being labeled a snob. If a stranger had attended that evening and disgraced him or herself by bandying around a word like “Paki” or “poof,” they would have found themselves swiftly ejected from the flat. But no one flinched at a joke about chavs shopping in Woolies. (Jones, 2020[2011]: 1–2; also in Jones, 2011)

Current research reveals that “fickle, frivolous and fashionable styles,” harshly criticized from middle-class women, are still sometimes openly branded as ‘chav’, with those who follow them being looked upon as “culture dupes, fooled by the fashion industry, which has encouraged them to spend irresponsibly on fashion brands and the latest styles with the hopes of securing social status” (Appleford, 2021: 200). Similarly, children’s dress branded as ‘chav’ is used as an example of certain mothers “failing to care for children in the ‘right’ way” (201) and employed as a tool to nurture children’s “fashion habitus” (202).18 Back in 2008, the British think-tank, Fabian Society, called on the British media and population to stop using the word ‘chav,’ which, they contended, “should be put on the same footing as the ‘N’ word” (Bambuck, 2009: n.p.). The request surprised those who felt the term had been superseded by ‘pikey’: In the past few years pikey, says Tony Thorne, language consultant at King’s College London, has replaced chav as the insult-du-jour. With its origins in travelling communities, it now means someone beyond the class system, off the social radar, without apparent worth. Mr Hampson’s argument that chav smacks of snobbery is right but hardly new. Julie Burchill, the writer, championed the chav cause “on the basis that the white indigenous English working class is now the one group you can insult without feeling the  See Hamilton’s interesting window onto the reasons some families articulate to explain their choice of engaging in conspicuous consumption. The scholar interviewed 30 families and found an emphasis, among low-income consumers, and single mothers in particular, on an attempt to improve the standard of living for their families through access to the ‘right’ brands. These coping strategies to achieve approval in turn “fuel further stigmatization and, instead of creating inclusion, have the opposite outcome of exclusion and marginalization” (Hamilton, 2012: 74). 18

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breath of the Commission for Racial Equality on your neck.” (Jacobs, 2008: n.p.)

The article here below, another example of public metadiscourse, gives an idea of the varied forms of uptake on the same semiotic object: The chav strives to look expensive while remaining “street” […] “They are replicating celebrity styles at the market level,” explains Dr. Keith Hayward. Hayward was one of the first to research the phenomenon, revealing that chav had taken off as the national expression to describe this kind of individuals. […] unlike one’s skin color or sexuality, chavness is mostly a choice. Unlike “prole” or the American un-PC “trailer trash,” it is a misconception that chavs are underprivileged. “‘Chav’ has more to do with style than with money,” Laura Midgley told ABC News. “It’s a certain look: the baseball hat, the tracksuit … You could be very rich and be a chav.” […] Chavs, by definition, are poor in culture and somewhat anti-intellectual. Their purchasing power affords them the brands that make up the chav style, the alcohol and tobacco essential to the chav way of life, the hair gel and heavy cosmetics of the chav look—but the chav doesn’t spend a lot of time in school. (Bambuck, 2009: n.p.)

This is also an interesting example of why reported speech (cf. Hayward’s intention in his actual words, in particular) would be more accurately described, according to Agha, as “represented speech.” The act of reporting speech effectively transforms the current interaction whether or not the report is accurate. This happens because although the act points to the axis of denotation in the description of the thing/event being described, it simultaneously points to the axis of interaction, the reader of the description: “whenever an utterance denotes another speech event the act of producing the utterance shapes the interaction in which it occurs in ways mediated by the mode of linkage between the event denoted and the current event” (Agha, 2007: 31). The reported speech construction is used in the current interaction to denote the characteristics of other social interactions in ways that contribute to shaping the current interaction, steering Hayward’s words in a direction most probably wholly opposed to the scholar’s intentions. The intelligibility of social relations and the possibility for agency within relations depend on awareness of the reflexive

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processes that connect people. Looking at these reflexive processes through a linguistic perspective may help raise awareness of the semiotic activities underlying them.

4.2 Chav Stylizations: Competing Indexicalities, Fractal Recursivity and Commodification Section 4.1 has explored how a series of objects and the things denoted by those objects have gradually been viewed as marking a specific social persona (a chav), progressively making that persona ‘palpable’ as an object of cognition (cf. Agha, 2007: 235). We have also seen how the qualities denoted have functioned as diacritics to which emblematic values are attached through stances19 and alignment or disalignment, and that a considerable number of individuals formulated open disalignment from such qualities in the first decade of the twenty-first century, contributing to generate a polarization of an ever-growing part of the British population into factional groupings. The repertoire of objects, each with their stereotypic social indexicality (the qualities denoted), became emblematic of a specific identity (the chav), the contrast between factions differentiating a register boundary. A characterological figure of the chav surfaced in the character of Vicky Pollard from the comedy show Little Britain, and a multitude of artifacts of ‘chav’ were produced along the chain of communication through each individual’s metasemiotic work, each the product of a specific uptake, contributing to the dissemination of the ‘chav’ register. Although emblems are embodied in diacritics (or prosthetic extensions), a single diacritic can be interpreted in various ways on different occasions and in different situations, depending on acts of performance. This section explores some of the events through which ‘chav’ has been progressively recontextualized in diverse figures and events through different acts of performance and diversity of uptakes, sometimes creating  Positioning oneself in relation to an interaction, in terms of evaluation, i.e., expressing one’s attitude to such qualities. 19

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temporary unities among disparate events and morphing into ever-­ changing things. The following exchange, extracted from Reddit, is meant to account for the impression, on the layperson’s part, at the time of their writing (2013), that regional words for ‘chav’ have been “replaced by ‘chav’” (Reddit, 2013: n.p.). Reddit is an American website featuring user-­generated content and discussions, the name “Reddit” being a play-­on-­words with the phrase “read it,” (“I read it on Reddit”) (Reddit, 2021: n.p.). Data of this type are used here and further down with the understanding that they are configured as recourse to public participation on issues of sociolinguistic interest, with the Reddit users involved in the exchange seen as “citizen sociolinguists: people who use their senses and intelligence to understand the world of language around them” (Rymes & Leone, 2014: 26, emphasis in the original; also Rymes, 2020a, b and Bennett, 2021). Indeed, advocating the potential of public participation “to illuminate our contemporary communicative environment,” as well as the development of a “contemporary new media-based sociolinguistics, or citizen sociolinguistics,” Rymes and Leone define citizen sociolinguistics as “the study of these understandings”: Some practitioners of citizen sociolinguistics will be traditional academics who write articles for peer-reviewed journals, and others may be those who are blogging, commenting, or taking dialect quizzes online and talking about them. Any individual, with or without formal sociolinguistic training, who comments on talk or the way people use language can be considered a citizen sociolinguist. We foresee a growing overlap between these two types of citizen sociolinguistic work, and we do not, out of hand (a priori), judge either as superior to or more relevant than the other. (Rymes & Leone, 2014: 26, emphasis in the original)

The two scholars contend that traditional sociolinguistic research has typically sought to map generalizable processes of change, focusing on how changes occur over time and across place without addressing people’s awareness of how they use language. They think that “sometimes, the sociolinguist’s intuitive leaps run the risk of putting forth inaccurate and biased descriptions” of the social value of certain variables: “we need a

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more nuanced and emic qualitative approach that taps into circulating discourses about language” (Rymes & Leone, 2014: 27–28). “Talk about talk”––Rymes and Leone contend––was traditionally relegated by the linguist in footnotes, subject to their (the linguist’s) own presumptions about what speakers “assumed, naturally.” They propose, instead, a methodology centered on casually produced language: “a new methodology that positions the second order descriptions of language users (like Facebook comments on the New York Times quiz, Irish Internet message board contributors, or the comments of Labov’s subjects relegated to footnotes) as primary data sources” (Rymes & Leone, 2014: 29). Rymes explains that “Citizen Sociolinguistics flourishes in those moments when language catches us by surprise and forces us to start talking about it” (Rymes, 2020b: n.p.). It allows us to capture forms of data that would be otherwise inaccessible (Agostini et al., 2019, for example). Recourse to evidence such as the following (Fig. 4.2) is therefore justified, even encouraged, by the consideration that the chav phenomenon has taken most people by surprise, ‘forcing’ many of us to start talking about it and leaving us in need of evidence that would probably not be immediately accessible otherwise. It would certainly take the form of data capable of telling us something about the social value of the item researched for the very people that its existence and use affects; data that tell us something about people’s awareness of language change and the actors involved. Based on this data, ‘chav’ appears to be perceived as a top-down linguistic innovation (“they were reclassified as chavs”; “that got mutated into ‘chavs’ just like everywhere else”), not justified by immediate need (“Blame the Sun”). Linguistic innovations occur more rapidly as a society becomes increasingly unstable (Luu, 2017), and this, of course, may explain these users’ impression that change has been imposed upon them. However, I would like to emphasize these people’s perception that ‘chav’ is the signifier of a signified which was already covered in the recipient varieties represented in the exchange (‘townie’ in Manchester and Norwich; ‘scally’ in Liverpool; ‘kev’ in Birmingham; ‘ned’ in Scotland; ‘charver’ in Newcastle appears to be similar, not the same), and that it appears to have become stabilized in these varieties to the point that some people do not remember the word they used before the ‘invasion’ of ‘chav.’

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Fig. 4.2  Some user exchanges on “Our regional word for chav has been replaced by ‘chav’” in 2013. (Reddit, 2013: n.p)

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The previous existence of words for ‘chav’ in different varieties of English spoken in Britain tells us that all the terms mentioned above (‘kev,’ ‘ned,’ scally,’ ‘townie’) as regional words for ‘chav’ used to have something in common at the time of the perceived ‘invasion’ (most probably around 2004). However, the signified could not have been exactly the same (hence the Newcastle user’s statement that the meaning of ‘charver’ is “similar to but not the same”). The existence of partly non-­ overlapping repertoires of the same register by distinct groups may account for the difficulty in dealing with the ‘chav’ phenomenon in a comprehensive, consistent way, hence the considerable variety of interpretations: The Ned/Chav phenomenon has been interpreted as stereotyping, class hatred/abuse (Law, 2006; Tyler, 2008), a leisure career (MacDonald and Shildrick, 2007), a youth subculture (McCulloch et al., 2006; Nayak, 2006), an underclass (Tyler, 2008), as ‘flawed’ consumers, as celebrating consumerism (Burchill, 2005; Hayward Yar, 2006), as low cultural capital (Martin, 2009) and as disenfranchised and alienated (Hollingworth and Williams, 2009; Sutton, 2009). (Young, 2012: 41)

The difficulty experienced in the interpretation of the phenomenon may indeed also be due to the fact that once enregistered, the register (to facilitate understanding of this aspect, I will provide “variety of communicative conduct” as another definition for ‘register’; cf. Agha & Frog, 2015: 13) of ‘chav’ has grown, progressively acquiring more characterological figures and new, sometimes competing indexicalities and valorizations: Through semiotic chain processes registers grow or shrink in demographic terms, gain hegemonic force or lose it, are replicated uniformly across populations or fractionate into oppositional models of personhood (Agha, 2007: 81) Competing models of a cultural phenomenon can come to co-exist within a society (Agha, 2007: 79)

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Moreover, its diacritics have produced different interpretations on different occasions and in different situations, depending on the specific acts of performance in which they have been used. I am going to mention some of the ‘real’ chav performances (‘real’ as opposed to the negative fictitious ones dealt with in Sect. 4.1 and to the positive fictitious ones focused on later in this section) that have contributed to widening the register and expanding the range and degree of indexicalities and valorizations. The late Jade Goody was considered one of the first celebrity chavs in the UK (Tyler & Bennett, 2010), probably the most ‘chav,’ “the stereotype of the ignorant and loud-mouthed ‘chav’” (Cameron, 2007: 127): […] unapologetic uberchav—coarse, fabulously ignorant, common, crushingly low of brow both physically and metaphorically, overweight, sexually incontinent, famously racist—spewed out from a home not so much broken as smashed into little pieces, a home of smackheads and crackheads. (Liddle, 2009: n.p.)

Raised amidst addiction and poverty and poorly educated herself, Goody acquired fame after taking part in Big Brother in 2002. Viewers do assume reality TV contestants to be some sort of “popular royals,” due to the existence of an unspoken understanding “of some hidden essence or ‘true’ working-class identity concealed beneath the ‘glitz.’” (Biressi & Nunn, 2008: 150) However, they learned with Goody that “to appear too trashy, too sexual, too uncultured can also provoke media opprobrium and infamy” (Biressi & Nunn, 2008: 156): the young woman was vilified, at one point, as “the one-time ‘most hated woman in Britain’”: Not just the viewers: the press, too. Goody pulls up front pages that seem archaic now, with fatphobic headlines and cruel imagery. […] She was vilified, the entire country over, for how she spoke and looked. Her Big Brother housemates mocked her, and footage of viewers outside the house show people chanting to “vote out the pig” and telling her to “die.” […] The hatred of Goody was symptomatic of the hatred of those like her in Britain in the early 2000s—a fear of working class people, of “chavs,” was endemic in the country. (Eloise, 2019: n.p., emphasis in the original)

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Even papers which have stated their best intentions to purge society of its outdated habit of class contempt […] still routinely publish panegyrics of lumpen-loathing. […] As David Cameron and co suddenly make it OK to be posh, there is a parallel—and more worrying—shift, which seems to make it OK to trash the poor. Goody may have had her 15 minutes of fame and her three two minute hates, but the chav-trashing looks set to run and run. (Hill, 2008: n.p.) Hard to know where to start with the whole Jade Goody revival, her corpse exhumed by Channel 4 and slapped on a digital slab for us all to have another gawp. Fat ugly chav eviscerated by the tabloids, in an era where being eviscerated by the tabloids still meant something; her ignorance and gobbiness clashing with notions of how young women should look and act. Graham Norton wore a Jade fat suit, Jonathan Ross made comments about her that would today earn a Me Too hashtag. Mocked, reviled, ridiculed. Common as muck, thick as shit. Class hatred at its most virulent, with all of us colluding. (Harrington, 2019: n.p.)

Raisborough et al. (2012) argue that the aspects which contributed to construct Goody as a chav were her “ignorance and bigotry,” her family background (Raisborough et al., 2012: 253), and her elocution (also Chivers, 2008): I’d found cotching in the Sun in an article about slang likely to be used by Jade Goody, an ordinary girl from south London who’d once been on Big Brother on television. The Sun said it meant ‘hanging out at a friend’s house to relax.’ The short article included plenty more words I’d never heard of, such as moody (‘counterfeit,’ with reference to designer goods), dino (‘a small amount of money’), blue (‘mum, or secret’) and gatta (‘petrol’). I wondered if the whole thing was a joke. (Wordsworth, 2006: n.p.)

Goody was well aware of her deficiencies (“I’m common and my talking is quite abrupt,” cf. Tolson, 2011: 45), and many scholars agree on viewing her as a victim of the cynical celebrity culture system: “celebrity is an increasingly significant means by which reactionary class attitudes, allegiances and judgements are communicated” (Tyler & Bennett, 2010: 375). A hard worker, she managed to conquer and keep the public’s favor for some time, recurrently held up as “emblematic of the

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‘democratisation’ of celebrity” (Holmes, 2009: 3). However, in 2007 she caused an outburst of outraged reactions for addressing racially offensive remarks to an Indian housemate on Big Brother: […] “slags,” “scum,” “chavs,” “povvos”—is threaded through the whole debate, often used by people who claim to be outraged that Goody called Shilpa Shetty “Shilpa Poppadom.” [Goody] attracted the most vile, fascistic ranting long before the whole Shilpa episode. The online Urban Dictionary […] defines “Jade Goody” as: “A horrific abomination of a human being. Became famous for being as thick as, and uglier than, pigshit after appearing on Big Brother.” And the definition gets much worse. After last week, the new social etiquette seems to be that racism is not acceptable but you can call uneducated, white, working-class people anything you like. It is now okay to regard the urban underclass as a kind of genetic sludge-tank, occupied by a subhuman race with no capacity for intelligent life. (O’Toole, 2007: n.p.) Andrew Neil on the BBC said she was only one of “a bunch of Vicky Pollards” and “thick bitches” cluttering our screens, while Richard Littlejohn called her “the high priestess of the slagocracy” and Simon Heffer said Jade’s problem was “hating her social superiors.” On a BBC phone-in, Jade was called “just another chav, the estates are full of them,” a comment that made the host laugh and suggest “hosing them down.” I’m proud that Britain is a country that finds racist abuse despicable. But I’m ashamed we had to fight this prejudice with another prejudice. While we find generalising about Asian and black people loathsome, we have shown we have no compunction about doing the same with the white working class. No—we glory in it. (Hari, 2007: n.p.)

In an effort to rebuild her image, Goody appeared on the Indian version of Big Brother in 2008, and received a diagnosis of cervical cancer while there, on live-television. This paradoxically attracted more hate: Here’s a notable first for television—a contestant on a Big Brother programme was told, in front of a television audience, that she had cancer. The woman in question was Jade Goody, whom you may vaguely remember as the coarse, thick, Bermondsey chav who sprung to national prominence for having been allegedly racist on a previous series of the programme. This

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time she’s on the Indian version of Big Brother called Bigg Boss—an attempt, apparently, to convince everyone that she isn’t racist at all, but is quite happy to trouser fairly large sums of money from darkies the world over. (Liddle, 2008: n.p.) Luckily for her career, she died. In terms of rehabilitating her image from racist monster back to the plucky princess, dying too early and leaving two small children, was peerless, a strategy not even Max Clifford could have conceived. How she took charge of her death was almost Bowie-like, albeit with radically different tactics—she publicised it, monetised it, televised it. She married in white, her chemo skull unveiled; days from death, she secured a fat deal with a gossip mag, providing for her children. Her death was written about in the New York Times, mentioned by Gordon Brown. Her story is not so much about her, as about us. (Harrington, 2019: n.p.)

Goody’s death significantly impacted British people’s awareness of cervical cancer through the candid interviews that the young woman did in the weeks before passing away (Kindon & McKinnell, 2020): a large number of young girls sought cervical cancer screening, and England’s National Health Service revised its policy on testing for women under 25. However, it was also commodified (Woodthorpe, 2010), becoming the ultimate reality show: Walter wonders whether “for some, the public dying of this lower-class woman was indecent […] because it was public or because she was from a class some deemed not to deserve celebrity status and publicity” (Walter, 2009: n.p.). Raisborough et al. contend that “(c)ultural imperatives for ‘dying well’ intersect with what could be perceived as more positive or even affectionate representations of Jade to produce ‘good taste’ as naturalised properties of the middle class” (Raisborough et al., 2012: 251). With this in mind, the framing of her final weeks was intended “not primarily as a typical media cancer story of heroism, but as one of redemption in which she attained social respectability through dying” (Walter, 2010: n.p.). Despite contending that “class-infused celebrity identity myths (‘celebrity chav’) are constructed in terms of glamour, allure and charisma but also vulgarity, repulsion and ordinariness”,20 Cocker et al. reveal the 20

 Di Martino 2019 contends that chav-related articles have genre-specific features.

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existence of a hierarchy among celebrity chavs, with footballer David Beckham occupying the top position: Scholars have argued that there exists a status hierarchy among celebrity chavs with David Beckham occupying a higher status than Katie Price21 (Jordan), for instance (Young, 2012). Those with high status have typically ‘achieved’ their status as a celebrity through hard work and accomplishment (e.g. footballers viewed as working-class heroes—Jones, 2020[2011] and are valued more highly in celebrity culture than those with ‘ascribed’ status (‘famous for being famous’). This could explain why some scholars have discussed the ‘celebrity chav’ as being ‘almost exclusively gendered female’ (Williamson, 2010, p. 120), noting that male celebrities seem better able to rise up the scale of celebrity value (Tyler & Bennett, 2010). To date, the literature has placed the female working-class celebrity—Jade Goody, Kerry Katona and Katie Price—at the centre of their discussions of the ‘celebrity chav’ (Coy & Garner, 2010; Raisborough, Frith, & Klein, 2013; Tyler, 2013; Tyler & Bennett, 2010), reflecting the way that the abject celebrity chav is predominantly constructed and produced in the popular consciousness as a female figure. (Cocker et al., 2015: 505)

Beckham is a public figure of intense media interest in contemporary Britain, and a “significant figure in contemporary popular culture”; a figure in which it is possible to appreciate an expansion of the parameters of masculinity, with the latter being constructed and represented with both the ‘reassuring’ referents of traditional hegemonic masculinity (“aggressive and petulant world-class footballer”22) and new, dissonant elements (for example, Rahman, 2004 emphasizes his being a fashion dandy, a doting father, and an apparently downtrodden husband; cf. also Cocker et al., 2015; Scheidt et al., 2020). These diacritics, to which emblematic values are attached, have caused both alignment and disalignment, ­creating for some a polarization, in generalized perception, between the

 About Price, see Heeney’s reflections on how lifestyles and moral respectability may be called into question even for “causing or even fabricating particular disabilities in the first place.” (Heeney, 2015: 650) Indeed, Price’s receipt of welfare benefits for her son caused a heated debate which reopened old discussions about the fairness of welfare support for the “undeserving poor”. 22  Rahman, 2004: n.p. 21

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“two most visible and most talked about masculine identities of recent times,” metrosexuals and chavs: ‘Visible also in contemporary British society is a very different form of identity—‘chav’ culture. Noted also for its (hyper)masculine (and decidedly heterosexist) idiosyncrasies, chav has emerged in recent times as an increasingly prevalent signifier of Englishness and, contrary to its metrosexual counterpart, is often used as a derisory descriptor towards the unruly behaviours and consumption habits of White, working class (primarily male) youth. (Parker & Lyle 2008: 258)

This partial ‘disalignment’ on the part of the ‘emblematic’ male celebrity chav from certain chav diacritics may explain why some scholars believe that the “celebrity chav” is “predominantly constructed and produced in the popular consciousness as a female figure” (Cocker et al., 2015: 505), despite both David and Victoria Beckham often being mocked in the British press for their lack of “cultural capital” (Hill et al., 2007: 145). Identities are, of course, “in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005: 585). However, thinking of indexical fields in connection with acts of performance and acts of identity (the ways “fashion their ways […] as they move their personae through situations from moment to moment, from day to day, and through the life course”23) may help to understand how certain chav diacritics can acquire different ‘meanings’ in different contexts: Variables have indexical fields rather than fixed meanings because speakers use variables not simply to reflect or reassert their particular pre-ordained place on the social map but to make ideological moves. The use of a variable is not simply an invocation of a pre-existing indexical value but an indexical claim which may either invoke a pre-existing value or stake a claim to a new value. (Eckert, 2008: 464)

23

 Eckert, 2008: 463.

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In this light, also singer Cheryl’s being ranked above other female “celebrity chavs” (Cocker et al., 2015) may appear to be due, at least in part, to her shedding part of her celebrity chav image through assimilation of middle- and upper-class taste codes and a “careful performance of vulnerability” through a considerable number of acts of identity (Woods, 2016: 210; cf. also Di Martino, 2019) perceived as ‘authentic.’ Unlike other “celebrity chavs” (“Kerry Katona, Jade Goody and Wayne Rooney, have labeled themselves ‘chav’”; Scheidt et al., 2020), Beckham and Cheryl have ‘stylized’ (Coupland, 2001, 2007) their identities deviating from those predictably associated with “celebrity chavs,” and producing consistently ‘authentic’ subversive, multi-voiced acts of identity: their own personal chav styles. These performances have resisted the current construction of the chav as “aggressive, sexually promiscuous and drug abusive” (Pointner, 2015: 97), contributing to altering the social domain of ‘chav’: Processes of communicative transmission depend on participant linkages between semiotic events. Such processes can alter the social domain of a cultural regularity through the activities of persons, one participation framework at a time. (Agha, 2007: 78)

Change in the social domain of ‘chav’ and countervalorization cannot, of course, ignore that while representations of chavs “continually impute a lack of value to such subjects, it is precisely this lack which is converted into symbolic capital to be bought and sold,” (Johnson, 2008: 65) so that the enregistered style of conduct (or a subset of its stylistic repertoires) is “valorized as an emblem of self-differentiation” (Agha, 2015: 313) and thus repossessed by its users. And change of course happens at the same time (and sometimes in the very same places) as stability and permanence. While, for some, Beckham becomes the prototype of the metrosexual human, his colleague Rooney and his partner get crowned ‘King and Queen of Chavs’ by others, adding to the number of flesh-and-bone characterological figures of chav, as well as attracting more disalignment and more alignment at the same time: King of Chavs A sobriquet awarded to the youthful English footballer Wayne Rooney (b.1985), regarded by the snobbish as the epitome of the Chav, and by cultural commentators as a key figure in contemporary

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Celebrity culture. Appropriately enough, his girlfriend Colleen McLoughlin, famed for her need of Retail therapy, is dubbed the ‘Queen of Chavs.’ (Ayto & Crofton, 2011[2009]: n.p.) Among British women, Coleen McLoughlin, the girlfriend of the soccer star Wayne Rooney, is seen as a celebrity chav. Ms. McLoughlin—whose new house with Mr. Rooney reportedly includes its own spray-tanning booth—is rarely photographed without a variety of designer-store shopping bags and a thong showing above her pants. Her 18th birthday party last year descended into chaos when the free drinks ran out and Mr. Rooney’s uncle began yelling abuse at the waiters. Others in the greater chav universe are David and Victoria Beckham, who would hate to be considered chavs but who nonetheless wore matching purple outfits and sat on matching thrones at their wedding; and Jordan, a former topless model who recently traveled to her own wedding in a Cinderella-style carriage shaped like a pumpkin and pulled by six white horses. (Lyall, 2005: n.p.) All that bling and Burberry gear and spray-on tan and hedonistic holidays in Ibiza and bucketfuls of ‘Bacardi breezers’ cost quite a lot of dosh, and chavs, whatever else, are not short of a bob or two, credit crunch or no. Their heroes—more often heroines—may often have hailed from the working class but have left their origins far behind them. The Beckhams, particularly Victoria, and the Rooneys, particularly Coleen, are ‘chav’ aristocracy. So, too, is the singer Charlotte Church. […] Whereas in previous generations upwardly mobile people sought to blend into the middle class, and assume respectability, chavs glory in remaining apart and different, and in not conforming. They don’t buy into the old class hierarchy. (Glover, 2008: n.p.) […] chav is a term of abuse which identifies a subject with excessive consumption of items such as Burberry baseball caps, fast food24 and cheap jewellery with no taste, little education and anti-social behaviour patterns.  “Tastes in food also depend on the idea each class has of the body and of the effects of food on the body, that is, on its strength, health and beauty, and on the categories it uses to evaluate these effects, some of which may be important for one class and ignored by another, and which the different classes may rank in very different ways. Thus, whereas the working classes are more attentive to the strength of the (male) body than its shape, and tend to go for products that are both cheap and nutritious, the professions prefer products that are tasty, health-giving, light and not-fattening. Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied helps to shape the class body” (Bourdieu, 1996[1979]: 190). 24

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Occasionally, the term can be used as a faux compliment, but for the most part its use is derogatory. In the British media, ‘chav’ is used as a term of abuse for the working class and also celebrities who have working class roots (such as David and Victoria Beckham and Michael Collins the lottery winner and multi-millionaire who is known as the ‘King of the Chavs’). (Preston, 2007: 35) McMansion: large modern house that is at once lavish and tasteless, and thus imaginatively cheap while being ostentatiously expensive. Favoured ‘styles’ include mock-Georgian and fake-hacienda. McMansions are much favoured by high-earning (or overpaid) football players […]. The name is modelled on that of McDonald’s, the fast-food chain25 (Ayto & Crofton, 2011[2009]: n.p.) Many of my relatives do chav jobs: my grandmother cleaned toilets for a living. My dad is a bus driver. My nephews have “Chav names,” according to ChavScum. When I hear the children of privilege ranting about chavs, I want to lock them on a council estate with three kids, no education and a hundred quid a week to see how they cope. [Jade Goody] was ridiculed […] because of her lack of general knowledge and apparent illiteracy. Nobody asked how she had become this way. When she was two, her father dumped her seriously disabled mother and ended up in prison. Jade did not go to school much because she insisted on staying at home to help her mother dress, eat and get around. For showing this degree of compassion in extremely tough circumstances, Jade is slapped down as a “moron.” (Hari, 2004: n.p.)

Out of this chav chaos arises the need, for some, to add another category within ‘chav,’ that of the ‘superchav’: Britain is producing a generation of “super chavs” who are impossible to teach and will never work, a teachers’ leader said yesterday. (The Sun, 2009: n.p.)

 Incidentally, while explaining that McDonald’s has been widely cited “as the stomping ground of the ‘chav’,” Moran (2007: 552) contends that Americanized fast-food outlets are the obvious descendants of the original milk bars which Richard Hoggart describes in a famous passage of The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 2009[1957]) (See also Wyatt, 2004 and Moran, 2005). 25

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Vogue has never compromised its high standards with plebeian taste. And [Coleen] McLoughlin is to style what a bicycle repair kit is to a Formula One car. She is a shopaholic whose undiscerning accumulation of expensive clothes—paid for with Rooney’s gold credit cards—has earned her the term ‘looting chic.’ She is, in short, a ‘superchav,’ the uncrowned queen of chav. A girl of average looks, an unremarkable figure and no discernible talent is to have the ultimate self-affirming accolade of being showcased as a style leader in the June issue of Vogue. (Sunday Times, 2005, cited in Tyler & Bennett, 2010: 381)

However, chavs with spending power have unquestionably contributed to further dissemination of the register and to a growth of the repertoire of sign-forms that express the cultural construct of ‘chav,’ with the emergence of a scheme of counter-values in some uptakes, which have come to co-exist society-internally with previous values (cf. Agha, 2007: 78): Rejoice at those fashionable Burberry baseball caps! Slip on those gold bracelets, and embrace that Croydon facelift hairdo. Let’s have no more of this unkind discrimination against the chav underclass, say MPs. Labour’s Stephen Pound—motto: never knowingly under-publicised—says he’s even prepared to become parliamentary spokesman for the chavs. “It is yet another example of class snobbery,” he says. “I am an aspirant chav. I don’t have a lot of gold rings, but I am saving up for them. “What on earth is wrong with a bit of flash, a bit of bling bling? It keeps the jewellers in business.” (White, 2005: n.p.)

The burgeoning of chav counter-values through the association of ‘chav’ with positive real-life characterological figures probably reflected on––and was certainly accelerated by––the unprejudiced portrayal of chavness in movies such as St Trinian’s (2007) and Fish Tank (2009). Hill has stressed, for example, the presence of reclaimed chav features in the movie St Trinian’s: In St Trinian’s […] the chav clique is situated within the broader reclamation of the term as an ‘affirmative subcultural identity’ that took place particularly in the music industry via working-class rappers like Lady

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Sovereign, who features on the film’s soundtrack. When ‘chav’ is evoked as an insult in the film, it is not an expression of class disgust but rather a way of signifying rivalry between the various groups. The girls use clothes and accessories to adopt the markers of chav identity to create a sense of belonging; it is not necessarily evoked as an explicit comment on their working-­ class status. (Hill, 2020: 35)

Hill has also drawn attention to the sympathetic portrayal of chav character Mia in Fish Tank, which won its director Andrea Arnold, who “never vilifies her protagonist” unlike traditional representations of chavs (which typically elicit cultural reactions of class disgust, Hill, 2020: 74), the 2009 Jury Prize at Cannes. Arnold—Hill argues—had also “produced a typically non-judgmental depiction of the ‘chav mum’ in her Oscar-­ winning short film Wasp (2003)” (Hill, 2020: 76). The shot in Fig. 4.3 provides a glimpse into Arnold’s unprejudiced gaze on Zoë, the young mother of four small children, pictured on her way home after storming to a neighbor’s house in her nightshirt, wearing no shoes, to tell her off for attacking her kids. These burgeoning chav counter-values acquired wider circulation and started articulating a proper chav counter-discourse with the

Fig. 4.3  Still from Wasp. (Arnold, 2003; Youtube, 2017[2003])

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broadcasting of Misfits, a low-budget BAFTA-winning science fiction comedy-­drama television show, which aired on E4, a British youth-oriented channel, between 2009 and 2013. Drawing on a vein of interest in “questions of difference, otherness, increased power and the impact of these on personal and community relationships [and] using supernatural power as a motif through which to explore these concerns” (Moseley, 2001: 43)—which appears to be quite common in teen drama26—Misfits features a group of young offenders doing community service27 who develop supernatural powers after they are struck by lightning during an electrical storm. While denying the project any specific political agenda, the drama’s creator, Howard Overman, does admit he viewed his characters kindly when conceiving them, probably also in response to the channel producers’ patronizing request to make the show working class so the working-­ class audiences would not feel excluded: I honed in on the least likely, most unheroic group I could find. I’d been reading the papers about asbo kids and it struck me that young offenders doing community service were exactly what I was after: a gang of strangers from different walks of life, thrown together who don’t particularly want to know each other. Perfect. But I wanted to delve a bit deeper than the demonised caricature young offenders we read about. These kids in Misfits aren’t angels, but they haven’t stabbed or shot anyone; they just got trapped by circumstance. It’s no secret that there are plenty of middle-class kids who take drugs or drink-drive but don’t get caught. Misfits is about the ones who aren’t so lucky. (Donaghy, 2009: n.p.)

Starting off with such creative intentions, it is not surprising that the characters’ “superpowers ultimately unearth a fundamental decency. Come season two, the faceless hoodie figure so demonised by media  Ross and Stein contend that “Teen TV has the potential to raise considerations of marginality on a regular basis. Perhaps because Teen TV probes such a wide range of culturally weighted categorical divides, and also because of its recurring engagement with questions of identity and self-­ discovery, some of the programs […] go beyond addressing specific teen issues to negotiate questions about class, race, gender, and sexuality” (Ross & Stein, 2008: 9). 27  Resonating the creator’s words, Donaghy, 2009 labels them “asbo teens.” 26

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panics is taken up and rewritten as a superhero figure” (Woods, 2016: 78). As Frei and Schmeink contend, the Misfits are superheroes “who fight the insecurity, uncertainty and unsafety of living in a liquid modern world” (2014: 106). Research has emphasized, on the one hand, the channel (E4)‘s “intent to diversify the normalised middle-class identity offered by its US imports” (Woods, 2016: 77) and, on the other, “the series’ attempt to ‘resignify’ the ‘chav’” (Wearing, 2013: 225). Indeed, Misfits “disrupts […] signifiers of the ‘real’––the brutalism of housing estates, the grey of the concrete and the sky––by making them strange” (Woods, 2016: 81; also Wood, 2015) while still grounding the narrative in a strong sense of regional space to assert its British ‘authenticity.’ Authenticity is also performed through a peculiar use of language, whose remarkable Britishness is emphasized through “bluntness, a creative use of profanity or a fondness for scatological or sexual stories” (Woods, 2016: 82). Another interesting aspect which emerges in Misfits as a legacy of the genre hybridity of US teen TV is the conflation of adolescent alienation and the ‘other,’ with Smallville, a take on the origins of Superman, offering itself as a prime example of the “alienated, emotional and sympathetic [protagonists], attempting to make the right choices as they struggled towards adulthood” (Woods, 2016: 79): The protagonists […] are ‘misfits’ in the sense that adolescents could generally be seen to be. The teen-age of the protagonists symbolizes the transition from childhood into adulthood, and the development of maturing into fit members of a society. They have not finished their maturation yet, and the lessons they are supposed to learn from their powers are merely a hyperbolic version of the challenges posed to any juvenile, trying to develop a full personality and come to terms with the traits given to them by nature. (Frei & Schmeink, 2014: 116) Lauren said: “I do like playing Kelly—she’s a bit outgoing and says it how it is, when I was younger I was a bit like her, a bit ‘chavvy’ with my gold, trackie bottoms and fake Burberry and all that.” (Metro, 2009: n.p.)

The female figures in Misfits are also particularly interesting in relation to the renegotiation of the ‘chav’ issue. The two central characters of

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Alicia and Kelly, for example, both exemplify but also ‘speak back’ to the vision of the ‘undeserving’ poor. Kelly, in particular, is “stereotyped as a simple-minded, lower class ‘chav’” (Frei & Schmeink, 2014: 99). However, she is also clearly regarded with sympathy: Kelly’s proximity to the lexicon of chav femininity is highlighted by her hair, scraped back into an ultra tight pony tail (the infamous ‘Croydon facelift’) she is also ‘gobby’ and verbally aggressive but she is, very much a sympathetic character, rewarded in the third series for what the audience already knows about her intelligence she is given a new power, she becomes a ‘rocket scientists.’ […] this power seems more in keeping with an intensification of existing characteristics than something of a different order altogether, and her inability to use her new found subjective positioning (she is a rocket scientist) to actually get a job could also be read as something of a wry commentary on the judgements made about chav intelligence. […] Invoking the chav stereotype in order to repudiate it, granting the character qualities, which, by definition, are antithetical to most chav media portrayals, marks the series as distinct from those representations. (Wearing, 2013: 233)

Both characters are part of a broader discursive framework through intertextual references to such characters as Lauren in the Catherine Tate Show and Vicky Pollard in Little Britain but also, at the very same time, contest such a framework. Wearing focuses on one episode, in particular (last episode in the first series), where a middle-class young woman brainwashes everyone into becoming born again virgins, with the results being especially evident in the female characters, whose transformations stand out due to a point-blank evacuation of agency and affect, “an affront to a proud generation of ‘fuck ups’ and chavs with attitude” (Wearing, 2013: 230). The comic power of some of the scenes in this episode is a strong critique of the ‘makeover’ paradigm pervading much contemporary television, setting the stage for a proper defense of ‘chav’ femininity: “[b]ecoming ‘respectable’ and filled with precisely the kind of shame and disgust which animates the media discourses on ‘chav’ allows for a comic denunciation of precisely that judgemental stance.” However, the contestation “stops rather short of staging a resistance to terms of the debate […] but rather, effectively displaces what might otherwise be read as class

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antagonism onto generational difference” (Ibidem). In other words, rather than taking on the shape of class solidarity and explicitly reversing the trope of young female sexuality as a ‘social problem,’ the episode claims agency in the face of conformity and coercion, toning them down into a milder rhetoric of generational distinctiveness. Nathan, one of the main male characters in the series, becomes the spokesperson for the values of his generation on this occasion: it is in his speech to the crowd of brainwashed teenagers that the sense of distance becomes mitigated. In this speech, ‘fucking up’ turns into a rite of passage for young people which basically revives the “age-old discourse about the decay of succeeding generations” (Gonnermann, 2019: 219): We’re young. We’re supposed to drink too much. We’re supposed to have bad attitudes and shag each other’s brains out. We are designed to party. This is it. Yeah, so a few of us will overdose or go mental. But Charles Darwin said you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. And that’s what it’s all about: breaking eggs! And by eggs, I do mean, getting twatted on a cocktail of Class As. If you could just see yourselves! It breaks my heart. You’re wearing cardigans! We had it all. We fucked up bigger and better than any generation that came before us. We were so beautiful! We’re screw-ups. I’m a screw-up and I plan to be a screw-up until my late 20s, maybe even my early 30s. And I will shag my own mother before I let her… or anyone else take that away from me! (IMDb: n.d.)

The ‘deviant youth’ stage becomes, in this way, a crucial phase in human development, an inevitable evolutionary stage between adolescence and adulthood. As Gonnerman puts it, “the inter-generational ‘war’ does not originate in the teenage population but in authorities who have forgotten how it is to be a teenager” (Gonnermann, 2019: 220). This view, combined with Wearing’s opinion that the critique of the middle-­class gaze in Misfits, “displaces […] class antagonism onto generational difference” (Wearing, 2013: 230) interestingly links up with the data I present later on (cf. Sect. 5.4) pointing to widespread representations of ‘chav’ as a ‘phase,’ a stage in people’s lives. While media discourse has traditionally demonized young people in modern society, adult fear of, and obsession with, youth and crime has come to dominate domestic political and media agendas in recent times,

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giving rise to a considerable number of initiatives to tackle the ‘problem’ (Muncie, 2004[1999]) but creating ‘moral panic’ (Young, 1971; Cohen, 2002[1972]). This worsening phenomenon, which Giroux (2009: xii) looks at, from a wider perspective, as a proper war on youth, “a growing youth-crime complex [which governs] through a logic of punishment, surveillance, and control,” appears to have taken on new implications and unprecedented turns, and thanks to this ‘rite’ of demonizing younger generations, young people come to be denied their place as legitimate citizens, their lifestyles constructed as a ‘threat’ to the safety and well-­ being of members of mainstream society: Since 1997 New Labour has placed youth justice reform at the top of its ‘modernizing’ agenda. Much of this, in the form of restorative justice, evidence-­led practice, partnerships and adherence to principles of ‘what works,’ seems to herald some new beginnings. However, the ‘new’ is also submerged within a persistent authoritarianism and populist punitiveness. Comparative research now confirms that England and Wales lock up more young people than any other country in Europe. But why are we so ­markedly different? What is it that seems continually to feed our punitive obsession so that we are more concerned to punish rather than to understand? (Muncie, 2004[1999]: XV)

It is precisely this narrative of the deviant teenager that Misfits inverts, locating the reasons for dysfunctionality within traditional communities and emphasizing the negative role of deviant authorities: gradually through the series, the teenagers prove themselves to be able to establish a circle of trust, work, and friendship capable of standing up to challenge (Gonnermann, 2019). In this sense, the Misfits antiheroes, some very distinctly ‘chavvy’ in their speech, dress, and antisocial behavior, as suggested above, arguably helped ‘chav’ achieve covert prestige in the UK. Through countervalorization, ‘chav’ has been commodified using various reiterations, with more elements increasingly being dragged into the picture. These additions have contributed to changing its value as a commodity while simultaneously reinforcing the old valorization. In the words of Gal and Irvine, “(b)y selectively engaging with forms of convention and typification, individual persons construct and embody

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interests, craft projects, and adopt vantage points. They also evoke (index) and instantiate conventional discourses as explanatory narratives” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 17). One way the commodification of difference happens is through tourist discourse. Consider, for example, the view of ‘chav’ in the following stretch of text: Chav-tastic If you like a holiday where you can take your kids and leave them to their own devices whilst you spend the day and evening by the pool or filling up on all inclusive drinks oblivious to what they are up to, then this is the place for you. Regular broadcasts asking for people to assist with the search for ‘lost’ kids is the norm. (Truthful Oxford, 2009: n.p.)

This text appears to weave together more thread into chav-chastising discourse due to its use of ‘chavtastic’ (cf. Sect. 3.2) as a title. Indeed, this choice clearly positions chavs within a set (negative) category, but the provider of this piece of advice is not openly judgmental: they are leaving it to others to decide for themselves whether or not the holiday described sounds pleasant (“If you like…, then this is the place for you”). Read from a chav-chastising spotting perspective, though, leaving kids “to their own devices” may appear to work as indexical. It is the title of the advice that may encourage one to read “leaving kids to their own devices” as an object-sign (index of bad quality parenting28), thereby creating an axis of differentiation between chavs and chavnots. In this way, the text may turn into a potential locus for ideological work, “a focus of joint attention, for making construals and conjectures” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 22, emphasis in the original). Emergence and convergence of signs, in turn, may reinforce the register of ‘chav.’ Of course, there is always a plurality of gazes and perspectives on any site. It is not easy in a text like this to adequately account for other gazes and investigate their various construals, but we can imagine that it might have generated a different type of uptake  See Day’s contention that current TV shows focusing on the parenting practices of those who take part encourage forms of “intensive parenting” (Hays, 1996), normalizing middle-class ways of being and living as being unquestionably ‘correct.’ However, “the ability to ‘micro-manage’ children’s lives in this way depends on having the time and material resources to do so, which are more likely to be available to middle-class than working-class parents [but attributed on such shows] to a lack of knowledge or just sheer laziness” (Day, 2020: 118). 28

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due to the ambiguity of the title, despite not constituting clear and explicit evidence of chav-chastising. However, the gaze, in a review like the one that follows, would appear to be unidirectional: What a perfectly beautiful and tranquil place. NO CHAVS! Review of [name deleted] […] there were parks, loads of grass to play on, a football goal area, donkeys, fishing lakes, commando course, the list goes on! We found plenty to do. There is a lovely woodland walk which takes you about 40 minutes, you arrive at Dawlish Warren beach, we walked up to the red rock beach where it was nice and quiet. We didn’t use the club facilities as our kids are tiny but I am glad to say there were no chavs to be seen, just lovely families and couples having a nice holiday, Will 100% definately [sic] recommend this place and will most definately [sic] return. (annafrankie, 2011: n.p.)

It is interesting to compare and contrast this gaze with Brewis and Jack’s aversion for middle- and upper-class gay men using chav bodies as objects of consumption. Indeed, looking at ‘chav’ from the opposite vantage point, some scholars illustrate and criticize this phenomenon—“gay chavinism” (Fraser, 2005), “a growing appetite amongst gay men for seemingly downwardly mobile sexual experiences” (Brewis & Jack, 2010: 252)29—, which contributes to further de-value the chav individual (Johnson, 200830), “creating a form of symbolic violence” (Brewis & Jack, 2010: 251).31 Regarding chavs as consumers rather than objects of consumption by others, there seems to be a niche in the market among school-leavers,  Brewis and Jack explain that “Chavinism takes several commodity forms, including gay men […] listening to or watching recordings of chavs having sex (eg, by downloading onto a mobile phone) or even seeking ‘real’ sex with tracksuit-wearing, baseball-cap-sporting youths (eg, by going to ‘chav nights’ at gay clubs, in cities such as London, Manchester and Brighton).” (Ibidem) Exploring the opposite perspective, das Nair and Hansen (2012) emphasize the exploitation of chav identities by those who choose to make their bodies desirable and economically marketable in the pornography industry by looking like chavs. 30  “(W)hile the male chav has value in one context, value created by his use as a sexual object, such value is based on a continual assertion of his worthlessness. The chav remains an object—before, during and after his use—of disgust, filth and repudiation” (Johnson, 2008: 79). 31  The issue would require fuller treatment in a separate chapter. However, this volume is certainly not the locus where it could be accorded the required recognition. 29

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already in work at the age of 16,32 with companies having to weigh whether or not it is wise to target their products towards this sector: Nick Mustoe, the chief executive of HP’s advertising agency, […] explains: “If you want to intellectualise the term chav, it’s about being proud of who and what you are and that it’s cool to be an ordinary man on the street. We’re tapping into this and showing that HP is not a posh sauce, it’s about an ordinary British life of which you should be proud.” Ford is using a similar strategy to sell its vans. […] But not everyone in advertising is willing to admit to targeting a group that comes with certain negative connotations. Cristyn Bevan, the account director for Ford Europe, rejects the idea of specifically chasing the chav pound […] the chav market has been earning since the age of 16 and living for free with their parents, with many receiving supplementary income from them. (Barns, 2005: n.p.)

Some labels have greatly suffered from the ‘unwanted’ association, with traditional Burberry customers particularly frowning on the association after Rooney adopted the brand, as did I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! contestant Danniella Westbrook (Day, 2004, Sunday Times 2005; also Jackson & Show, 2008), with “the curse of the chav” soon casting its shadow on fashion brand Prada (Campaign, 2005: n.p.): My current cold appears, alas, to be especially common. In fact, the first thing it did when it moved in, razor-blading my throat on Monday; installing itself good and proper on Tuesday was demand a really, really big telly (with Sky) as well as a little something from Burberry. A cap, perhaps. I think I might even have the kind of cold that isn’t so much common as downright Chav. I think if my cold had a name it might be Kayleigh or Blane or Tayler or Chantel. (Ross, 2005: n.p.)  Thornton notes that “[t]he material conditions of youth’s investment in subcultural capital (which is part of the aestheticized resistance to social ageing) results from the fact that youth, from many class backgrounds, enjoy a momentary reprieve from necessity […] Freedom from necessity […] does not mean that youth have wealth so much as that they are exempt from adult commitments to the accumulation of economic capital. In this way, youth can be seen as momentarily enjoying what Bourdieu argues is reserved for the bourgeoisie, that is the ‘taste of liberty or luxury.’ British youth cultures exhibit that ‘stylization of life’ or ‘systemic commitment which orients and organizes the most diverse practices’ that develops as the objective distance from necessity grows (Bourdieu, 1996[1979]: 55–6)” (Thornton, 2003[1995]: 160–161). 32

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“It’s making marketers realize that not all customers are created equal,” said Mark Ritson, a professor of marketing at London Business School. “Some customers can actually be dangerous to the brand.” While chavs are said to favor a number of names, including the designers Gucci and Louis Vuitton, the apparel makers Hackett and French Connection, Nokia mobile phones and Stella Artois beer, it is Burberry that is most often associated with the trend. The company’s signature check pattern has been adopted by chavs as a sort of unofficial clan plaid; its baseball caps, and knockoffs of them, are uniform fixtures. (Pfanner, 2004: n.p.) For positional companies such as Burberry, the ‘elite’ connotations of the brand are vital to its success because ‘Consumer culture is crucially about the negotiation of status and identity—the practice and communication of social position’ (Slater 1997: 30). Unfortunately for Burberry, the ‘elite’ connotations associated with the brand were undermined when Burberry check was widely adopted as the badge of an ‘undesirable’ group, the ‘chavs,’ and within a few months the Burberry brand became synonymous with ‘lower’ class taste […] the way in which the ‘Chav’ subculture ‘adopted’ Burberry check was tantamount to a ‘tactical raid’ on the symbolic meaning of the brand, that is an example of what Eco termed ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare.’ (Hill et al., 2007: 144–145)

Beckham’s son Romeo, starring in the 2014 Burberry ad that contributed to turning the brand “from chic to chav to chic again” (Ostler, 2014: n.p.; also Cartner-Morley, 2018), may have caused even more confusion than the one experienced by some of the Singletrack (a mountain biking news magazine) Forum users in (Fig. 4.4) as to the indexical field of ‘chav’: Since the term ‘chav’ has been applied to “any number of different demographics,” its meaning is palpably shifting and thus both open to contestation and liable to appropriation of any sort (to the point of even being sarcastically connected to once president of Venezuela Hugo Chávez by one user): “pointers” are definitely needed. I have argued elsewhere (Di Martino, 2019) that a program like Geordie Shore has taken the commodification of Geordie and ‘chav’ a step further, endowing it with formulations that imply more complex value projects, in which it is not a status that is at stake but a lifestyle. Indeed,

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Fig. 4.4  Some users’ exchange on “Chav—What’s your definition?” on Singletrack

diametrically opposed to both the view of ‘chav’ as the result of “choice incompetence” (Bauman, 2005[1998]: 76 quoting Mead, 1992) and as a “style of life” which is imposed by one’s condition,33 the perspective that  Hughes argues, for example, that the characters of the 2012 British crime drama film Ill Manors (written and directed by rapper and actor Ben Drew AKA Plan B) face the lack of moral boundaries as “necessary, pragmatic and functional to survival”: 33

Katya steals a pram and a purse to save her baby and escape the sex-slave nightmare she has had to endure. Michelle prostitutes herself to feed her drug habit, which provides her with the only means of escaping her past. Aaron works for Ed selling drugs to afford the bare minimum life essentials. These examples illustrate the fluidity of moral and legal boundaries in the context of surviving at the margins of society. To survive in a neoliberal economy and with no capital to exchange, to some extent the only means by which these characters can acquire money to live is by eschewing their morality and becoming dehumanised in the process. It becomes apparent that the economic and social limitations this group endure force them to behave in this manner. (Hughes, 2018: 250)

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emerges from Geordie Shore is of ‘chav’ as a way of “forging a sense of self and creating cultural symbols that resonate with personal identity” (Hughes, 2018: 250). In this light, chav diacritics become a gateway to a whole sphere of activities (partying, sexual activity, etc.) synonymous with youth, the period of transition from the dependence of childhood, and the worries of adulthood. A lifestyle that is negatively valorized by incumbents of many adult social roles (schoolteachers, parents, etc.) may turn into a positively valorized one, where certain forms of public self-­ display are formulated as emblems of youth lifestyles. A lifestyle which, in its apparent lack of coherence, queers ‘deprived,’ ‘aspirational,’ ‘pragmatic’ (cf. note 33), and ‘posh’ chav meanings in a destratification strategy that erases previous layers. I expand on this aspect in Chap. 5. The texts presented in Sect. 4.1 have shown that the ‘difference’ depicted in ‘chav’ is often diacritic, in turn, of social contrasts. Some openly voice the working class/middle-class polarity, but this polarity is also detectable in other, sometimes not so overt but quite obvious argumentations. Let us consider some of the stretches of text produced in Sect. 3.2 again to explore this aspect: A bickering chavocracy that marries in register offices should suit advocates of a bicycling monarchy. But suddenly, a finger buffet, with all that subtext of pastel Crimplene and gift-wrapped toasters, strikes the media as too naff for words. Why no glass coaches and spit-roast Highgrove stag? Where is the self-respect of a country that may not be able to run a food standards agency but which defers to no one on choreographing a fairytale royal wedding? At the heart of the Windsors’ survival is a snobbery that permeates society. (Riddell, 2005: n.p.) The jury is out as to what extent the new look will catch on. Some of the more fashion-aware high-end actors––Uma Thurman and Natalie Portman, perhaps––are probably jumping into catwalk samples as I write. But I imagine it will be some time before the tulip-shaped skirt becomes de rigueur at Pangaea or wherever it is soap stars and chavistocrats hang out these days. It’s a great image: Girls Aloud falling out of a limo in bubble coats, Alice bands and opaque tights. Aah, a girl can dream. (The Guardian, 2005a: n.p.)

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Ideologizing difference works through comparison, in a semiotic process that Gal and Irvine describe very effectively, with a series of characterizing aspects. Among them, rhematization and erasure: In rhematization, a contrast of indexes is interpreted as a contrast in depictions: A conjecture focuses on some perceptible contrast of quality in indexical signs and takes that contrast to depict––not only to index––a contrast […] of quality in what was indexed. That is, a conjecture posits an axis of differentiation, creating a schema of qualitative contrast both for indexical signs and for what they are taken to represent. The contrasting qualities in the signs are “found” or projected onto the contrasting ­phenomena that the signs are taken to . The specific qualities presumed to be in contrast depend on the ideologies––background knowledge, interests and projects––that social actors bring to the scene of comparison. Often the contrast itself is erased from attention, making it seem as though the qualities inhere in each entity by itself. (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 19, emphasis in the original)

The first of the stretches of texts presented above, a metacommentary, is excellent evidence of the use of rhematization to ideologize difference: a contrast of such indices as bicycles and a finger buffet (with its subtext of pastel Crimplene and gift-wrapped toasters) on one side and glass coaches and spit-roast Highgrove on the other creates an axis of differentiation between chavs and chavnots,34 as well as between those journalists (with a particular political orientation) who take a finger buffet to be “too naff for words” and those who, like the one writing, would simply “let them eat vol-au-vents” (Riddell, 2005: n.p.), being themselves critical of that gaze, “an uptake––from some vantage point––that creates a sign relation” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 21–22). The second stretch of text is slightly less overt, but again rhematization would seem to be at work in such indices as tulip-shaped skirts, bubble coats, Alice bands and opaque tights, and limos, as well as in the mention of the elegant Pangaea Lounge in Brooklyn. Clothing and accessory  Tastes (likes/dislikes and styles of appreciation) are often mobilized as distinction strategies that can draw firm symbolic boundaries or can be used to police them. This is confirmed by an empirical analysis of British comedy taste drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews (Friedman, 2011, 2014). 34

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choices are understood as though their particular qualities iconically displayed some underlying social quality (cf. Gal & Irvine, 2019: 39). The difference between chavs and chavnots is not only ideologized through rhematizations. It also comes about more subtly through what Gal and Irvine call fractal recursivity (cf. Sect. 4.2),35 namely through continuous reproduction of the relation of difference. Gal and Irvine explain that the poles of the contrast (the most extreme versions of the registers) are also found on large-scale public occasions. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cameo in a popular Comic Relief video alongside chav teenager Lauren Cooper from The Catherine Tate Show is an excellent example of this (The Guardian, 2007). However, while a local ideology appears to link these registers with the non-overlapping social categories of chav and chavnot, in practice, as the Comic Relief video case just mentioned with Blair cannibalizing Lauren Cooper’s catchphrase “Am I bovvered?” illustrates, the registers are drawn upon by everyone (cf. Gal & Irvine, 2019: 43). The fractal replication of the same axis of contrast at different levels of inclusiveness is a common consequence of an ideology of contrasts, as Gal and Irvine explain. One way recursivity can work is the inward projection of a contrast, producing narrower categories: the “Sajid Chavid” joke mentioned in Sect. 3.2 is an excellent illustration of this, and so are the ‘chavistrocrat’ and ‘chavistocracy’ instances commented upon in the same section. Fractal principles, Gal and Irvine explain, can replicate the structure of difference internally, producing contrasts of ever-smaller magnitude. There is not just one social boundary or relevant distinction, but a scheme of stylistic differentiation that semiotically organizes relationships at many different levels. The scheme at work in the “Sajid Chavid” case, for example, appears to be: going to the opera vs. watching  Gal and Irvine name such differentiations recursivity because “the distinctions are repeated, in linked and positioned comparisons. The recursions are relative judgments, creating categories of objects that are self-similar. The comparisons produce analogies: diagrammatic icons within diagrammatic icons, indexically invoked in specific situations. As in all analogies, the terms and distinctions are never perfectly replicated. What remains the same is the principle of contrast that is established, and the similarities that result, through qualities arrayed on one axis of differentiation. We label these repetitions fractal because each contrast repeats a pattern within itself, in a way that resembles fractal patterns constructed in geometry” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 129–130, emphasis in the original). 35

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Star Trek and listening to U2 (totalpolitics, 2019); lack of “oratorical flourish and lyrical resources” vs. possession of them (Nelson, 2019a: n.p.; also Nelson, 2019b). This principle applies even more clearly in the ‘chavistocrat’ case: the ideological vision of the contrast between chav and chavnot is reenacted at a narrower scale, subdividing the chavnot category into chav/chavnot. The recursive structure organizes many situations and stylistic aspects, even when the register contrasts are subtle: there is an axis of differentiation around which styles contrast in all sorts of settings (cf. Gal & Irvine, 2019: 46) also organizing, by analogy, supposed divisions within an individual speaker, as the following 2004 Daily Mail piece—commenting on Blair’s holiday at then Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s villa in Sardinia—again featuring some type of Blair ‘encounter’ with ‘chav,’ illustrates: Who can tell me the faux pas made by Tony Blair when he was pictured with the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi? […] Blair’s gaff was a sartorial one, the carefully unbuttoned crisp T-shirt displaying a give-away tartan design on the collar […] our Prime Minister has dressed in the style of a chav. […] Maybe he has blundered in Burberry in an attempt to show his style-awareness. Like his insistence on not paying for his summer holidays, he fails to realise how it looks back home. Or maybe there is a more straightforward reason why he has donned the Burberry. […] He does work hard to look cool. He does crave “all things shiny.” His intelligence does smack of low cunning. And, of course, he does share his love of the look with the poodle. […] I’m afraid our Prime Minister does not just dress like a chav. He is one. (Shakespeare, 2004: n.p.)36  See also Oliver, 2004 (n.p.):

36

I don’t care if you are Tony Blair … … you’re not coming in dressed like that The cream Burberry polo shirt sported by the holidaying Tony Blair this week may have gone down well at Silvio Berlusconi’s villa in Sardinia. But he better not try wearing anything from the classic English designer if he fancies popping out for a pint in Leicester. To do so would run the risk of being confused with one of the binge-drinking hooligans on whom his government has declared war. Drinkers wearing Burberry have been banned from two pubs in the city centre because it is one of the favourite designers of a group of thugs.

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I have mentioned erasure as one of the aspects put forth by Gal and Irvine to illustrate the workings of the semiotic process at the basis of the ideologization of difference. One of the ways erasure manifests itself is the very emergence and dissemination of such metapragmatic labels for these different ways of doing (style) that attribute exclusive social categories as permanent qualities, disregarding the recursive practices that distribute their use throughout society. Emphasizing a binary opposition, this ideology fails to consider that social relationships and categories are never unidimensional: an ideology is “a totalizing vision in which some groups (or activities, or varieties) become invisible and inaudible. [They are] accorded no voice” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 49). Luckily, competing models co-exist within the same society, each potentially ideological or distorting from the perspective of the other (Agha, 2007): Chav chic How did trackie pants and crop tops suddenly become the go-to look for the global elite? […] You’ve no doubt noticed them, slouching around town in their hoodies and tracksuits. You wonder whether any of them have jobs to go to. You assume not, because they always look like they’re off to the gym. These are the global elite: millionaires in sportswear, the One Per Cent in chav’s clothing. Those at the top of the tree have appropriated the uniform of the disenfranchised in the ultimate act of fashionable transgression and social camouflage. […] Even the royals did it: in 2008, Princes William and Harry went to a chav-themed fancy dress party in baseball caps, tracksuit bottoms and strings of gold chains. (Walker, 2016: n.p.)

Ideologization of difference is also emphasized in many recontextualizations of “chav bops,” a phenomenon that various sources have attempted to spell out for non-locals. I am listing three sources here below. The first––drawn from a vocabulary textbook focusing on neologisms––expands on a definition published in a Guardian article commenting on The Sun’s piece “Future Bling of England,” which featured a picture of Prince William with other trainee officers at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst having a chav-themed fancy dress “to mark the completion of their first term” (Larcombe, 2006: n.p.; Harris, 2006). The second is a reader’s contribution to the BBC Coventry and Warwickshire

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column “Local Dialect––Tell us in your Words.” It invited readers to contribute words they use, “to describe everyday items––particularly if you think those words are only used in Coventry and Warwickshire” (BBC Coventry and Warwickshire, 2004: n.p.) as part of the BBC Voices Project, a snapshot of the many ways English is spoken across the UK in the early twenty-first century. This was “the most significant popular survey of regional English ever undertaken around the UK” (BBC, 2014: n.p.). The third source comes from the blog of a Canadian ex-pat in the United Kingdom: CHAV BOP It is a disco or party at which participants adopt clothing associated with the working-class youths popularly designated as ‘chavs’; such clothing includes tracksuits, chequered baseball caps, white trainers, and ostentatious jewellery. The so-called ‘chav bop’—a disco where one dresses up as a working-class person—is an immovable fixture not only at public schools, but also throughout Oxford’s colleges. Google the phrase and we receive predictable snaps of well-bred young men, with captions like Rock ‘ard,’ mugging for the camera using poses they have presumably learned from Goldie Lookin’ Chain videos. (The Guardian cited in Shoba 2014: loc. 605) katie at covenry skewls 2day we say: waggin’ it (to truant) minger (ugly) mingin (discusting) batch (roll) nep (fags) cosh (an approval) rolly (rol on deodrent) spritz (perfume) jakky (someone who wears too much make-up) chav-bop (townie rave)x. (BBC Coventry and Warwickshire, 2004: n.p.) Chav Party This past weekend turned out to be pretty funny. After a failed Lad’s Poker Night […], me and some friends headed to a house party in Islington. This bears mentioning because it was a theme party that latches onto a British concept I’ve come to love so much: the chav. […] See, the class system is still really ingrained in the psyche here (made evident by the fact that Brits often asked me “So, what does your dad do?.” Remarkably subtle…). So their insults tend to focus around class (i.e., you toff, yob, chav, etc…). […] It has to be said that chav ranks as #1 in my “British words I’ve Learnt Over Here” dictionary. When something is bad or tastes gross or the

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weather isn’t good, you can just describe it as “chavvy.” If you saw a movie that sucked, you can tell your friend “don’t go and see that flick, it’s chav.” The list is endless really…. just like their desire to cause harm and vandalism. (Great Expatation, 2010: n.p., emphasis in the original)

The definition in the first extract ultimately points to an 18-year-old A-level student from Harrogate and occasional Times Education Supplement columnist who “found himself dispatched by his state school to a debating seminar organized by the English-Speaking Union” at a private school and spotted a variety of pictures hanging on this school’s walls. Among them, a chav-themed school disco: […] all these rosy-cheeked, foppish-looking public school kids dressed in baseball caps and Adidas tracksuits. It looked a bit pathetic; at first I suppose I felt slight pity for them. But then I thought about it another way: here were the most privileged kids in Britain pretending to be poor people. (Harris, 2006: n.p.)

The Guardian journalist’s uptake of the event is spelled very clearly: The chav phenomenon––the mass mockery of a certain kind of young, Burberry-check wearing, borderline criminal, proletarian youth––has been with us for more than three years. Its collision with public [meaning elite private] schools, military academies and high-end universities, however, surely serves to confirm what some people suspected all along: that the C-word actually denotes the mind-boggling revival of privileged people revelling in looking down their noses at the white working class, that social entity whose mere mention in certain company can cause either a palpable frisson of unease or loud ridicule. (Harris, 2006: n.p.)

A cluster of contrasting qualities (borderline criminal, proletarian vs. privileged, reveling) makes the lifestyles narrated iconic of the two person-­ types dealt with in a process of rhematization, with the contrasting labels constructed potentially affecting the kinds of further conjectures that can be made about the event. One wonders how much of the certainty of the reading comes from the way the piece of news involving Prince William had been framed in The Sun and the need to make it news in the first place:

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The headline inside was “Future Bling of England”; the strapline screamed, “Wills wears Chav Gear in Army Snap.” Over two pages built around a snap of 30 trainee officers at Sandhurst, yesterday’s Sun gleefully recounted how the heir to the throne “joined in the fun as his platoon donned chav-­ themed fancy dress to mark the completion of their first term.” Wills, we were told, “went to a lot of trouble thinking up what to wear” (white baseball cap, sweatshirt, two gold chains), and was challenged to “put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a royal.” Apparently, he struggled to sound quite as proletarian as required, though he was said to be “making hand gestures and swaggering from side to side as he walked across the parade square.” (Harris, 2006: n.p.)

The second definition of “chav bops,” which I spotted on a page that is very instructive on the meanings attributed to ‘chav’ by several people from Coventry and Warwickshire (those who chose to contribute to the BBC column), ultimately confirms the meaning of the practice for some: not only is it described as a ‘townie’ rave, it is framed within a picture of truancy, ugliness, excessive make-up, etc. Even more so the third definition: from this person (an outsider)’s perspective, the practice appears ostensibly offensive, and based, as we gather from the extract below (coming from the same source), on the assumption that chavs are mere parasites on British society, a typification presupposed in a framework of understanding constructed through institutionalized practices: The Chav’s Hobbies Chavs don’t work, instead earning income from unemployment benefits that hard-working people like myself pay for.37 They live in council estates (read: housing projects) and spend most of their time sitting outside drinking cheap cider, yelling at people walking by in unintelligible English, throwing up on the sidewalk, and spreading hatred and fear. They love fighting with random people and inciting racism and knife fights. The chav is to be considered armed and dangerous. Chavs also spend a great deal of  See Day, 2020’s recap of research conducted on the issue of discourses around labor and the consideration that the current dominant discourse, which also regulates readings from media texts, both excludes the idea that voluntary community work and other forms of unpaid labor are ‘real’ work, and only considers waged labor as essential for positive mental health and wellbeing despite evidence that workplaces can be ‘toxic’ environments. 37

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their time procreating, as this means the government will move them into a bigger house and give them more money in the form of child tax credits. Oh, the joys of living in a nanny state. (Great Expatation, 2010: n.p.)

This reading of chav bops as an enactment of the view of chavs as parasites––well-rooted as it appears to be in the chav-bashing atmosphere so common in the first decade of the twenty-first century––adds up to the (similarly negative) opinion that as working-classness is a desirable consumer good, those chavs who do work for a living are offered more opportunities. Opportunities taken away from ‘posh’ members of society: Withnail and I star Richard E Grant: Please make me a chav Richard E Grant, the actor, claims that he would win more roles if he was working class. […] “Actors always think that others are getting more work than them. In my case, they usually are. Tim Spall is not a posh actor and he works a great deal more than me. If I spoke like Tim Spall, I’d probably get more parts.” (Walker, 2012: n.p.) “It’s virtually impossible to be middle class in pop these days,” [Sophie Ellis-Bextor] complains. Loads of pop stars are middle class, but talk it down for the sake of coolness, I say. “Do you think there are loads of middleclass people? There used to be, like the Stones. Now it’s really unpopular to be middleclass. It’s worse than being upper class or lower class. Middle class is worst. (Hattenstone, 2002: n.p.)

The Guardian journalist’s outburst (Harris, 2006 just above) can be understood in this light. However, I wonder if the despicable practices we are discussing (where mockery of the ‘disenfranchised’ is indeed meant–– not all uptakes of the same event are ever equal) can be used as evidence that ‘chav’ is not indeed the prerogative of a specific group of people. Moreover, I wonder how many of these practices could also be made to collocate with more overt carnivalesque alternative social spaces characterized by freedom and equality. Among these middle- and upper-class young people doing chav bops, do some ultimately do it because they would like to look the same as their same-age peers from other social classes in terms of informality, freedom to go for scruffy and cheap clothes, for example? Are some of these practices, at least partly and for

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some, forms of public self-display formulated as emblems of youth lifestyles? Are they ultimately queering middle- and upper-class lifestyles?

4.3 Visibility of the Sign: The Making of Chav Bodies Reflecting on the fairly widespread chav-chastising attitude in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Little draws attention to the shift that ‘chav’ has made from being “a symbolic construct to a real, lived experience and to a Real figure which we are told to deride and fear” as an issue that “would warrant serious examination” (Little, 2011: 8). Having focused on chav derision and touched upon chav fear in the closing part of Sect. 4.2, I move on, in this section, to explore the second aspect Little identified as deserving of attention. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Dent, 2013[2012]) informs us of the existence of an association between hoodies38 and chavs that foregrounds the perceived intimidating and fearmongering undertones of the semiotic construct (“a potential hooligan”), while also subtly suggesting a connection with black identity that will be explored later in this section:39 Hood The term also refers to a young person who wears such a garment, and who is therefore considered to be a potential hooligan. Particularly when  Featherstone (2013) effectively describes the hoodie as “the capitalist other.”  Writing from a different perspective, Bell illustrates how the Romany ‘chav’ has recently come “full circle, now negatively imposed from the outside” (Bell, 2015: 127–128) through the re-­ inscription of Romanés communities’ identities––also precariously related with whiteness (Nayak, 2009)––as chavs in such reality and post-documentary television programs as Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (BFGW, 2010), Thelma’s Gypsy Girls (2013) and Big Fat American Gypsy Weddings (BFAGW, 2012–). Indeed, the scholar argues that “[a]s traditional GRT [Gypsies, Romanies and Travellers] ways of life and livelihood are increasingly dying out, the ‘romantic gypsy’ of the nineteenth century imagination gives way to the anti-social ‘gyppo,’ ‘pikey’ or ‘chav’.” (Bell, 2015: 130) Also consider Jensen & Ringrose, 2014, which contends that whereas the female ‘chav’ is regarded as excessively aggressive, the ‘gypsy bride’ is portrayed as deserving of the reader’s pity.  To fully appreciate how ‘chav’ functions as a pervasive cultural trope, also see Bullen’s arguments about the exaggerated traits of wags as chavs and the latter’s choice “to write their own stories to counter these critiques [and] attempt to dispel stereotypes or provide alternate images” (Bullen, 2014: 145). 38 39

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worn along with a baseball cap, it has become associated with the chav. In 2005, British artists Gilbert and George, representing the UK at the Venice Biennale, contributed a photographic work called Hooded, in which they are shown flanked on each side by a young black man wearing a red hoodie. (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Dent, 2013[2012]: n.p.)

If we focus on hoodies before exploring the specific association that may have encouraged association with chavs, it is not too hard to imagine how they have been construed as icons.40 This comes about through a semiotic process already hinted at in Sect. 4.2 that makes features indexing social groups or activities look like iconic representations (cf. Irvine & Gal, 2000: 37): rhematization (Gal, 2005; also see Gal & Irvine, 2019: 19).41 Quoting Parmentier (1994: 17), Gal (2013: 34) explains that “‘rhemes are signs whose interpretants represent them as being icons.’” This means that the relation of sign and object is taken to be not only indexical but also one of similarity. A 2006 Observer piece may help illustrate this process. It reports on former Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to “completely re-­ engineer the Conservatives’ image on crime […] with a remarkable speech calling for more understanding of ‘hoodies’”: In a ground-breaking speech calling for more ‘love’ to be shown to adolescents, the Tory leader will attack bans on hooded tops––a symbol of urban menace to many adults––that were imposed by a shopping centre last year […] Cameron will tell a conference on social justice tomorrow that politicians should be discussing causes of crime not its symptoms. He will say: ‘The hoodie is a response to a problem, not a problem in itself. We––the people in suits––often see hoodies as aggressive, the uniform of a rebel army of young gangsters. But hoodies are more defensive than offensive. They’re a way to stay invisible in the street. In a dangerous environment the  Wong explains that multifacetedness and indexical expansiveness may “increase the propensity of an indexical sign to become perceived as an icon: a […] feature that is multifaceted is more likely to be indexically expansive, and the more indexical linkages that a […] feature evokes, the easier it is to weave a complex story around it” (Wong, 2021: 66). 41  Irvine and Gal draw on the Peircean view of rheme as “a Sign which, for its interpretant, is a Sign of qualitative possibility, that is, is understood as representing such and such” (Peirce, 1940 [1897, 1903, 1910]): 103). 40

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best thing to do is keep your head down, blend in. […].’ (Hinsliff, 2006: n.p.)

The extract illustrates how an item of clothing is understood as the index of a social persona from a specific ideological perspective (represented in the text through the image of “people in suits”). Wearing a hoodie is perceived and framed, from such an ideological perspective, to be indexical of potential criminal identities, in contrast to the hoodies’ image of themselves as actually sheltering from crime directed at them. Presuming not covering one’s face to be ‘the’ natural practice, “people in suits” assume that wearing a hoodie reflects having something to hide. They single out a perceived contrast in the qualia of the signs: having something to hide in the hoodies’ practices vs. having nothing to hide in that of people in suits. The event that may have set off large-scale iconization of hoodies in Britain is Bluewater’s (a shopping centre in Kent) decision to draw up a dress code for its customers, forbidding clothing that obscures the face, including hooded tops and baseball caps: The country’s biggest shopping centre has banned youths wearing hooded tops to stop anti-social behaviour. The Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, which comprises more than 330 stores, yesterday brought in a “zero tolerance approach to intimidating conduct” after shoppers complained about groups of loitering teenagers. (Sapsted, 2005: n.p.) […] the managers of Bluewater shopping centre in Kent have drawn up a code of conduct for the centre—a dress code, if you will. Wearing clothing that obscures the face-hooded tops, baseball caps—will not be allowed. Those persevering with such anti-social, CCTV-foiling fashion choices will be asked to leave the mall. (McLean, 2005: n.p.)

What may have triggered the analogy with chavs is a simultaneous–– though actually previously enforced––ban issued by the police in

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Northamptonshire on chav-style clothing, as reported on the BBC website:42 ‘Chav ban’ plan to deter thefts Police are trying to cut crime in shops─by banning customers wearing “Chav”-style clothes. Baseball caps and hooded tops are among the garments which would mean wearers could be barred from stores. The clothes are popular with youths who follow “Chav” fashion, which has grown in popularity over recent years. (BBC News 2004: n.p.)

In 2006 (Notice below) and 2007 (Fig. 4.5) some businesses in the London area were still banning customers wearing hoodies as well as items of clothing commonly associated with chavs: Over 18’s only No hoodies, baseball caps or tracksuit-bottoms ID required. R.O.A.R. (Ford, 2006: n.p.)

Cameron’s approach to crime as laid out in the text presented earlier was framed by Labour in the infamous ‘hug-a-hoodie’ parody phrase (Fleming, 2011), with more outrage being expressed when a bronze statue of a teenager wearing a hooded top to be erected in Angus was criticized for “glorifying hooligan culture” (BBC News, 2005: n.p.). The hoodie issue acquired center stage again the following year, after the parodied picture of the former Minister with a gun-salute hoodie in the background was released by the press: Cameron was visiting the Wythenshawe area to talk about gun culture and the young man, black tracksuit and  Hayward & Yar, 2016[2011] contend that “the reality of groups of young people, nearly exclusively dressed in sportswear, who engage in minor forms of unruly behavior in and around town centres, entertainment zones and certain fast-food outlets” is only the latest articulation of the phenomenon of marginalized youths “occupying public space(s) and falling foul of both the authorities and public opinion” (Hayward & Yar, 2016 [2011]: 535). The two scholars also give an account of the “plethora of (highly derogatory) terms” which emerged in the 1990s to label such phenomenon and the related style. These terms were characterized by distinct geographical variation. 42

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Fig. 4.5  “No Hats or Hoodies” poster in the window of a fast-food restaurant in Enfield Highway, North London in 2007. (© Nina Grant (Nina Grant generously allowed free reproduction of the picture), @ninachildish on Flickr)

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hoodie, made a shooting action with his hand behind the MP’s back while photographers were taking a picture of him (BBC News, 2007a, b), producing “one of the most iconic political photographs of the decade, as well as any number of smug ‘Still want to hug a hoodie, Dave?’ tabloid headlines,” as a recent exhibition in Rotterdam remembers with a film, which brings together different representations of the hoodie (Greig, 2019: n.p.). The Archbishop of York supported the hoodie cause the following year, even wearing a hoodie himself (Manchester Evening News, 2007). Writing for The Guardian in 2011, Braddock still laments the politicization of the hoodie in the UK, which has come to symbolize “the furtive menace of Britain’s inner-city teenage population”: Feared, derided, misunderstood and still resolutely un-hugged, the utilitarian, hugely popular sportswear garment, the hoodie, has staged a comeback against a backdrop of pyromania and rioting. Worn by millions every day: a generation’s default wardrobe choice was transformed into an instant criminal cloak for London’s looting youth. (Braddock, 2011: n.p.)

Reminding the reader that most of the banlieue youth he had interviewed in 2007––when reporting on the Paris unrest––wore hoodies, “along with the other staples of the 21st-century, hip-hop redux wardrobe––tracksuit bottoms or voluminous jeans, expensive trainers, baseball caps, black Thinsulate gloves and the occasional bandana,” the journalist remembers that the youths he met around the time of the London murders of teenagers Billy Cox, James Andre Smart-Fordd, and Michael Dosunmu shared the same uniform: “the hoodie was as ubiquitous as the two-piece suit in the financial centers of Paris and London.” While admitting that the hoodie “was a political symbol long before it became a policy initiative” and that all clothing––as a form of nonverbal language––is political, he recognizes that it carries particular stigma in Britain as well as in France, where “‘Sarkozy stigmatised a whole group of kids who have the look of those who act violently,’ […] ‘Because they wear a cap, tracksuit, a scooter, shaved head […].’” However, young people’s reasons for wearing a hoodie are legitimate, Braddock contends:

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Regardless of its origins, however, for the kids who live in the suburbs and inner-city estates where threat and violence are everyday realities, the hoodie is, above all, a tool for blending in, rather than standing out […]. For sure, a hoodie is a useful tool to avoid identification for a range of gang-related rituals. Yet for teenagers under intense peer pressure to ­conform to a collective identity, acceptance means adopting a prescribed outfit. For some, there may be no choice but to wear one and shoulder its associations. (Braddock, 2011: n.p.)

This case does not appear to be too dissimilar to the one discussed in Sect. 4.1. While a critique of hoodie demonization is indeed the reason underlying the piece of writing, in the first extract from the article presented just above, the author echoes associations of hoodies with events of urban unrest, opening up the possibility for uptakes that reinforce the hoodie-criminality equation. Two sets of personae––and times, places, events––(the French banlieue riots and the teenager shootings in South London) are presented as parallel indexicalities for the hoodie. These indexicalities are similar insofar as they are related (the youth involved wore the same garment), so they may come to reinforce the iconic power of the item of clothing in some of the subsequent uptakes. For the journalist, the text clearly serves a different purpose, and it will hopefully perform this task in most uptakes: it intends to highlight that in two different European countries (the UK and France), a hoodie is indexical of criminality, in contrast to the hoodies’ image of themselves as (ideally) just blending in. By 2014, the BBC website appears to be drawing a sharp distinction between hoodies and chavs in the profile of Dean, the fictitious character created in order to introduce readers to teenage labels in Them, an online series produced in early 2008 about teen labels in the UK: What do I think? A hoodie is not a chav! My laid back attitude does not mean I don’t care; it’s just how I am. My friends and family are the most important thing to me… football is a close second. Wearing a hoodie does not make me a criminal. Wearing a hoodie is comfortable and part of the fashion where I live. (BBC−Switch 2014: n.p.)

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While negative uptakes of hoodie representations did not cease altogether, with artist Kayne West’s slot bringing hoodies on stage at the 2005 Brit Awards attracting criticism for promoting gang culture (Dorset Echo 2015), for example, hoodies can be said to have received some clear positive institutional recontextualization, which chavs have not experienced. In reality, the only appreciative representations of chavs outside the chav community come exclusively from individual directors, writers, artists, or journalists (cf. Sects. 3.2 and 4.2). The visibility generated by the 2004 and 2005 bans and the recontextualizations that followed these events can be said to have constituted the ‘matter’ of chav bodies: “(m)atter does not ‘exist’ in and of itself, outside or beyond discourse, but is rather repeatedly produced through performativity” (Fraser, 1999: 111), which “brings into being that which it names” (Butler, 2011[1993]: 222). The forms and ways in which this visibility occurred has led several scholars to conclude that chavs have been constructed through being “constantly made visible in conditions not of their own choosing” (Skeggs, 2004: 156). As hinted right at the start of this section, a fil rouge connects hoodies and chav bodies to black bodies. In Sect. 3.1, I have mentioned that Kehily and Nayak have drawn attention to the fact that supposedly chav adornments such as “sovereign rings and large hooped gold ear rings are also associated with Travellers.” The two scholars have also connected the wearing of such accessories to the “‘not-quite-white’ status of charver kids”: At a transnational level, comparisons can be made between representations of Britain’s travelling population and America’s rural ‘trailer park trash,’ both of whom occupy a precarious ‘off white’ status in their respective national body politic. Even a ‘celebrity chav’ such as Cheryl Cole […] has been constructed as ‘dirty white,’ with emphasis placed on her strong regional accent, occasional violent outbursts […] and black boyfriends […]. Charvers are represented as society’s new urban primitives, dwelling in ‘sink estates’ beyond the restorative powers of gentrification and urban regeneration. (Kehily and Nayak 2014: 154)

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Tyler too foregrounds the idea that the chav “bodies forth a whiteness polluted by poverty and contaminated by territorial proximity to poor black and migrant populations43” (2013: 188). Schmitt identifies in this notion of the ‘contaminated’ (Tyler, 2008: 26) or ‘tainted’ (Nayak, 2003: 85) white a further link which connects the chav with more marginal groups. Indeed, the nineteenth-century British image of the poor, American ‘white trash,’ and the chav all stand, in his opinion, for “a whiteness defined and qualified as inferior by poverty” (Schmitt, 2018: 48). Scerri has recently opened an interesting window onto similar but less explored offensive labels existing in the United States and Australasia (“the Appalachian hillbilly” and “the outersuburban bogan”44), contending that such moralizing stereotypes of white working-class citizens have proliferated among both conservatives and liberals across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australasia, and Europe since the global financial meltdown in 2008, “to allege white working-class citizens’ failure to adapt to the demands of the globalizing political economy” (Scerri, 2019: 202). Whereas historically it is white working-class women who were often ethnicized due to their supposed sexual promiscuity (Gilman, 1992), current political rhetoric distinguishes types of whiteness within chavs at large: “the respectable who can be incorporated, and the non-respectable who represent a threat to civilization, citizenship and, ultimately, global capitalism” (Skeggs, 2004: 91). Hollingworth and Williams contend that “‘(c)hav’ comes to represent everything about whiteness that the middle-­ classes are not” (Hollingworth & Williams, 2009: 479). During a 2011 BBC Two’s Newsnight discussion about the London riots, historian David Starkey notoriously brought the point well into the open, claiming that “whites have become black” (O’Carroll, 2011: n.p.): “What has happened is that the substantial section of the chavs that you [Owen Jones] wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture  Tyler contends that because the underclass is imagined as a race and not a class, their poverty and disadvantage are conceived as “not economic or even properly political issues, but as a hereditary condition, a disease” (Tyler, 2013: 188, emphasis in the original). 44  On the bogan issue, see also Pini et al. 2012. 43

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has become the fashion,” he said. “Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together… which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England. This is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.” […] It is not black culture that is the problem but rather a certain form of black culture, i.e., the ‘nihilistic’ […] hip hop and gangster rap culture that is so ‘destructive.’ […] Just walk out onto the streets of Manchester (or anywhere else for that matter) and you will see guys of a certain age wearing their trousers low to reveal their boxers (someone should tell them this is not attractive), wearing heavy gold chains and caps worn at a slight tilt in the style of big rap artists. (Ramzan, 2011: n.p.)

One Daily Mail piece covering the issue foregrounded ‘chav’ also in the title (“White Chavs have become black—David Starkey TV outburst provokes rage row,” Hastings, 2011: n.p.). The BBC received nearly 700 complaints in response to Starkey’s remarks, and a petition to Ofcom was raised for the broadcaster to apologize, gaining over 3600 signatures, with Labour leader Ed Miliband also condemning the race comments as “disgusting and outrageous” (BBC News, 2011: n.p.). So should a publicly funded broadcaster apologise, if a lot of people find a contributor’s views so objectionable? Some of Dr Starkey’s analysis was downright odd—like his statement that anyone hearing David Lammy, the well-educated, black Tottenham MP speak, would think he was white. Plenty of other British black people speak without resort to Afro-American patois. But he did raise an issue plenty of viewers would think worthy of discussion: the cultural and social factors forming the way that some inner-­ city youths conduct themselves. Nor could it reasonably be denied that the “gangsta” culture of hooded young men and contempt for the “Feds,” previously known as the police, played a major role in unleashing some of the violence and disorder, even if others from other social and ethnic backgrounds joined in. (The Economist, 2011: n.p.)

However, as this stretch of text and the previous one show, not all Starkey’s remarks were dismissed in the recontextualizations that followed the Newsnight discussion. Focusing on the presence of ‘chav’ in public discourse, Bennett has not only identified traces of the presence of (stereotypes of ) Black Englishes in chavspeak (Bennett, 2011: 148, 2012: 11)

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but also noticed that “stylisations of and commentary on chavspeak […] for example, in Armstrong and Miller’s ‘chav pilots’ television sketches (BBC 2007–present) make apparent features of Black Englishes prominent” (Bennett, 2012: 12). Moreover, Bennett contends, this aspect appears to be looked at as a form of inauthenticity: “the supposed use of Black English in chavspeak is similar to the stereotype of Jafaican. The chav, like the speaker of Jafaican, is represented as a kind of ‘race traitor,’ albeit a fairly mild and perhaps just harmlessly delusional one” (Bennett, 2012: 15, emphasis in the original). Hoodies, fake blacks: some scholars believe that such derogatory terminology as ‘chavs,’ ‘underclass,’ ‘new migrants,’ and ‘white trash’ convey precisely this feeling of contempt; some whites are just less white within a hierarchy of whiteness (Webster, 2008). Exactly like some middle- and upper-class individuals are less middle- and upper-class within a hierarchy of middle- and upper-classness: they have some chav in them. In many contextualizations and recontextualizations, ‘chav’ ultimately appears to be just another way of wording difference.

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5 New Digital Media and the Chav

In Chaps. 3 and 4, we have seen that ‘chav’ has been semiotized as ‘alien’ at its first emergence in British culture, at the turn of the twenty-first century. This chapter examines some of the TikTok videos in which the ‘chav’ issue has recently re-emerged to understand whether such videos draw on and consolidate this perspective; alternatively, whether they appear to question it or even re-inscribe it entirely or in part. Section 5.1 presents a review of the main aspects of TikTok, a platform intended for creating, sharing, and responding to, other people’s short videos: metaxis (the condition of in-betweenness in which metamodernism is embedded) seems to effectively describe the TikTok individual, caught between dichotomous directions: the real and the virtual; reception and production. Section 5.2 focuses on the issue of TikTok as an “appropriation accelerant” and TikTok videos as original assemblages of bits drawn from a variety of different sources whose wide—mostly anonymous—availability suggests that a redefinition of intellectual property may be impending. Section 5.3 discusses Chav check videos, in which TikTok users deploy a range of chav semiotic resources to reach out to other users and invite them to align with their performances in the construction of ‘chav.’ This construction process is performed through a ‘queering’ of chav

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object-­signs, which are detached from their supposedly original sources and re-­used in novel contexts. Section 5.4 discusses some of the fresh indexicalities that appear to emerge from some of these performances. Section 5.5 analyzes one Chav check video in detail to illustrate the semiotic processes through which some Chav check TikTokers appropriate chav object-signs and incorporate them into their performances, and how such recontextualizations de-chav chav resources while retaining some of their stylistic functions.

5.1 The TikTok Platform TikTok is a social media platform for creating, sharing, and responding to others’ short (3- to 60-second-long1) videos which loop each time they reach the end. These amateur semiotic objects are targeted at young2 mobile phone users, and the activities featured in them are primarily movement-based (lip-syncing, dance routines, gymnastics, comic sketches, etc.), so the body is definitely more central in TikTok than it is in other social networks. Memes are also popular, and again they take on the innovative format of “embodied memes,” since “the raw material being remixed is the user’s body”: “the user performs the behavior associated with the meme format” (Munger, 2020: n.p.). In short, TikTok is essentially a virtual play structure. Editing TikTok videos reproduces the elaborate post-production of professional cinema through applying sophisticated audiovisual effects to the design of a virtual playground. This constructs an experience of intensified play. In this light, TikTok is more of a creative than a social media platform: it “liberates young people to play without adhering to the visual styles, narratives, and online cultures of the past” (Bresnick, 2019: 10): At its very core, TikTok is about having fun and not taking yourself too seriously. […] You’re mostly uploading and packaging your personality in  The platform is now experimenting with 3-minute videos (Al-Heeti, 2020).  According to statistics, 41% of users lie within the 16–24 range (Mohsin, 2020).

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all its whimsical glory. TikTok benefits from the liberating and non-­ competitive atmosphere it’s fostered. Users are free from the weighty shackles of trying to fit in or thinking first about performance metrics when uploading videos. Instead, they’re excited to reveal an authentic version of themselves or, alternatively, a heightened perception of whom they aspire to be […] maybe the most interesting distinction between TikTok and its competitors is its “come join the fun” way to presenting challenges. […] It ensures everyone is engaged and not solely judging from the sidelines. For TikTok, engagement isn’t exclusively watching your feed; they want you (and will prompt you) to be active. There are various dares, competitive dance memes, and even joke-making. (Planoly, 2019: n.p.)

The freedom granted by the platform should, of course, not be overemphasized: individual agency is culturally constituted (Bourdieu, 1990). TikTok users act through a specific culture, not against that culture; they are not genuinely free; they are ‘regimented’ by different rules—“they want you (and will prompt you) to be active”—which are conceptualized as resources through their being used in human action (“TikTok allows users to share, view, and create short videos that range from comedic skits to lip-syncing, dancing, and meme-making”). However, the platform does revolve around the type of profile that futurist Alvin Toffler was conjuring up for future consumers in the eighties: that of ‘prosumers’ (1980), people who produce many of their own goods and services. Building up on Dan Gillmor’s notion of the “former audience” (Gillmor, 2004), Rosen had introduced the concept of “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” in 2006: The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another—and who today are not in a situation like that at all. […] The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. (Rosen, 2011[2006]: n.p., emphasis in the original)

Probably due to a similar understanding while opening up new possible perspectives for the current century, at the start of the twenty-first

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century, performatism (a cultural reaction to postmodernism that started in the mid-nineties) pointed to the idea that “(t)he medium is the messenger, and no longer the message: it is the extension of a paradoxical authorial subject pointing out his (or her) own materiality and fallibility” (Eshelman, 2000/2001: n.p.). This consideration appears particularly true of TikTok, where the focus is on the act, hence on the individual acting—unhindered by fallibility (most of the videos on the platform display minimal knowledge and skills)—rather than on the object created through the act or the meaning generated through it. Indeed, this object is often one of the many identities performed by the user through the semiotic assemblage of text, audio, and dynamic visuals from different sources. For example, “TikTok’s platform feature ‘use this sound’ affords the creative reuse of audio clips or songs from videos that users were just watching. TikTok employs an automated system to identify original creators but the system frequently obscures or misattributes the ‘original’ source of the audio. Subsequent creators may then use sounds without any connection to the original author” (Valdovinos et al., 2020: 1; cf. also Sect. 5.2 below on this point). Discussing Antonio Garza (a female identifying individual)’s public transformation from an ignored high-school student in Austin, Texas to a mainstream celebrity for high schoolers and YouTubers, a New York Times 2019 article connects the “unleashing of our multiple selves” generated by the most recent media to metamodernism: This chaos—this cubism, this unleashing of our multiple selves—is a feature, not a bug, of the online world. It’s arguably its defining characteristic for those who grew up there. You could attribute all the jump cuts, all the endlessly iterating memes, to a destroyed attention span. But it’s also evidence of something deeper, a mind-set people are just trying to name. The Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker settled on the term metamodernism […] The sensibility is, as Luke Turner, a British artist and the author of “The Metamodernist Manifesto,” puts it, “a kind of informed naïveté […] the internet’s McLuhan moment, brought to us by teenagers who, as such, spend their days feeling like 10 different people at once and believe they can, and should, express them all. We all contain multitudes. The kids seem to know that’s allright. (Weil, 2019: n.p.)

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In metamodernism Vermeulen and van den Akker foresee the rise of a new modernism, having noticed that new generations of artists display tendencies that can no longer be explained in terms of the postmodern: they express “a (often guarded) hopefulness and (at times feigned) sincerity that hint at another structure of feeling, intimating another discourse.” This emergent sensibility, Vermeulen and van den Akker contend, is “characterized by the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment” (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010: 2).3 The two scholars situate it “epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism” (Ibidem), and explain that it manifests itself in very different phenomena, marked by a common element, i.e., their anti-utopism: […] an opposition to “the” modern—to utopism, to (linear) progress, to grand narratives, to Reason, to functionalism and formal purism, and so on. These positions can most appropriately be summarized, perhaps, by Jos de Mul’s distinction between postmodern irony (encompassing nihilism, sarcasm, and the distrust and deconstruction of grand narratives, the singular and the truth) and modern enthusiasm (encompassing everything from utopism to the unconditional belief in Reason). (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010: 4)

The current historical situation, characterized by financial crises, geopolitical instabilities, and climatological uncertainties has led to changes in the economic system (a new form of capitalism accompanied by the shift from a white-collar to a green collar economy) and in the political order (the disintegration of the political center at both a geopolitical level and a national level), generating a restructuring of the political discourse with the simultaneous emergence of other crucial issues such as the need for the development of alternative energy and a sustainable urban future, which have affected our material landscape. The cultural response to these changes is the gradual abandonment of “tactics such as pastiche and

 On metamodernism, see also Rudrum & Stavris, 2015.

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parataxis for strategies like myth and metaxis, melancholy for hope, and exhibitionism for engagement” (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010: 5). Metaxis (or metaxy, μεταξύ) is a Greek word that Plato used to refer to the condition of in-betweenness that characterizes the human condition. It effectively describes the TikTok individual caught between the real and the virtual, reception and production. The reasons behind the widespread use of the platform are varied. However, personal motivation rather than personality traits would appear to be the main incentive, some studies emphasizing “archiving, self-­ expression, social interaction and peeking” as significant predictors to TikTok usage behaviors (Omar & Dequan, 2020: n.p.), some others “(m)otivations of fame-seeking, self-expression and social recognition […], the gratifications of relationship building and relationship maintenance […] sought out via the contributory, rather than the participatory function of TikTok” (Bucknell Bossen & Kottasz, 2020: 463–478). Being user-driven, the platform would appear to be a democratized environment. However, users only have limited control over real visibility: As an inherently political technology, […] the platform is largely userdriven […] which allows anyone the chance to “go viral,” in a sense: if enough users “respond favorably” to a video (i.e., liking or commenting), the algorithm may recommend it to a much larger audience of users, regardless of who follows the author. […] But some aspects of TikTok push the platform toward Mumford’s category of “authoritarian” technologies, described as “systemcentered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable.” Namely, users have limited control over what becomes visible on the platform, and visibility is highly skewed–the top 1% of videos in our dataset accounted for 76% of all plays. (Bandy & Diakopoulos, 2020: n.p.)

Recent research alerting to the growing presence of harmful content— which is thought to be underestimated—contends that the presence of extremist groups on the platform is worrying since, unlike all other social media, most TikTok users are underage: in theory, the company’s Terms of Service does not allow people under 13 to use its platform, but many users appear much younger in videos, so they are “naïve and gullible when it comes to malicious contents” (Weimann & Masri, 2020: 1).

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Some users are reported to be sharing calls for violence against people of color and Jews, as well as neo-Nazi propaganda, with the platform still lagging behind in terms of how to protect users from disturbing content. Expressing political views has seen a recent spurt (Medina et al., 2020), too, and there appear to be more concerns in this respect: […] while hate speech and sexual harassment exist on the platform without repercussions, other speech is being censored. One user’s account was blocked after they posted a video speaking about Muslim’s [sic] in China (Zhong, 2019a) […] A policy that claims to have been put into place to address cyberbullying was actually suppressing the videos of disabled users, preventing them from going viral (Kelion, 2019). An effort to provide “locally sensitive” moderation resulted in the banning of LGBTQ+ content (Hern, 2019a). TikTok, like all social media platforms, can also be a platform for spreading misinformation, conspiracies and hoaxes, and there is concern about the ability to counter that within the platform (Tardáguila, 2019). […] It […] has built technology for face swapping on videos, […] a major concern on several levels from privacy to misinformation (Constine, 2017). (Zhong, 2019b: n.p.; also see Broderick, 2019; Hern, 2019b, c)

However, there are also many cases of good practice: for example, the platform has been used (Basch et  al., 2020) or proposed to be used (Eghtesadi & Florea, 2020) to convey public health messages, to facilitate scientific public engagement (Hayes et al., 2020), to create and engage with scientific content (Lovett et al., 2020), and to communicate science to the younger generation (Zeng et al., 2021). Moreover, like other social media platforms, it has acquired, in the popular imagination, an almost ‘therapeutic’ role during the Covid-19 emergency, “the perfect medium for the splintered attention spans of lockdown” (Haigney, 2020: n.p.). Focusing, in particular, on the notion of the transformation of girls’ “bedroom culture” (McRobbie Garber, 2006[1993]) from a private space to one of visibility, Kennedy argues that the media attention paid to TikTok during this time can be read as a “celebration of girlhood in the face of the pandemic.” This, while being a cure for boredom for some, risks increasing the divide for “those facing long-term impacts to their education, physical and mental health, social and familial relationships,

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and future economic and social prospects—and in some cases, potentially fatal consequences—as a result of the Coronavirus crisis” (Kennedy, 2020: 1074). This aspect is particularly relevant for the specific type of video analyzed in Sect. 5.5.

5.2 Transmodal Stylizations on TikTok As already hinted at above, videos are central to the TikTok experience. They are edited through the user’s original assemblage of bits drawn from a wide variety of sounds and song snippets made available on the platform, along with the option to add filters and special effects, the most characterizing (and innovative) feature of the platform being a potential move towards the redefinition of intellectual property at large: Unlike other video platforms before it, TikTok has a unique social infrastructure. The network is designed to facilitate user collaboration in the form of “duets.” All content is intended for appropriation. Each user can build upon the content of a previous video, creating a “duet chain,” where performers mime the same sequence of actions. Users come in and out; the original doesn’t matter, only your version of it. (Citarella, 2018: n.p.)

Some of the appropriations have been interpreted as a form of subtle or, in some cases, overt cultural plundering, so much so that the platform has also been renamed “the new epicenter of cultural appropriation” (Vandermark, 2020: n.p.) and “the evolution of digital blackface” (Parham, 2020: n.p.; also Pearce, 2020): “(i)t is an appropriation accelerant. Swimming in it for a while makes clear how easily the app jumbles together inputs and references” (Poniewozik, 2020: n.p.). This issue became particularly palpable when TikTok superstar Charli D’Amelio (TikTok’s “undisputed ruler,” Andrews, 2020: n.p.; the “face of TikTok,” Cassidy, 2020: n.p.) received online backlash for not crediting dancer Jalaiah Harmon, the original creator of the dance that gained her unexpected and vast visibility:

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Charli D’Amelio, TikTok’s biggest homegrown star, with nearly 26 million followers on the platform, has been affectionately deemed the dance’s “C.E.O.” for popularizing [the Renegade]. But the one person who hasn’t been able to capitalize on the attention is Jalaiah, the Renegade’s 14-year-­ old creator. […] To be robbed of credit on TikTok is to be robbed of real opportunities. In 2020, virality means income: Creators of popular dances […] often amass large online followings and become influencers themselves. That, in turn, opens the door to brand deals, media opportunities and, most important for Jalaiah, introductions to those in the professional dance and choreography community. (Lorenz, 2020: n.p.)

In short, we can say that TikTok performances are stylizations (Bakhtin, 1986) in the sense that they are strategic: each user creatively draws from communicative resources, stretching them in novel directions to incorporate them into personal projects (cf. also Sect. 5.5).4 Moreover, they are transmodal because users “produce styles indexing multiple culturally salient representations simultaneously through the use of different yet mutually elaborating communicative modalities” (Goodwin & Samy Alim, 2010: 179). Through the concurrent use of multiple resources pertaining to different modalities, users can be said to perform—appropriating the metaphor of the ventriloquist through which Holquist5 skillfully expressed Bakhtin’s theory—acts of ventriloquation.6 They articulate meaning through the performance of others’ voices: The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and  Bucholtz explains that whereas “(t)he governing ideologies of voice under earlier stages of modernity were rooted in essentialization and authentication, which comfortably imposed and reasserted hegemonic ideologies of social subjectivity […] in the media regimes of the late-modern period, already-essentialized voices have become further recontextualized through a process of linguistic re-embodiment, whereby such voices are detached from expectably raced, gendered, and classed bodies and jarringly reassigned to ‘inappropriate’ bodies via language crossing and stylization” (Bucholtz, 2011: 256). 5  Among others, Morson and Emerson (1990: 3) identify Holquist as the originator of this notion. 6  “The author does not speak in a given language (from which he distances himself to a greater or lesser degree) but he speaks as it were, through language, a language that has somehow more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates” (Bakhtin, 1986[1981]: 299). 4

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e­ xpressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. (Bakhtin, 1986: 293–294)

Such acts of ventriloquation as those performed by TikTok users make the dialogic nature of language in itself all the more palpable throughout the communication chain. In Carroll’s interpretation of Bakhtin’s dialogics (cf. quotation below), ventriloquism is itself ‘ventriloqated’; similarly, the acts of ventriloquation performed on TikTok are themselves immersed in the dialogue of voices: […] the intentions of the ventriloquist himself cannot be given a special status outside and preceding the dialogue of voices, where the ventriloquist himself must be seen as ventriloquated as much as ventriloquating. (Cooren, 2010: 88 quoting Carroll, 1983: 74; emphasis in the original)

Indeed, each of the transmodal stylizations shared on the platform is just one segment in a chain of previous and subsequent appropriations and ‘abductions’ (cf. note 1, Chap. 2; also see Peirce’s definition of abduction as presented in Keane, 2018, Sect. 5.3). It may become the object of others’ cannibalization. Other users may comment upon it; it may become an object of reflection and criticism in activities of metasemiotic commentary on the platform and beyond.

5.3 TikTok Chav Check The TikTok videos I will focus on in this section are part of a group collected under the umbrella term Chav check, a trend created by a user called rhi, which has attracted nearly 75 K response videos at the time of writing. I have decided to discuss these videos because their creators were posting from outside the UK in an attempt to make sense of ‘chav.’ They were not familiar with the concept, so they approached it through

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approximations, making ad hoc hypotheses on the indexicalities of the semiotic objects produced by previous, UK-based, TikTokers. Their lack of any potentially inherited attitude of disgust may activate and keep in motion a more comprehensive range of ‘chav’ meanings, making their TikTok videos worthy of study and analysis. The videos have stirred up much debate online and in the traditional media, also going viral among TikTok worldwide in the Summer of 2020. The first encounter with these videos for someone searching for them (at the time of writing, they can be watched without creating a TikTok account, simply googling keywords related to the topics of interest) is via verbal language since they are collected under the heading Chav check, and the phrase clearly provides an anchor. However, it must be considered that the average prospective viewer and user (“teenagers and young people,” Schwedel, 2018: n.p.) will approach these videos differently, for example, via acoustic categorization, in addition to the personalized recommendations also typical of other social networks: […] the “sounds” that users combine with their personalized videos represent a novel way to categorize and navigate a social media platform, a feature unique to TikTok. If you click on the “sound” at the bottom of a tiktok, you can see all of the other tiktoks that use that sound file. (Munger, 2020: n.p.)

The sounds used for acoustic categorization on TikTok can be anything from famous songs7 to ‘original’ sounds, that is, a specific user’s own recording of themselves talking against the backdrop of a song or making strange sounds which may go viral and turn into earworms. Searching by keywords and hashtags is also possible, as is deliberate exploration of trending videos. The more popular the video creator, or the more intriguing and desirable the sound, keyword or hashtag that go with it, the higher the chances that a specific video will be watched, shared and ‘quoted,’ i.e., incorporated in subsequent video sequences or personalizations of the ‘original’ video. However, we do have to consider the adult lurker and any user who chooses to search videos through verbal  “TikTok has a library full of clips of popular songs” (Schwedel, 2018: n.p.).

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language, and, in the specific case of the videos here analyzed, Chav check is the first verbal element to which the user’s perception becomes anchored. It is also the element used to identify the specific videos in generic metasemiotic activities on other social media platforms and metasemiotic commentary on the web and in traditional media (TV, newspapers, magazines), which in turn attracts more viewers (and multiplies the number and types of uptakes) to the videos in question (cf. Chav check, 2021). As a lexical item, ‘chav’ has recently come to frequently co-occur with the collocate ‘check’ in fashion and gossip magazines to designate Burberry’s iconic check pattern after it was ‘adopted’ by a “distinctly downmarket crowd,” as we have seen, producing what could be intuitively described as negative semantic prosody:8 Burberry finally shakes off its ‘chav check’ reputation as millennials re-embrace the iconic print (and even Gigi Hadid is a fan) Burberry check suffered image crisis in late ‘00s due to negative associations […] Its [sic] spent years in the fashion wilderness after being adopted by a distinctly downmarket crowd, but it seems that Burberry’s iconic check pattern is making a comeback. Back in 2002, the design had been dubbed ‘chav check’ after it was embraced by far from A-list stars like actress Danniella Westbrook who famously wore it head-to-toe on an outing with her Buberry-clad [sic] daughter, complete with a checked pushchair. But at Copenhagen Fashion Week this month, it was the print of choice for street style stars and fashion editors—ever the barometer of trends. (Brennan, 2018: n.p.)

The ‘check’ reference in the TikTok videos, though, is not a reminder of the world-wide famous check pattern, but—a Quora9 user informs us—an invitation for other users to confirm whether the person featured  Semantic prosody is a concept that has emerged within the field of corpus linguistics to designate lexical phenomena similar to connotation connected to the typical lexical environment of words: some terms take on unfavorable semantic prosody on account of their habitual co-occurrence with other words denoting unfavorable states of affairs (see Stewart, 2010). 9  Quora is “an American question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, followed, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions” (Wikipedia, 2021: n.p.). 8

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in each video is actually a chav, basically to check if there is consensus on the recognition of the quality of chavness: […] the phrase “chav check” means that author wants to show chav person on camera, so people in the comments could confirm whether it’s chav or not. (Anonymous, 2020: n.p.)

However, for adult viewers like me, approaching TikTok for the first time, the “chav check” collocation may come across with a negative association attached to it. Studies on semantic preference and priming10 (Hoey, 2003; Partington, 2004) contend that “as the word is learnt through encounters with it in speech and writing, it is loaded with the cumulative effects of those encounters” (Hoey, 2004: 23). Consequently, it is predictable that people of a particular generation familiar with British culture may be prone to spot the negative semantic prosody in “chav check” and detect its class-bound origin. Repeated use of the collocation with associated negative prosody specifically linked to class belonging has certainly primed many to recognize and assess (if not appropriate) the sequence in this way, possibly explaining the outraged reactions that these videos have generated (among others, Davies, 2020; Dawson, 2020; Horn, 2020; Lockwood, 2020; Smith, 2020). Intuitively, though, “chav check” cannot be said to be set in a consistently negative semiotic environment in these videos, and certainly not in the heading provided in Chav check, 2021, associated as it is to a colorful picture of a beautiful young individual whose face is decorated with flower emojis.11 Nor does the negative association (where it appears to be overt—in some of the snippets which pop up right away, for example, where the content creators have posted videos of individuals they deem  Hoey explains that “(i)n essence, the theory [of lexical priming] says that a person’s repeated exposure to contextualised instances of highly similar phonetic sequences or identical letter sequences results in their being primed to associate those sequences (typically, though not necessarily, words) with the recurrent features of those contexts […] when the primed person uses the word (or other piece of language) in question, s/he typically replicates the recurrent features of the context, thereby ensuring the perpetuation of the association of the word (or whatever) with those features. This […] accounts for the existence of collocation, colligation, semantic association (or semantic preference) and a range of other corpus-identified features of language” (Hoey, 2017: ix–x). 11  “Commonly used for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and other special occasions. May be more generally used to convey such ideas as love, appreciation, and happiness” (Emojipedia, 2021: n.p.). 10

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to be chavs) seem to be necessarily class-bound, unlike the semantic prosody the collocation appears to have in most fashion magazines, in the first place. The negative semantic prosody of “chav check” could then be taken to be genre or register dependent at present. Alternatively, the different perception and use of “chav check”’s semantic prosody may be hypothesized to be a form of diastratic variation (cf. Pace-Sigge, 201312), more precisely as age-graded variation: this would appear to be in line with the notion that recourse to non-prestigious communicative features tends to peak in individuals during adolescence, “when peer group pressure not to conform to society’s norms is greatest” (Holmes & Wilson, 2017[1992]: 186, emphasis in the original); see Agha’s point that for value-boundary registers that are age-graded, “different value judgments can typically be obtained at different points in a person’s life cycle,” Agha, 2015: 312). To sum up, the semiotic object identified by the label Chav check is likely to come across as creating the expectation of an “unpleasant thing” for many grown-up users, but this expectation probably does not fully apply to younger users. As already hinted at above, the other element used for orderly classification on TikTok is acoustic categorization, and the sound that functions as glue in these videos, is a short segment of a song by Manchester-based British rapper IAMDDB, who describes her music as urban jazz (Gardner, 2012; Clément, 2017). The song, Shade, suddenly turned into an earworm through the TikTok Chav check association, as these comments posted in the Summer of 2020 (which appear at the top due to their getting more reactions from other users despite being chronologically more recent) to the official 2017 YouTube video of the song tell us (Fig. 5.1). The considerable number of YouTube users confirming that they are watching the ‘IAMDDB Shade’ official video as a follow-up to their TikTok Chav check activity (the question “who’s here from that really nice chav girl on tiktok” scored nearly 15.000 likes) tells us that the song would appear to have gained popularity through the TikTok association, rather than the Chav check videos attracting visibility through the sound  Aligning with the scholar’s assertion (1978), Pace-Sigge explains that “Wolfram makes clear that expanding dialectology and sociolinguistics beyond their traditional brief, stretching out to include the phonological, grammatical, and semantic, is possible” (Pace-Sigge, 2013: 54). 12

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Fig. 5.1  User exchange on ‘IAMDDB Shade’ official video. (YouTube, 2017)

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associated with it by the user starting the trend. Some TikTokers even translated the lyrics for the benefit of speakers of other languages (cf. brutism, 2020). I will be discussing the association of the song to the Chav check trend in more detail in Sect. 5.5. Moving from the general to the particular, from the elements that keep the structure of the videos together to the internal cohesion among individual semiotic objects, the ‘freedom’ that characterizes TikTok (but also the possibility of making money through activities carried out on it13) allows trend starters to reference what seems most relevant and appealing. The people responding to the first video with their own do so because they are interested in the topic and enjoy the activity created around it. The object-signs of ‘chav,’ or the communicative process created around it, have proved to be able to connect people, making this a “semiotic encounter” (Agha, 2007). This ability to connect shows that ‘chav’ is still currently perceived as carrying exchange value. Nevertheless, how cognitive processes figure in these remote interactions is crucial to understanding the nature of the exchange value. Building on the other TikTokers’ cognitive agency, i.e., on their ability to draw inferences and produce implications, is crucial to generating reactions. However, due to the constraints of the medium involved—the very short duration of the videos— these inferences are indexed without contextualization. Consequently, due to the platform’s worldwide reach, inferences are subject to a much wider variety of interpretations than could be imagined. What a chav is in these videos appears to be subject to even broader negotiation than in previous, more traditional interactions.14 If the first two videos posted under the heading Chav check feature supposedly chav individuals unaware of being filmed, those immediately following are videos of users who have ‘manipulated’ their appearance to prime a stereotype. They are made up or clothed as chavs and offer their fictitious  Articles in Forbes inform us that “(w)ith so many losing income due to coronavirus, people are looking for new revenue streams and earning potentials. Social media has become a revenue source for many by becoming a social influencer on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. The fastest growing of these social apps is TikTok” (Frazier, 2020: n.p.). Such articles also tell us that serious money can mean seven figures (Brown, 2020). 14  We have seen in previous chapters that chav was always about the temporary identification, interpretation and negotiation of class and other differences rather than a fixed identity. 13

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chav selves to the judgment of other users, invited to assess the degree of performed chavness. In short, these videos would seem to align ‘chav’ with appearance, in gendered and classed ways, in a way not too dissimilar to more traditional representations. Nevertheless, I believe that merely equating ‘chav’ as performed in these interactions with ‘underclass,’ as some have done, fails to provide an adequate picture of what goes on in them. To start with, let us focus on the wider meaning of the interactions performed. The videos produced would seem to be the fruit of a search for contact initiated by the first video creators, with the apparent wish to orient other users towards an understanding of ‘chav.’ The videos’ parallel format (which is a consequence of the constitutive structure of the TikTok platform) helps to build common ground, creating “a space of engagement between persons” (Gill, 2004: 244). The engagement performed is an indicator of personal interest by the individuals starting or keeping the trend going. The space of engagement is the dynamic process through which such videos—when considered as a whole—appear to be individual segments of a grounding process (Clark & Schaefer, 1989) which moves towards “discovering the boundaries of common ground, and extending them” (Wilkes-Gibbs, 2014[1997]: 240) through the deployment of an array of multimodal semiotic resources. The reactions are individual forms of behavioral alignment/disalignment often occurring at the level of meta-communication. Chav check performers do not simply represent chavs, they enact them through “the visual experience of being visible” (Jones, 2020b: 24),15 drawing upon multiple strategies and resources: language, graphics, gaze, kinesics, proxemics, and their ability “to pull apart and put back together aspects of speech and the body  Jones invites the production of ‘embodied’ visual semiotics, which considers “the body that experiences technology and the body that technology experiences, as well as the ways these two bodies interact. In order to do this, scholars of the visual need to get away from thinking about the visual and start thinking about visuality—by which I mean the physical experience of being visible” (Jones, 2020b: 24). ‘Chav’ lends itself particularly well to illustrate one such perspective, since being traditionally equated with the poor, it is also “associated with the material and the embodied,” with an emphasis on bodies: “their appearance, their bearing, and their adornment” (Lawler, 2005: 432): “the chav is persistently identified in terms of bodily indiscretion” (Adams & Raisborough, 2011: 84) since “emotionally-charged, visceral denigration–disgust–works to ‘fix’ the other as leaky whilst positioning the self as contained” (Adams, Raisborough, 2011: 90). 15

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suggests that [they] are […] aware of the indexical meanings associated with particular ways of communicating, and more importantly, that they manipulate them in order to create meaning” (Goodwin & Samy Alim, 2010: 181). Chav check users stylize ‘chav’ through a creative juxtaposition of chav stylistic features, producing new chav meanings. In Sect. 5.5, I will show in some detail how the incorporation of chav object-signs into supposedly chavnot performances may de-chav chav resources in some cases, all the while retaining some of their stylistic functions (cf. Bucholtz, 2015). I have said that what a chav is in these videos appears to be subject to broader negotiation than in traditional interactions. This occurs through ‘scaling’ (cf. Middleton & Brown, 2002; also Norris & Jones, 2017[2005]), that is, through shifts in how the chav individual is “rendered or made actual” (Middleton & Brown, 2002: 137) depending on the author and the ideal addressee of the individual semiotic object. Properties and values appear to significantly change from one video to the next also due to a local construct reaching well beyond its national context; for example, whereas the chav is constructed as an individual inhabiting specific places of a city by some UK users (the urban fringe and the department store, for example), they become metonymic of the whole UK for other non­UK users, who display various forms of alignment/disalignment, and sometimes also compare/contrast chavs to individuals whom they perceive to share similar features in theirs or other cultures: “I was colonized by this for 200 years?”; “This sound has made me realize british girls wear 5 pounds of makeup and puffy jackets like they’re stuck in 2016”; “i would give anything to be a british teen just loitering n enjoying life”; “the way i was literally an american chav in high school i did that with my concealer every day,” “i cant believe Britain has their own cheeto girls,” “Norwegian chav also known as rånebabes” read the captions in sharma_ karma100 2020, owen1s 2020, serbean 2020, reagan_oxman 2020, krisbaby22 2020, ronjafrydenlund 2020 respectively. How chavness is rendered or made actual in these semiotic assemblages also varies as it becomes linked to clothes, food, props, manners, lifestyle, and so on, with make-up being the ‘quality’ apparently implied most often. Individuals become acquainted with registers through socialization processes. From the perspective of non-UK users, who appear to

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be very active producers of content in these Chav check videos, the effort is to figure out the general category in which ‘chav’ should be placed. Individual TikTokers appear to do so through approximations:16 “Does anyone else like every single CHAV video to stay on british tik tok on ur fyp to learn more like is it a joke, r these ppl real, r they the equivalent of american delco girls?? I need answers !!!!” reads the caption in rosieerosee 2020. Understanding is always relative to the size and quality of each individual’s personal semiotic map, the grid against which we understand our own and others’ “thought, language, action, and interaction” (cf. Gee on Discourse maps in Gee, 2005[1999]: 32). Since personal semiotic grids are the limit of our understanding, these users are construing bigger semiotic maps for themselves. The content is of course also constructed by those who comment on individual videos on the platform, as well as by the semiprofessional and professional figures who have shared their metasemiotic commentaries on these videos well beyond the space of TikTok. The ideal utterance “I think chavs are + adj” performed by the Chav check video creator becomes temporarily tangible through these TikTok objects, which mutate on the same page where the video is posted through other users’ reactions expressed as comments. These objects are open to further ‘abduction’ (see further below for a broader reflection on the notion of abduction, already introduced in Chap. 2, note 1, and referred to in other chapters) along the different segments of the communication chain, where they will probably produce related artifacts and perform varied and varying effects too: “ chav Thai versioN […] Done ”; “ Turning myself into a indo chav […] Pake behel abang2 + karet” read the first and last captions of the videos in which two content creators prove their skills at chav impersonation through makeup and accessories (babiekikko, 2020; thedemonprincess, 2020). By expanding the scope of language ideology, Keane has introduced the notion of “semiotic ideology” to draw attention to “the dynamic interconnections among different modes of signification at play within a particular historical and social formation” (Keane, 2018: 67; also Keane, 2003). This notion is directly connected to the idea of ‘abduction’: 16

 On ‘chav’ in non Anglo-American cultures, see Moreno-Segarra & Bernárdez Rodal, 2017.

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Semiotic ideologies are kinds of abduction, and abduction is the fundamental epistemological mode of social life. In Peirce’s account, abductions cannot in principle have the same certainty and stability as deductions and inductions. They are probabilistic because signs are open and grow. They do so at multiple temporal scales (see Carr and Lempert, 2016), ranging from the fluctuations of face-to-face interaction to gradual changes working their way across entire societies—from, say, the fleeting perception of amusement in your interlocutor’s eyes to the seemingly fixed terms of racial identity. For all their participants’ proclivities for mind reading and all the repairs and clarifications by which they work at convergence, in the end people’s interactions with one another neither start from nor arrive at certainties—although people must proceed, much of the time, as if they do. (Keane, 2018: 83)

Approximations such as those presented above make the single users’ fundamental assumptions about what the chav sign is, and how it functions in the world, explicit. Making sense of chav indexicality involves making ad hoc hypotheses. Such hypotheses foreground the reflexivity inherent in every use of ‘chav,’ the “semiotic ideology”17 emerging through the specific semiotic object produced, i.e., what each user considers “the role that intentions play in signification to be” (Keane, 2003: 419), at varying levels of explicitness. These hypotheses are contingent, “even unique, in character” (Ibidem). Some formulations remain tacit presuppositions of the chav sign use. Some others become explicit, with their users deliberately utilizing the space to resist chav representations which they perceive to be more mainstream, in a very overt manner: “i know it’s fun to trash british people on this app but she genuinely looks so sweet and i want to be friends with her,” reads the caption of a content creator who comments on another TikToker’s post featuring the video of a supposedly chav girl (jortsmaster, 2020). Through these approximations, we can make hypotheses on how these users’ assumptions about what chav signs are, contribute to the ways they “use and interpret them, and on that basis, form judgments of ethical and  Semiotic ideology—Keane writes—“directs attention to the full range of possible sign vehicles and the sensory modalities they might engage, including sound, smell, touch, muscular movement, pain, affect, and other somatic phenomena” (Keane, 2018: 65). 17

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political value” (Keane, 2018: 67). Through the further interactions they invite, ‘chav’ gets co-materialized and resemiotized in unforeseeable ways in subsequent uptakes within a “representational economy,” since–Keane contends—all the technologies, media, institutions, and practices prevalent in a specific context affect one another: Representational economy refers to the totality of technologies, media, institutions, and practices prevalent in any given historical and social context, insofar as they have effects on another. The term economy is meant to indicate, first, that it is not something natural, like an “ecology,” and, second, that it is a system of logical and causal relations among unlike things that are prone to having unintended consequences for one another. (Keane, 2018: 68)

Quantum theory—which provides the theoretical basis for modern physics—uses the notion of entanglement18 to explain how particles of energy and matter can become correlated in such a way as to predictably interact with each other regardless of how far apart they are. Entanglement is “what knits the bulk space into a contiguous whole” (Musser, 2018: n.p.): no matter how great the distance between correlated particles, they will remain entangled. Each of the Chav check users mentioned above (and each of the others active in some way on TikTok) is not merely engaging with other TikTokers, but they are also ‘entangled’ in a larger whole, where correlations amongst the single elements are not necessarily neat or evident at all; each chav performance is co-construed–an ongoing, open-ended, entangled material practice: To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. (Barad, 2007: ix)

Social worlds—Keane also contends—are in a permanent state of change “not just for reasons technological, demographic, economic, and 18

 The term ‘entanglement’ was first introduced by Schrödinger in 1935 (Barad, 2007: 456).

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so on, but because semiotic processes are in constant motion” (Keane, 2018: 84 referencing Urban, 2001). All these users are speaking through, or ventriloquating, chav voice, re-using its resources and manipulating them, in some cases for critique, in other cases out of curiosity and fun, or for self-representation. In all cases, they are immersed in a larger picture and keep ‘chav’ in motion in it, contributing to its fluidity, with each new uptake potentially being transformative. By proposing new comparisons and contrasts, new ways of assembling chav resources in novel circumstances, these users, even when personally critical of ‘chav,’ may contribute to change its conceptualization and its subsequent enactments. What is more, through these semiotic objects, ‘chav’ has ceased to be the sole possession of British individuals.19 The new chav users may be more lenient to it, free as they are from any potentially inherited attitude of disgust that “hinges on proximity” (Lawler, 2005: 440), and this relaxed attitude may activate and keep in motion a more comprehensive range of ‘chav’ meanings. This may even, in turn, end up affecting the realities of some British individuals, one single act of communication after the other, for good, for bad, or for a hybrid combination of both effects. For the time being, ‘chav’ does not seem to be unequivocally indexical of “un-modern, anti-cosmopolitan, backward and worthless” (McDowell, 2006: 839) for these TikTokers enacting ‘chav’ from around the world. It is undoubtedly regarded as an object worthy of their interest, time, and effort.

5.4 Chav Indexicalities in Chav Check The sample videos analyzed in this section were chosen because they illustrate a view of ‘chav’ as indexical of a temporary phase in most people’s lives, as stemming from complex forms of entanglement in ‘visuality,’ discussed later in the section, a form of resistance to the construction of the chav’s body as permanently fixed in its excessive and out-of-control quality. Forms that were mediatized by the teenage series Misfits, as we  Here I am stretching Rushdie’s statement that “the English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago” (Rushdie, 1991[1984]: 70). 19

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have seen in Sect. 4.2. I thought this view was worthy of exploration as it appeared in both citizen sociolinguistic data and in metacommentary in the public sphere, which is also reproduced in this section. I have suggested that the considerable number of reactions recently gained by the Chav check trend may be an index of the current existence or ongoing development of common ground among the TikTok users creating this content or reacting to it (Olson, Olson, 2000). Indeed, reactions—the creation of parallel videos, comments, likes—represent occasions for repeated encounters and increased understanding: People can assume common ground prior to an interaction if they know they are members of the same group or have experienced the same events. They also develop common ground by more active means. The term grounding refers to the interactive process by which communicators exchange evidence about what they do or do not understand over the course of a conversation as they accrue common ground. (Wilkes-­Gibbs & Clark, 1986) (Kraut et al., 2002: 147)

More precisely, in Chap. 3, I have argued that ‘chav’ is not a natural state of being but a semiotic construct that is co-constituted through the boundary-making practices that distinguish chavs from chavnots: “‘(o)therness’ is an entangled relation of difference” (Barad, 2007: 236). Then, in Sect. 5.3 here above I have defined the Chav check videos as segments of a grounding process moving towards the discovery or extension of the boundaries of common ground on ‘chav,’ i.e., as semiotic practices through which boundaries of chav/nonchav identification emerge. Southerton draws on Lamont’s research on processes of identification, which has carried out a systematic analysis of the relationship between boundaries and categories, to identify boundaries as being essentially of a socio-economic (related to wealth, power and professional success), cultural (intelligence, manners, and taste), or moral (honesty, work ethic, and personal integrity) type (Southern, 2002, citing Lamont, 1992).20  See also Hollingworth and Williams’s identification of the chav along the aesthetic, performative, and moral axes: “Chavs were most commonly defined by their brash and excessive dress and appearance (aesthetic); their careless, unruly and often violent behaviour (performative); and, in the context of schooling, their lack of respect for and disengagement with education (moral)” (Hollingworth & Williams, 2009: 473). 20

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The framework ‘traditionally’ employed (as it was commonly applied before 2011) in the boundary work performed for the identification of the chav individual draws from all three types: indeed, in Chap. 4, we have seen that the aspects mainly focused upon by self-identified chavnots to legitimate their narrative of identification, relate to the tacit orientation that non-chavs appear to share both towards professional success, and manners, and personal integrity. We have also seen that chav aspects are actually found in all individuals in public metacommentary, irrespective of class or other social categories: “(w)herever you are on the social scale, chavs are below you, […] because different people draw class boundaries differently too. If you’re working class or if you’re middle class, chavs are always someone else” (Davies, 2020: n.p., quoting Bennett). The construction of ‘chav’ on TikTok has been judged in similarly negative terms in public metacommentary, with some stating that the “‘chav’ caricature has made a comeback on TikTok” (Shadijanova, 2020: n.p.; also Smith 2020) and that the platform has “resurrected the problematic ‘chav’ stereotype” (Davies, 2020: n.p.), for example. Public commentary on the presence of ‘chav’ on TikTok performed in the Winter of 2020 focused especially on the visibility gained by a group of students attending a private dance and drama college, through jiving to country rap in chav-like clothes: Over the past two years, videos captioned with the hashtags #chav or #chavs have racked up more than 150 million views between them. #BritishChavs, #UKChavs and #SchoolChavs have been watched by another 12 million. In these videos, “chavvy” girls are regularly mocked for wearing too much make-up, while those who either eat or work in McDonald’s are considered fair game for abuse. […] But perhaps the biggest proponents […] are The TikTok Chavs. […] The clip of (what appeared to be) five British delinquents joyously jiving to country rap racked up hundreds of thousands of clicks. In the months since, the troupe’s backlog of videos–one captioned “At least they aren’t out stabbing people” is particularly popular—has received over 20 million views. […] At least three of the group’s core line-up currently attend Laine Theatre Arts, an independent dance and drama college in the leafy town of Epsom, where students pay approximately $23,000 a year in tuition. (Coulter, 2020: n.p.)

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The framework employed by these TikTokers in the differentiation of chavs from chavnots appears to be a combination of the cultural and moral types, with one of the chav performers publicly drawing a line between themselves and ‘chavvy’ individuals: There’s even a popular dance group with more than 450,000 followers called the TikTokChavs, which consists of five boys wearing Adidas tracksuits and puffa jackets dancing to viral songs. A member of the group recently revealed: “I’d have to say, none of us are exactly ‘chavvy’ in real life. We were all brought up quite well, which we try not to let our followers know” (Shadijanova, 2020: n.p.).

Indeed, “(b)eing brought up quite well” advances symbolic boundaries between communities, constructed through specific social practices (parenting, in our case) in this narrative of nonchav identification: […] shared understandings of contextual codes and social practices, act to highlight boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘Them.’ Boundaries are the point where group similarities end and differences begin. By analysing narratives of boundaries it is therefore possible to investigate identification without starting from the assumption that consumption is the most significant medium. (Southerton, 2002: 173, citing Jenkins, 1996)

If these specific TikTokers would appear to resort—at least as far as public declarations go (the specific TikTok videos requiring a subscription, it is not possible to advance any evidence here)—to previous indexicalities with similar meanings, the phenomenon of Chav check videos, peaking in the Summer of 2020 but still very much alive at the time of writing, and mainly focusing on make-up tutorials, memes and comedy sketches, would seem to suggest, as hinted at above, higher fluidity in the perceived chav indexicalities. Indeed, some of the subsequent public uptakes (featuring the creation of a chav check Instagram filter, for example) similarly suggest a less consistently negative, less class-bound, and certainly more international perspective on ‘chav,’ despite many external commentators framing the issue as a debatable one:

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“The chav trend was something I came across and felt it would be a funny idea. I live in the UK and have grown up around chavs, so I felt it would be fun,” says Yasmin Barnes, a 20-year-old student living in Birmingham. Her chav look took 40 minutes to complete. “Throughout my education, the term ‘chav’ was always very common. There was always a group of people who were known as the chavs,” Yasmin says. “I think the trend went viral because it’s something people would say relates to the UK and almost ‘defines’ it. A lot of people live with chavs and the trend going viral showed people outside of the UK what it’s like here.” The chav aesthetic has become so popular that even foreign creators are also getting in on the trend. (Davies, 2020: n.p.) The creator of a ‘chav check’ Instagram filter—disturbing proof that the trend is expanding out of its original platform—is Filipino, and defended the filter by saying: “Since chav culture has become embedded in our meme and pop culture landscape, social media has helped fuel people’s interest in hopping onto trend.” (Horn, 2020: n.p.) Russia-based Ilya is the creator of the “chav check” Instagram filter, which features massive brows and chalky makeup. “I don’t think my [filter] can offend anyone, because this ‘chav check’ meme has long been popular on the web,” he says. […] Kiara has also created a chav filter, called “chav check w/ sounds” […]. According to Kiara, a chav is “someone who does their makeup differently, like overly filled in brows, using pale-coloured concealer for lipstick, and too much bronzer” or someone who wears “[Puffa] jackets with fur on the hood, with hoop earrings as an accessory.” Like Ilya, Kiara is not based in the UK—she lives in the Philippines. She too was inspired by the TikTok “chav check” trend. […] Maxim is another creator who specialises in creating augmented reality filters. He’s the creator of the “hey luv” Instagram filter—previously called “chav luv.” The filter gives you swooping lashes, a beauty spot and a big messy bun. For Maxim, the inspiration for this filter was also the TikTok trend, rather than any real-life chavs. […] Maxim explains that he is Russian and currently lives in France, and initially did not realise how loaded the word “chav” was in the UK. “After some research, I found that chav was being used as a slur in Britain. That’s why I’m not using this word,” he says, going some way to explain why the filter’s name recently changed from “chav luv” to “hey luv.” (Smith, 2020: n.p.)

In short, the individuals engaging in Chav check activities on TikTok use a range of chav stylistic features (particularly make-up) in both

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conventional and innovative ways. Sect. 5.5 analyzes one specific Chav check video to both illustrate and reflect on what is distinctive in some of these chav indexicalities in detail. In what follows, I start to open a window onto these peculiarities to address some of the possible incentives to perceivable semantic fluidity. In Sect. 5.3, I argued that TikTokers who are not familiar with ‘chav’ get to understand its meaning through approximations, making ad hoc hypotheses on the indexicalities of the semiotic objects produced by those TikTokers who have previously encountered ‘chav’ and been primed to recognize and assess it in their own specific ways. In Chap. 3, I mentioned, and in Chap. 4 also briefly touched upon, the phenomenon of “chav pride” and chav style commodification, which is presented—and would appear, for the most part, to be mostly negatively framed—in public spaces, and generally reflected upon within a wider and more complex framework in academic spaces: Today, it is used by chavs themselves. “The word ‘chav’ has grown within the community that it represents,” Laura Midgley, co-founder of The Campaign Against Political Correctedness told ABC News. “People work to be chavs,” she adds. “It is something they aspire to be, like a badge of honor.” One click on the Internet supplies evidence of that hard work. Chavs really like, for instance, to test their chaviness, through online quizzes such as chavtest.com. Chav bloggers also enjoy displaying their chavness. (Bambuck, 2009: n.p.) […] chav has become an increasingly complex identity category and some of those interpellated as filthy chavs have now reclaimed the term as an affirmative sub-cultural identity. This trans-coding of chav is visible within popular music acts, such as white teenage rapper Lady Sovereign and the acclaimed pop icon and urban poet Mike Skinner (who releases records as The Streets). Journalist Julie Burchill has repeatedly attempted both to defend, and claim for herself, a chav identity (see 2005). In 2005, the tabloid newspaper The Sun, a propagator of chav hate, ran a ‘Proud to be Chav’ campaign. Nevertheless, this ‘chav pride’ is deceptive, for like the US term ‘white trash’—now widely adopted within celebrity culture—this ‘pride’ works as an enabling identity category only for those who have acquired enough cultural capital and social mobility to ‘rise above the filth.’ (Tyler, 2006: n.p.)

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[…] chav style has been extensively commodified […] comedy character Lee Nelson (created by former doctor Simon Brodkin), Lee Bok’s Little Books (a guide to ‘Britain’s new social elite’), or the Jeremy Kyle Show [imply] an ironic, disdainful distance from the people whose pathological lives are being depicted. Consuming chav commodities implies elevating ourselves as not-chav, and feeling superior or hip as a result. So it might be surprising that ‘chavinism’ […] is prevalent on the British gay scene, encompassing telephone lines and films featuring male chavs having sex, and chav club nights. Gay men are typically understood, in academic commentary and popular culture, to be middle class, sophisticated and discerning: a far cry from a social group viewed as feckless, aimless and hopeless. […] Perhaps, for chavinism to be enjoyable, it ‘rubbishes’ gay chavs in ways that do further violence to their identity?21 (Brewis, 2014: n.p.)

The complexity and potential deceptiveness of the “chav pride” notion are evident in the recent parallel appearance of both tangible evidence of a ‘chav’ appreciation commodification in the sale of chav-friendly items on the British Amazon website and less tangible (but still well palpable) evidence of the reiteration of the stereotypical habit of applying the label ‘chav’ as a stigmatizing mark in the dismissal of Anglo-Irish Celtic punk song Fairytale of New York as “an offensive pile of downmarket chav bilge” (Neale, 2019: n.p.). BBC Radio Solent DJ Alex Dyke has told listeners that he is “no longer comfortable” with playing The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl’s ‘Fairytale of New York,’ having previously tweeted that the song was “downmarket chav bilge.” In the since-deleted tweet, posted before the 57-year-old’s afternoon radio show, Dyke wrote: “Radio, let’s ban Fairytale Of New  York this Christmas! ‘You’re a slut on junk, you scumbag, cheap lousy f****t’–is this what we want our kids singing in the back of the car? It’s an offensive pile of downmarket chav bilge. We can do better!” (Neale, 2019: n.p.)

Incidentally, the list of ‘chav’ appreciation items on sale on Amazon.co.uk includes a coffee mug which is itself not a direct object of chav appreciation, featuring the caption “Beware Crazy Chav Man” on top of the sardonic picture of a gap-teethed, Burberry-capped male chav figurine exhibiting helix piercing, a massive golden chain with pendant, and multiple rings. As it stands, the object may potentially come across (particularly if we ‘read’ the  On the issue of chavinism, see Sect. 4.2, note 29, and Fraser, 2005.

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picture in combination with the joke printed on top of it—humor fostering ambivalence, for example Ford et al., 2015), as a form of ‘liquid’ anti-chav attitude (Weaver, 2011; also Bennett, 2016’s reflections on the difficulty of dealing with sexist and classist jokes about chavs).22 I am not implying a simplistic connection between the emergence of forms of nonconformist chav culture and the development of new ‘chav’ indexicalities as mirrored in some of the Chav check videos I am discussing in these pages. However, I am suggesting the existence of complex forms of entanglement in ‘visuality’ (Otter, 2008), i.e., amongst “practices and relationships and discourses through which visibility is socially accomplished and negotiated” (Jones, 2020b: 24): […] multimodal meaning emerges not from “signs” per se, but from techno-­ somatic entanglements in which the most important communicative resource is not what is visible but communicators’ embodied experiences of seeing it. (Jones, 2020b: 20, emphasis in the original) Digital media have […] forced us to see “images,” “bodies” and “media” not as separate objects but as relational categories that intersect in complex moments of action, categories that can only be understood by engaging not just with what they mean but with how they are lived (Barad, 2007). They have opened up space for a new form of visual semiotics that focuses less on “meaning” and “representation” and more on how people use the embodied and affective dimensions of visual communication to negotiate their physical experiences in the world and their relationships with others. (Jones, 2020b: 22) […] digital media have forced us to see not just images, but texts in general, along with ‘bodies’ and ‘media’ not as objects but as relational categories that intersect in complex moments of action that can only be understood by engaging with how they are lived. (Thurlow, Dürscheid, 2020: 7)

The existence of complex forms of entanglement in ‘visuality’ may also help to explain previous overt forms of nonconformist “chav pride”  The item only became available on the British Amazon website in December 2019 and appears to be currently unavailable. In its quite long description (I am only providing an extract), we learn that “(t)his funny cup is a great novelty drinkware featuring a humorous joke and a sarcastic saying, great conversation starter. Perfect gift for birthday anniversary wedding retirement housewarming appreciation engagement bridal shower bachelorette graduation friendship Christmas day secret Santa. For dad brother boyfriend uncle” (Amazon.co.uk, 2021: n.p.). 22

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culture, with British young people from affluent or middle-class families deliberately identifying themselves with chavs in order to increase peer respect (Young, 2012).23 In turn, popularized forms of public commentary on such manifestations of nonconformist “chav pride” culture in the public sphere may have produced more occasions for entanglement in positive ‘visuality’ around ‘chav’: Ned (non-educated delinquent) is the Scottish equivalent of the English term ‘Chav.’ […] Using a survey of over 3000 15-year-old school pupils from the West of Scotland, we investigated the association between adopting a Ned identity and socio-economic background, educational engagement, delinquency, peer-status and (sub)cultural markers. Some 15 per cent of pupils self-identified as a Ned. […] Among explanations for this appeal are elevated peer-status, the attraction of non-conformity and the growth of ‘Chav pride’ within popular culture. (Young, 2012: 40) A Glasgow University survey found that some teenagers viewed terms such as “ned” (non-educated delinquent) or “chav” as a badge of pride. […] it seems that part of the appeal of joining such groups may be to attain a better social standing within their own peer-group and greater peer respect, even for young people from more middle-class backgrounds. “‘Neds’ or ‘chavs’ are often respected by the young people we spoke to for being risk-­ takers, thrill-seekers or rule-breakers. “This sort of ‘cool’ transgressive behaviour may contribute to the appeal of joining these groups and could explain young people’s desire to identify themselves with an otherwise stigmatised social group.” (BBC News, 2012: n.p.)  It would be interesting to compare/contrast these results with those of previous research:

23

[…] one recent study interviewed children aged between 8 and 13 years, some from a disadvantaged housing estate, some from a fee-paying independent school (Sutton et al., 2007). The study found that all of the children were eager to be seen as ‘average’ along a continuum of poverty through to affluence, and consequently defined themselves in terms of what they were not rather than what they were. ‘Chav,’ the English equivalent of ‘Ned,’ was ‘used exclusively by the private schoolchildren—not at all by the estate children. Chavs were ‘distinguishable because of their outfits of tracksuits, hoods and baseball caps’ and were ‘common’ and ‘behaved badly’. More specifically, chavs were identified as ‘children who lived on estates and had parents who were unemployed, with poor parenting skills’. That children are using such categories to represent others and distinguish themselves suggests that patterns of mockery towards a socially recognizable ‘other’ end up constituting structures of feeling along class lines in which the working class are routinely rendered abject and the middle class the hidden norm. We are not amused. (Raisborough & Adams, 2008: n.p.)

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The view of ‘chav’ as indexical of a temporary phase in most people’s lives which emerges from some of the Chav check videos may stem from one such entanglement in ‘visuality’—supported by the ‘counterdiscourse’ building up on similar assumptions advanced in the TV series Misfits (cf. Sect. 4.2), generated as it appears to be from “the physical experience of being visible” (Jones, 2020b: 24): a tangible expression of the need to confess past evidence of one’s chavness and recognize signs of its presence in others while presenting it as a form of “affective authenticity” (Warfield, 2017) which involves calling attention to rather than concealing imperfections. This “affective authenticity” appears to be well in tune with the type of authenticity many people perform through “the good selfie” as discussed in Warfield (2017; also Jones, 2020b): “imitirala sam chav ribe pre svih xd here’s me 2 years ago being a chav ” reads the captions of a Chav check video (bielan 2020); “they are so gonna grow up chavs and i cant wait my chav phase was my fave one i was so funny and happy,” writes esmemillspussay, commenting on the image of two young women in bed smiling and talking to each other all the while holding on to their mobiles, presumably their children/sisters/nieces/etc. (2020); “You cant tell me that we all were’nt chav’s in midle school,” reads the caption in mermaid.wh0r3 2020’s video, a commentary to the picture of a pair of feet in trainers resting on the steps—covered with fallen leaves—of what would appear to be the entrance to a house. The picture sits side by side—meaning that it ‘quotes’—the still from another Chev check video in which a young woman performs a chav impersonation. I am going to provide in-depth analysis of the video thus quoted further down, in Sect. 5.5. “I cant make fun of chavs because i used to be one,” reads the caption to the picture of a pouty-faced young woman in naomiiburns 2020, whereas bella. capillo 2020 accompanies a picture of a young woman who would appear to be crying with the caption “Guys I used to be a chav,” while also providing what would appear to be a picture of such chav phase. Half of a woman’s smiling face crosses the picture in juliana4444 2020 transversally, along with the caption “im trying to embrace my natural brows and not tint them or fill them in i cant tell if i love it or hate it cuz i was so insecure ab them when i was young be honest yes no maybe.” Traces of contextualization of ‘chav’ as a temporary life phase24 which appear to be entangled in visuality with the Chav check videos described here 24

 Which may have psychological foundations.

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above25—a form of resistance to the construction of the chav’s body as permanently fixed in its excessive and out-of-control quality, a break from the entirely negative representations of ‘chav’ which have long reverberated “throughout different media to overdetermine the chav in powerful ways” (Adams & Raisborough, 2011: 94)—already emerge in the piece of citizen sociolinguistic data (intended as in Sect. 4.2) presented here below (Fig. 5.2), where a guest of Netmums, a website for parents in the United Kingdom, established in 2000 (Wikipedia, 2020), explains in the Forum chat that “(e)very generation has a collective name for teens who act out, chav is the current one”. Traces of less negative recontextualizations also appear in ‘chav’ as a temporarily imposed upon categorization in metacommentary in the public sphere: If you were a teenager in the noughties you were probably slotted into one of two dismissive stereotypes; the “emo” or the “chav.” You either listened to Linkin Park or RKelly; you wore Converse or Nikes; you drank snakebites or WKDs. (Jenkins, 2015: n.p.) The youth of today are suffering from age discrimination. Stamped with the “hoodies” or “chav” label and thought of as an unruly, disrespectful and dangerous bunch, we are simultaneously marginalised and stigmatised, turned into a blurry, menacing entity […] In 2004 a survey […] suggested that a staggering 71% of articles from a range of tabloid, broadsheet and local papers involving young people were negative in tone, and a third were crime-oriented […] according to figures from the Metropolitan police, the total number of people in London accused of serious youth violence in 2009 was 1,336–just 0.07% of an under-20 population of 1,868,457. Youth crime has always been around, we just hear about it a lot more now. Cases are individualised and heightened to their maximum, inciting nothing but fear. (Heath, 2011: n.p.)

 See also the opinion of other content creators reported in Shadijanova, 2020 (n.p.): Abi, 16 (800,000 followers on TikTok): “She thinks a chav is ‘your stereotypical British girl with big eyebrows who smokes and wears perfume.’ According to Abi, being a chav is a ‘stage we’ve all been through [at school], in Year Seven and Eight’”; Molly: “Like Abi, Molly May believes being a chav is a personality type. The TikToker from Leeds says: ‘I think it’s just what kind of person you are. Like, if you’re someone who has a lot of makeup and acts a bit more rough and that. Your social [standing] doesn’t matter. It’s just like your personality, isn’t it?” 25

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Fig. 5.2  User exchange on ‘chav’ in 2011. (Lau17kyy, 2011)

More recent pieces of citizens’ sociolinguistic data, available in the blog from which the following extract is drawn, together with some of the comments it inspired (Fig. 5.3), also appear to be entangled in ‘visuality’ with the socially acceptable re-appropriation of ‘chav’ as a temporary life phase in many people’s existence,26 where the chav becomes the counterpart of the emo:27 When I was a young teenager, you usually went through one of two stages—chav or emo. Now, aged 22, I absolutely envy those who went through the emo stage as I was a chav and when I say chav, I mean a full on tracksuit bottoms and budgie swing earrings kind of chav. Oh the shame! […] You now look back at your photos and think “really?” Why oh why did I think that looking like I’d jumped into Sports Direct covered in superglue was a good look? Also, why don’t teenage girls these days have a chav phase? Why aren’t they currently tucking their tracksuit bottoms into their socks? I thought it was teenage tradition!! Did you go through a chav phase? (Amy, 2016: n.p., emphasis in the original)  “‘Emo,’ ‘punk’ and ‘mosher’ are music- and fashion-based sub-cultural identities. They are often portrayed as ‘alternative’ yet ‘mainstream’” (Renold, 2010: 85). Research shows that young people in certain areas tend to differentiate subcultural groupings in ‘hippies’ or ‘poshies,’ ‘goths’ and ‘emos,’ ‘skaters’ or ‘jitters,’ ‘rockers’ and ‘gangsters,’ and ‘townies’ or ‘chavs’ or ‘charvers’ (Hollingworth & Williams, 2009). Chavs are sometimes described to be in confrontational terms (due to similarity and consequent competition) to goths (see Barkham, 2005). 27  In line with previous research on secondary school culture, Davies found that the young people involved in her study appeared to be using the concept of ‘chav’ rather differently, in relation to the rival category of ‘mosher.’ She also noticed that both labels were mostly used to describe oppositional clothing and music tastes (Davies, 2011). 26

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Fig. 5.3  Blogger post on “10 Signs You Went through the Teenage Chav Stage” and some user comments on it. (Amy, 2016)

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Fig. 5.3  (continued)

It appears many users in this blog relate to the question “Did you go through a chav phase?”, and “Chav phase” even appears as a stage of life that is retrospectively looked upon with nostalgia (e.g., in the comments “my chav phase was my fave and i was so funny and happy”; “Ahhh the teenage years”). In this light, the visuality links up with the Geordie Shore formulation of ‘chav’ as an emblem of youth lifestyles. Here youth acquires the significance of a value project in which ‘chav’ becomes an attempt to fix the perfect stage of life—free from both the dependence of

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childhood and the worries of adulthood—as long as that can last (cf. Sect. 4.2). This picture of ‘chav’—I have argued—queers both ‘deprived’ and ‘aspirational’ and ‘posh’ chav meanings, in a destratification strategy that erases previous layers. In their metaxical virtual-real universe of long-­ lasting lasts-as-it-can-last youth, the Geordie Shore young people “are struggling to establish legitimate forms of subjectivity from within the spaces of their inclusion which produces a particular exaggerated and ‘hyper’ social aesthetics” (Wood, 2017: 42). The common thread between TikTokers and Geordie Shore participants becomes evident if we focus on two aspects: the first can be summed up in the notion that, like Chav check videos, Geordie Shore episodes are ways of experiencing rather than merely watching ‘chav’: With its lack of storyline or action, which would allow viewers to decode meaning from a distance, reality television produces images that require much more of our personal experiences, memories and feelings in order to make sense […] reality television draws on specific representational patterns and editing techniques in order to make meaning sensate rather than only visible. (Graefer, 2014: 108)

The second aspect that Chav check TikTokers and Geordie Shore housemates share can be summed up in both groups’ objective of branding of their identity through performance (Hearn, 2010): as the former are engaged in activities ultimately revolving around their visibility, Geordie Shore participants are “engaged in a process of work that might be termed ‘making themselves visible,’ but they are also involved in ‘making their work as themselves even more visible’” (Wood, 2017: 44, emphasis in the original). In the specific case of Geordie Shore housemates, the exaggeration of visibility—meant to claim some type of legitimate subjectivity and obtained through labor-intensive efforts on the improvement of their personal appearance—actually offers itself as a more socially acceptable counterpart to the individual chav identity constructed as looking away from the camera, “refusing to take up the invitation of the lens and [choosing to remain] anonymous, in the political language of social exclusion, refusing the call to individual responsibility” (Wood, 2017: 46): that of the ‘hooded’ chav.

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Focusing on the types of femininities that emerge from the show, Graefer contends that these do not simply embody the oppositional counterpart to “the ideal of clean, white, middle-class feminine respectability, but they also engender a complex affective fabric of delight on the one hand and unease,” which is too often simplistically “resolved by a mocking audience position that laughs at these out-of-control participants” (Graefer, 2014: 109). In her work, the scholar draws attention precisely to the type of audience responses that are often overlooked in critical studies about reality television, which, I think, can help us find clues to how unexpected entanglements in visuality come into being: The show’s status as a serial, wherein character engagement is necessary to keep viewers watching and engaged with the same group of individuals week after week, illustrates that Geordie Shore women are not only constructed to repulse but also to attract and attach audiences emotionally. Moreover, the fact that the show’s production team manages a Facebook fan page that seemingly encourages the formation of such affectionate relationships demonstrates the affective ambiguity that is at work in and through these excessive working-class representations. (Ibidem)

Focusing on the character from Geordie Shore who seems to elicit the most joy and laughter, Charlotte, “a bubbly woman who openly admits her ‘flawed’ gender performance,” Graefer convincingly illustrates how the young woman is not only “read as exhibiting an ‘unruly’ femininity that makes other bodies feel shame and disgust, but that she can also engender affection, pleasure and mirth […] Charlotte is not merely sticky with negative emotions but […] she is saturated by a more complex affective fabric” (Graefer, 2014: 112–113). Indeed, the young woman appears to embrace her faults through self-deprecating humor, hence performing a similar type of affective authenticity to the one I was discussing just a few pages back. This self-deprecating humor is not—Graefer clarifies— “an expression of self-hatred and loathing but rather demonstrates Charlotte’s cultural knowledge and her ability to reflect upon herself,”

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self-reflexivity being itself a form of cultural capital that “allows subjects to present themselves as future-oriented, productive and enterprising individuals.” Self-deprecating humor does not strike at its teller but at the “wider sociocultural norms and values that enable the joke in the first place.” The self-deprecating humor characterizing many other-perceived chav individuals (Jade Goody is a prime example: cf. Sect. 4.2) can—and is most probably—experienced by some, not as a way of degrading oneself or admitting and accepting other people’s degrading, but as a way of upgrading oneself by presenting as “self-reflexive and knowledgeable about social codes.” At the same time, such a peculiar form of humor makes it clear that many ‘middle-class’ ideals are impossible standards for any ordinary person to reach. Some Geordie Shore individuals—and various supposedly chav personalities—invite affective investment, inspiring emotional attachment, and sympathetic connection. They ultimately come across as affective figures through which one can “experience the pleasure of rebelling” against the oppressive rules of middle-class propriety. (Graefer, 2014: 113–116) Rather than functioning as triggers of disgust, these figures’ flaws then serve as affective entry points, perhaps making them lovable because some viewers can relate to them, which is ultimately why they are experienced by some as ‘cool.’ A still in shaynashaynashayna 2020’s video shows a young woman raising her arm high while apparently replying ‘me’ to the self-posed question “who else wants to be a chav more than anything and finds this song incredibly addicting” spelled in the top caption, and adding “plz never let me leave british tiktok” as a farewell greeting. The picture sits side by side with—that is, it ‘quotes’—that of another young woman impersonating a chav in a popular Chav check video also ‘quoted’ by other TikTokers. Is it possible to detect processes of class formation/redefinition in this affective investment? Series like Geordie Shore and uptakes on it, like the public interactions on social platforms and metacommentary in the public space I am discussing in these pages, provide an exploration of the “diverse and open-ended modes of existence of class relations” (Campling et al., 2016: 1748), and they shed light, even if only implicitly, on the processes/events/agents that are making classes take the forms they are at

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this specific historical moment in time. In particular, the TikTok examples mentioned above would seem to point to the emergence of new, more advanced, more socially reticulated forms of class subjectivity: class subjectivities more open to otherness and international in outlook, all the while coexisting with traditional/mainstream ones.

5.5 Chav Features as Prosthetic Extensions In this section, I illustrate, through in-depth analysis of one video and related contextualization of content, some of the semiotic processes— generated by the dynamic interplay of moving visuals, video captions, still images, sound effects, etc.—through which Chav check TikTokers appropriate chav object-signs. In particular, I will show how the protagonist of a specific Chav check object incorporates chav signs into her performance and the ways her recontextualization de-chavs chav resources while retaining some of their stylistic functions. I chose the video in question for a series of reasons: (1) the content creators added the TYP tag to their content, so there are higher chances that their video will be visualized by more people, making them popular; (2) they have chosen to make an impact on the viewer not through a picture where the chav impersonation is complete, but through one where the performance really appears to be “watered down,” and what is foregrounded is instead the beautiful face of a young woman smiling into the camera. This makes the video an excellent illustration of the competing indexicalities around ‘chav’; (3) the protagonist of the video is inhabiting and, in fact, instantiating three contexts: the TikTok universe, the real world (what would appear to be her room) and the fictitious world (an outside where she pretends to be talking and shouting at someone while visibly gesticulating with cigarette in hand); (4) the video features an instance of chavspeak with interesting orthographic representations gesturing ‘chav’ in the caption (“Litrally luv propah bonkahz innit caw me a chav”) while also at the same time gesturing the style in the protagonist’s voice (which we can only guess since the audio we get is the snippet of the song gluing the Chav check videos together); (5) chav features

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appear to be not only used for others’ consumption, but also personal experimentation; (6) this semiotic object is an excellent illustration that the meaning of TikTok videos is opaque. Indeed it performs a complex representation of the dialectic of discipline and rebellion. A woman expressing seduction triggers the slut stereotype, and a woman expressing assertiveness triggers the bitch stereotype. The young woman in the video appears to be creatively utilizing the semiotic representations (heavy make-up and self-confident looks) of such ‘others’ as the slut and the bitch (which combine in the chav trope) to challenge some status quo sexist practices, so the video does not perform, but reverses the middle-­ class gaze on the chav. Even as the components of ‘chav’ remain the same, this uptake, whether or not it is conscious and/or motivated by a different project and different values, may produce change: it represents a “splicing or interweaving, a rearrangement, of the contrasts” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 144, emphasis in the original) of the chav/non-chav axis: a reassembling of their specific qualities. The notion of prosthetic culture may help to understand this incorporation of signs from different sources within the same performance. Questioning the concept of possessive individualism, according to which a free, self-determining identity is constituted as a property, Lury (1998) contends that the terms of such self-possession are currently being renegotiated in a process of experimentation which is part of a wider prosthetic culture: in a fascinating account of how technology is altering our consciousness, Lury argues that identity aspects that previously appeared to be fixed attributes are at present increasingly looked at as modifiable by the individual and made sites of deliberate transformation through strategic decision-making and experimentation which take the shape of techniques of the self. The idea put forward is that in present society we as individuals have moved beyond the stage of self-knowledge to that of self-extension, a form of “experimental individualism in which the subject is increasingly able to lay claim to features of the context or environment as if they were the outcome of the testing of his or her personal capacities” (Lury, 1998: 3). This experimental process of trying on cultural resources with the aid of technological devices can be understood

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in the perspective of a growing significance of aesthetic perception (what is commonly referred to as the “aestheticization of everyday life”,28 Featherstone, 2007[1991]) in increasingly more aspects of everyday activity (Harvey, 2011), where leisure comes to get used as personal investment into identity development, intended to increase personal ‘market’ value. In practical terms, this process consists in the individual attaching or detaching a number of ‘prostheses’ to their self, for example through the manipulation of photographic images and, more recently, through merging audio, images and captions from different sources in dynamic visuals. As a result of this process, a self-identity emerges which is no longer defined by the edict “I think therefore I am”; rather, the individual is constituted in the relation “I can, therefore I am.” This focus on experimentation comes from the recognition of changing cultural landscapes; of a view of nature “being put to work in new ways that signal not so much its disappearance as its transmogrification. Nature, in a sense, has been remade” (Franklin et al., 2000: 19). Indeed, in contemporary constructions of the body, the relationship between nature and culture appears to some to have definitely changed: in a daily reality of social networks which connect individuals very far away from each other in what might be called the “intimate global” (Stacey, 2000), the global “gets within” as an imagined universal nature, simultaneously commodified and renaturalized, a “Nature Seconded” (in the “‘chiefly British’ meaning of ‘to second’ to describe the secondment of nature through its use as a means of transfer or replacement,” Franklin et al., 2000: 23), in which icons function as orienteering devices, “figurative condensations of the traffic between nature and culture in the processes of global worldmaking” (Franklin et  al., 2000: 11). In this traffic, transmodal stylizations such as the ones we are discussing in these pages, in which enregistered emblems are prosthetically attached sometimes for pure entertainment, sometimes to enhance experimental representations of the self—I will argue below—, become instances of seconded nature: “(n)ew technologies enable new, non-genealogical, ‘unnatural’ relations” (Franklin et al., 2000: 56), producing a genetically modified self. TikTok, 28

 “(T)he stylization of life into a work of art” (Featherstone, 2007[1991]: 35).

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in particular, offers a constant supply of new ‘prostheses’; some of them— even when ‘usurped’ from lower-status individuals, as in our case— become desirable, thus producing, in addition to knowledge of such ‘new’ goods, a further need: how to use them appropriately, hence the proliferation of tutorials. It is not just a question of what prostheses to attach to one’s self, but also of how to put them on: “(t)he ‘how’ informs their exchange-value. The object does not wholly generate its value; it is the practice in which it is used” (Skeggs, 2004: 136). I will expand on this issue in the Conclusions. In Sect. 5.3 I anticipated that the first two of the TikTok Chav check videos I am discussing in these pages feature supposedly chav individuals unaware of being filmed, while the ones immediately following and some of the others reacting to the trend are videos of TikTokers who have ‘manipulated’ their appearance so as to prime the chav stereotype: these users are made up and/or clothed as chavs or act as such and sometimes add captions in chavspeak to their dynamic visuals, then offer their fictitious chav selves to the judgement of other users, who are invited to assess the degree of performed chavness. I have touched upon the fact that many commentators in the public space have criticized this activity as a “toxic trend” (Horn, 2020), interpreting it as the latest form of classist parody which is now taking on global proportions: The videos on TikTok are mocking a very British phenomena [sic], but have been picked up by creators across the world. US creators are sharing their own versions of the British ‘chav,’ which see users donning heavy make-­up and sportswear, ranking “TikTok chav songs” (grime tracks), and explaining what a British ‘chav’ actually is. “All it needs is for one such representation to gain traction,” continues Yar, “and this then starts an imitative cascade with others joining in with the ‘fun.’” (Dawson, 2020: n.p.) “Most teenagers wouldn’t dream of posting racist TikToks, but classism is probably seen as the more acceptable form of discrimination,” says Kate. “TikTok is very orientated towards makeup and clothes, so maybe people don’t see [making fun of people’s makeup and clothes] as offensive. They probably see it more as a matter of taste. It’s not always about class, but

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about things which are similar, like having a disposable income. But one of the ways we feel connected is by ‘othering’ other people. It’s probably done quite thoughtlessly.” For now, however, lots of content creators don’t see chav trends the same way. “Being a chav is a choice,” according to Bella. “If [people] find it offensive, they can simply choose to stop being chavish” (Davies, 2020: n.p.). TikTok users are contributing to the classist ‘chav’ stereotype […]. The chav hashtag on the app has almost a billion views at the time of writing this. It’s full of teenagers slapping foundation on, streaking bronzer across their cheekbones, and artfully letting a false eyelash hang off in their impersonation of a ‘chav.’ Hooped earrings, chewing gum, and Victoria’s Secret spray complete the look. In many of these videos, the creator acts out a scene as the ‘chav’: a dumb, loudmouthed girl with a rough accent and poor grammar. […] This feeds into the idea […] that a girl is quiet, patient, and polite […]. The chav stereotype has always been political; to pretend otherwise is to ignore an entrenched class system that permeates every level of British society […] the resurgence of chav-bashing is so dangerous. (Horn, 2020: n.p.) [M]aking fun of Chav cultured seemed to be a trend that we very much left in the past. But even in 2020, the world is still tuned into demonising the working class. The “chav” trope resurfaced on TikTok this year, showcasing people doing “Chav checks,” heavy make-up tutorials and compilations of the UK’s “chavviest” places. “Hey yo, chav check” is the sound clip on TikTok, used to ridicule puffa jackets, leggings and sitting around town. These skits are intended to be funny, capturing the look of Britain’s working class and erm, laughing at them? (Lockwood, 2020: n.p.) […] as these damaging stereotypes continue to abound on social media— and travel across the world—it’s a sobering reminder of how far we still have to go when it comes to tackling classism. (Smith, 2020: n.p.)

Humor has been traditionally used as a tool to maintain the social order. Indeed, through humor, social boundaries repeatedly emerge and get re-enforced: it is “a routine means of accomplishing discipline” (Billig, 2005: 46):

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Becoming a socialized member of society means more than learning how to behave in public. It involves learning how to laugh at those who behave inappropriately, for polite adults must be able to discipline the socially deviant with momentary heartless mockery. Yet, the discipline seems to occur beyond the awareness of those who are exacting the discipline. A rhetorical spray is at hand. The adults can claim to be ‘just’ laughing. But they are not ‘just’ laughing, especially if they believe that they are ‘just’ laughing. To believe that one is ‘just’ laughing is to do more than ‘just’ laugh: it is to believe and to laugh. (Billig, 2005: 230) Every interacting social group develops, over time, a joking culture: a set of humorous references that are known to members of the group to which members can refer and that serve as the basis of further interaction. Joking, thus, has a historical, retrospective, and reflexive character. […] Elements of the joking culture serve to smooth group interaction, share affiliation, separate the group from out-siders, and secure the compliance of group members through social control. (Fine & Desoucey, 2005: 1)

Mockery, then, frames many cultural representations of class (Raisborough & Adams, 2008). More specifically, the nexus between humor and social class in the chav trope has been widely explored (Tyler, 2008; Lockyer, 2010; Adams & Raisborough, 2011), revealing that it often springs from the application of the notion of the “self-control ethos” (Joffe & Staerklé, 2007), with gendered stereotypes often operating as stereotypes within stereotypes. With the advent of social networks, humor may be said to have also become a type of immaterial labor (Lazzarato, 1996) which has acquired novel forms and rationale (Graefer, 2016, for example). In some of the British TikTokers’ Chav check videos, humor may intuitively be said to serve the purpose of accreting the specific user’s personal value for capital: […] knowing that someone lacks symbolic and/or cultural capital is value producing because it demonstrates that you have this knowledge—how else would you recognise that someone else is missing it? From this perspective it becomes clear how humour can be a convenient tool for the culturally privileged to activate their cultural capital

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(Friedman, 2011) and distinguish themselves from those who are arguably lacking them. (Graefer, 2016: 156)

However, caution is imperative when “describing disciplinary humour as being unambiguously conservative” (Billig, 2005: 204): The link between embarrassment and humour is ambivalent. It can function to protect the social order, keeping social actors in line, but simultaneously it can express pleasure at subverting that same order. (Billig, 2005: 235)

Ridicule does not necessarily perform a disciplinary function (Carter 2019, for example) but can serve as a radical instrument for the promotion of social change. Rather than merely fulfilling an objective of chav mockery, some of the Chav check videos I am focusing on in this chapter, for example, appear to be hybrid sites of representation where the users are also constructing potential identities for themselves and, even when the performance of chav critique is overt, they may appear to also partly align themselves with exactly those ways of looking at the social world they are criticizing. This simultaneous focus on critique and identity work would actually appear to be the result of a ‘structural’ feature of TikTok: While other sites purport to be a tool with which users may represent their identities, TikTok does away with this conceit by engendering a mode of sociality (through its design features and affordances) in which the crux of interaction is not between users and their social network, but between a user and what we call an “algorithmized” version of self. […] This model of sociality can perhaps be termed the “algorithmized self ”—an extension and complication of the […] “networked self ”; while the latter posits that the self is created through the “reflexive process of fluid associations with social circles,” the former understands the self as deriving primarily from a reflexive engagement with previous self-representations rather than with one’s social connections (Papacharissi, 2011). The user is forced to negotiate identity not by connecting to the outside world through the mechanism of the machine, but rather by engaging with “machinized” selves. (Bhandari & Bimo, 2020: n.p.)

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Fig. 5.4  Screenshot of results for ‘chav,’ January 2021. (Google Trends, 2021)

In the video presented below, I am going to look at the user’s style as a “system of sociocultural positioning through modes of semiotic action” (Bucholtz, 2015: 32), analysing how chav object-signs, particularly makeup, are incorporated into the young protagonist’s performance, and in what ways the recontextualization de-chavs chav resources, while also retaining some of their stylistic function. The reasons for choosing to focus on a Chav check video which includes a make-up tutorial component (on which, as already hinted at, I will expand in the Conclusions) are that (1), from a Google Trends query for ‘chav’ at the time of writing (Fig. 5.4), words related to make-up (‘eyebrows,’ ‘makeup look,’ ‘makeup’) appear as collocates in a sudden leap (‘impennata’ on the Italian version of the page) together with ‘check’ and ‘have a little faith in me’ (the refrain acoustically gluing Chav check videos together, as anticipated in Sect. 5.3); and (2) the humor in Chav check videos currently appears to be mostly gendered.

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The video in question (mylingz, 2020) revolves around the chav impersonation that a beautiful young woman performs through makeup, clothes, mannerisms, props and a caption in chavspeak. I have anticipated in Sect. 5.1 that, focusing on the current notion of the transformation of girls’ “bedroom culture” (McRobbie & Garber, 2006[1993]) from a private space to one of visibility, Kennedy has argued that the media attention paid to TikTok during this time can be read as a “celebration of girlhood in the face of the pandemic” (2020: 1070, emphasis in the original). This aspect is particularly relevant in the analysis of this specific video. To critically engage with it as a multimodal digital object, I have stretched data presentation strategies currently in use within the tradition of embodied sociocultural linguistics (for example, Bucholtz, 2015) to integrate text, audio and dynamic visuals. In the scheme below, each scene is briefly described in bold; there follow sequences (sometimes further divided into microsequences preceded by an arrow pointing to the top to indicate that the microsequences represent an articulation of what comes first in the presentation) making up the specific scene. For each sequence, in the left-hand column I have listed the acoustic data in single quotation marks (this consists first in the Chav check video creator rhis’s voice, then in the portion of the song gluing the Chav check videos together, which makes up the microsequence—indicated in bold); in the right-hand column I have offered an essential description of the visual data in italics. There follows a specification of the individual act performed for the single sequences. My reflections on the digital object as a whole come after the data presentation: In response to rhi’s Chav check video, myles hamilton has posted the video of a young woman (a friend, presumably), accompanying it with the tags #chavcheck #chav and #fyp They have also individually tagged aundyyy (another content creator, aund, possibly the protagonist of the video)

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Bathroom. Camera facing the door. Mid-shot of young woman Ayo, young woman making up in a 1. rhi: Champion sweatshirt;

↑

((Young woman applies concealer on chin: triangles already drawn on cheeks, lines on forehead)) 2a. rhi: Chav..., young woman making up; second one woman witnesses the make-up process in the background

↑

((applies blush on cheekbones)) 2b. rhi: ...check, young woman making up; second one woman witnesses the make-up process in the background

↑ (draws eyebrows) Bathroom. Camera facing the mirror. Mid-shot of young woman 3a. IAMDDB Have a little..., young woman finishes her preparation routine; second one woman has disappeared

↑

(zips up her quilted jacket; looks at herself smiling in the mirror) Room. Woman in white armchair 3b. IAMDDB ...faith in me, yeah., young woman finishes her preparation routine; appears to be talking to someone

↑ (wears earrings) Drawer. Close-up of hand grabbing cigarette and lighter 4. IAMDDB It’s all I need, young woman gets cigarette and lighter from drawer Outside. Mid-shot of young woman facing the left-hand side of the video; cigarette in one hand; packet and lighter in other hand 5. IAMDDB yeah. Baby you’re all I need, yeah, young woman gesticulates visibly and appears to be shouting

Outside. Mid-shot of young woman facing the right-hand side of the video 6. IAMDDB You’re my G, young woman gesticulating and shouting. Appears to take pleasure in the frolic Inside. Still of young woman facing the camera: a selfie, perhaps. Caption 7. IAMDDB Bad bitch, no, young woman smiling

keeps

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The video can be logically broken into four parts, coinciding with the three larger action sequences: making up; dressing up and accessorizing; acting out, and the final selfie with caption. Each larger action sequence is composed of smaller action sequences as indicated above. I am going to focus on sequence n. 7 in the discussion that follows, though of course considering previous sequences. My uptake of the video is indeed strongly based on in-depth reflection on each single microsequence: the division into microsequences stemmed from the very need to avoid limiting the ways in which I saw the actions performed in the video, i.e., to circumscribe the loss of details and any possible ideological implication. On first viewing the video, I got the general idea that the protagonist was not really being judgmental or better that she was not merely reacting to the Chav check trend, but had to be sure to pick up the details which made me say so. Forcing myself to focus on single details through repeated viewing confirmed my conviction but also provided the evidence I needed to argue that it was indeed so, from my perspective. For example, it was through repeatedly watching and pausing the video that it became clear to me that while someone else was filming all the other sequences, the still in the last sequence (n. 7) is most probably a selfie (the young woman’s left shoulder shows the typical shape of the person taking a selfie). I have used this still as the first piece of data to focus on because it is the backdrop against which I am going to interpret the activity performed in the video as a whole, being both the closing image of the TikTok object produced and shared, and the one the protagonist of the comedy sketch which makes up the object has clearly personally taken. The caption appearing on this last sequence is important too, because it would seem to frame the activity: “Litrally luv propah bonkahz innit caw me a chav.” Before reflecting on the caption, let me briefly clarify that the tag #fyp applied to the video together with the self-explicatory ones #chavcheck and #chav is an acronym, standing for ‘For Your Page’: it refers to that part of the page TikTok “uses to surface content to your landing page” based on a curation algorithm, i.e., an algorithm that arranges online delivered content by classifying and prioritizing a certain type information over other. In short, it is “the ‘explore’ page of TikTok and videos you are more likely to be interested in watching and engaging with.” Content creators are aware that

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adding the TYP tag to their content, there are higher chances that their stuff will be visualized by more people, making them popular. (95–106 Capital FM 2020). This piece of information is useful to try to detect some of the motives behind video creation and sharing. As for the caption that frames the video—“Litrally luv propah bonkahz innit caw me a chav”—I introduced this as an instance of chavspeak above, which Bennett describes as the sociolinguistic element of the chav stereotype, “the supposed language of the chav” (Bennett, 2012: 5), with the features deployed to represent it being recognizable as basilectal stereotypes. In this light, chavspeak works as a “continuation and intensification of classed representations.” It co-articulates a number of fairly well-established clichés, “in fairly loose relation to actual patterns of variation in contemporary Britain” (Bennett, 2012: 6): […] stylisations of chavspeak can be seen as a mode of enregisterment, drawing on sociolinguistic use of Bakhtin’s (1981) concept (e.g. Coupland, 2001; Rampton, 2006). Such work, as Rampton puts it, conceives of stylisation as ‘double-voicing,’ whereby ‘stereotypic elements from elsewhere’ are brought into language use to create ‘condensed dialogues between self and other,’ and, in drawing on these recognisable ‘other’ voices, acts of stylisation ‘nearly always draw on … settled ideologies of language and group value’ (1999: 422) […] The stylisation of chavspeak might […] not only be a way of making a supposed variety, but a way of making, and derogating, a perceived group of people, chavs, and of sustaining relations of class power. Stylisations are not only significant in linguistic-ideological ways, but in terms of broader social ideological tendencies too. (Bennett, 2012: 7–8, emphasis in the original)

Bennett contends that stylists of chavspeak do not rely directly on actual innovations but on well-established ideological representations of linguistic variation. While “litrally luv” could be said to be just an informal downtoner with no specific social connotation other than indexing age, of the “‘sure-fire’ stereotypes” identified by Bennet as being drawn in for the construction of chavspeak, the Chav check video I am discussing deploys the use of ‘innit,’ which is not explicitly commented upon by Bennett because it is undoubtedly seen as a self-explanatory sociolinguistic chav stereotype, widely recognized in the public sphere:

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The chav dictionary … Innit! (The Sun, 2004a) Guide to chav body language … Innit! (The Sun, 2004b)

In her studies on the new ethnicities and adolescent speech in the traditional East End of London, Fox discusses ‘innit’ as an established pragmatic marker among young speakers in London, irrespective of their ethnic origin. This leads us to imagine that its widespread use stems from frequent contact between marginal groups, i.e., from the territorial proximity hinted at by Starkey’s infamous speech on the 2011 London riots (“Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together … which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England. This is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country,” Ramzan, 2011: n.p.; cf. Sect. 4.3): It is used as a derivation of isn’t it, as a tag that matches the subject and verb form of the preceding clause […], and also in nonparadigmatic contexts, where the subject of the preceding form is not it and the verb is not is [..] and where there is therefore no grammatical relationship between innit and the preceding clause. […] Its use was first documented in the 1980s when Hewitt (1986) stated that the use of innit as invariant tag was one of the most frequent forms of Jamaican Creole found in the speech of white adolescents in London, particularly in high-contact areas and in ethnically mixed conversation. Andersen (2001: 110) also argues that innit developed in high-contact communities, with non-Anglo speakers and adolescents in general in the lead. Today, however, its use has spread throughout the community and there is little difference between Anglo and non-Anglo speakers in the frequency of innit use (Torgersen et  al., 2011). (Fox, 2015: 225–226, emphasis in the original)

Amongst the phonological forms that Bennett presents as commented upon and given orthographic representation in chavspeak stylizations, l-vocalization (“caw me” in the caption used in our video) is not included: it consists in the vocalization of preconsonantal final /l/; the /l/ sound visually occurring at the end of the word ‘call’ before a consonant (‘me’) is replaced with the semivowel /w/, resulting in the pronunciation [kɔːw], for ‘call’ [kɔːl]. Research has clarified that /l/ vocalization is “natural and to be expected,” since children acquiring English “tend strongly to replace

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dark /l/ with /w/ or a vowel /u/” (Johnson & Britain, 2007: 298). However, l-vocalization would appear to be includable amongst those sounds that are “recognisable as classed variants” for this specific TikToker, since its orthographic representation in the caption conveys the idea that it is perceived as an acoustic realization that diverges from a normative standard and thus dramatizes “power and status differentials between language varieties and their speakers,” all the while making the ‘authenticity’ of the supposed variety it metonymically represents29 well palpable: […] non-standard orthographies can graphically capture some of the immediacy, the ‘authenticity’ and ‘flavor’ of the spoken word in all its diversity. (Jaffe, 2000: 498).

Another orthographic representation which appears to gesture ‘chav’ in the caption making up the semiotic object I am discussing is in “propah bonkahz” (“proper bonkers,” i.e., “completely crazy”), which renders the vowel lowering (with final -er being lowered to [ɐ]) that Hughes and Trudgill (1979) identified as one of the traits of broad cockney in the seventies. Fox tells us that the use of “very open realisations [ɐ] of schwa in final position30 (Wells, 1982: 305) is still commonly found in and around London” (Fox, 2015: 219). This acoustic trait is, among other things (including the vocalization of dark/l/dealt with just above), a distinctive feature of singer Kate Nash, who has “labelled herself as the new Posh Spice in response to being called a chav in the press. […] ‘I think the press really wanted me to be a chav because of the way I sing. I’m way too articulate to be a chav. I’m the new Posh, me’” (Colothan, 2007: n.p., emphasis in the original). On the face of it, through the caption—“Litrally luv propah bonkahz innit caw me a chav” the young woman in the video would appear to be sharing a consideration about her activity, ascribing a judgment of  Jaffe and Walton talk about “orthographic metonymy”: “(o)ne aspect of dominant language ideology […] is the notion of language varieties as discrete and bounded codes, linked to discrete and bounded social categories and values. It is this premise that makes possible the striking leap from part to whole (orthographic metonymy) on the basis of a text’s orthography” (Jaffe & Walton, 2000: 582). 30  Cockney being a non-rhotic variety, final -er is pronounced as a schwa [ə] in non-broad forms. 29

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weirdness to it. It is quite evident from the smile on her face and the type of picture that she has chosen as the ‘signature’ to her video—a sort of payoff, a tagline, i.e., a memorable image that sums up the tone and premise of the video of which she is the protagonist—that she is not making a propositional statement about herself, however. Indeed, the young woman comes across as both pleasant and credible in this picture. Alternatively, her smile may suggest she is making one such statement about herself just in as much as it is understood that this is a pantomime. More likely, through her ascribing a judgment of weirdness to her activity, the young woman would appear to be making explicit that underlying expectations frame the style she is performing. In this sense, this semiotic object would make an excellent contribution to the Chav check videos as the press frames them: a “toxic trend” that re-enforces the classist chav stereotype. It is clear (from the #fyp tag) that the content creators intend to make an impact on the viewer, appealing to them, so they decide to like and share the video or create a video themselves, quoting it. However, they have chosen not to do so through a picture where the chav impersonation is complete but through one where the performance appears to be “watered down,” and what is foregrounded is instead the beautiful face of a young woman smiling into the camera in an attitude that would be better described as understated rather than overstated (as the chav stereotype would have it). It is not surprising, then, that the author of a video quoting this semiotic object has chosen to use a still of the young woman’s full chav impersonation, rather than this specific picture as representative of the Chav check trend (mermaid.wh0r3, 2020; cf. Sect. 5.4). Of course, multiple descriptions would be possible (and most probably exist simultaneously) for this semiotic object because content creators and viewers may differ in their interpretations of the same sets of object-­ signs and activities. In this case, as we have seen in Sect. 5.3, the existence of competing indexicalities around ‘chav’ is a crucial feature emerging from the Chav check videos, and the fact that ‘chav’ currently appears to be turning into a “floating signifier”31 (Butler et al., 2000), with chav/  Laclau explains that a floating signifier is a signifier “whose emptiness results from the unfixity introduced by a plurality of discourses” (Laclau, 2000: 305). 31

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non-chav boundary-making constantly reproduced and re-negotiated, appears to be making its way into the public sphere: I’ve been called a ‘chav’ in the past. I think it’s how people say it, what context they use it in. If they mean ‘she’s nothing but a chav’ and they think they’re better than me, that’s offensive. A bit of banter is fine. […] If you look back at me in The Call Centre days, you can see how people might call me a ‘chav.’ Looking back, I was. I was mouthy, in your face and I didn’t care. I was young. I’ve grown up now and progressed as a person. If someone called me a ‘chav’ now, I’d be like, ‘hang on, I’m not a ‘chav’ anymore!.’ I remember years ago, this stuck with me: my friend (who’s exactly the same as me) turned around and was like, ‘You’re a chav Hayley.’ I was like, ‘why?.’ She said, ‘because you always match all your jewellery and your accessories’ and I was like ‘what?!.’ She was like, ‘that’s chavvy.’ I said, ‘I like to be colour coordinated!.’ I always thought of a ‘chav’ like that old tracksuit and big earrings… (Pearce, 2020: n.p.)

Let us move back to the caption and analyze it in its pragmatic force this time, not just in its propositional content: “Litrally luv propah bonkahz innit caw me a chav” may easily be classified under the stance category of tact/rudeness. It is a form of ‘banter,’ and it appears to be used, in this specific case, for social bonding purposes, so technically, it is an instance of mock impoliteness, i.e., “an impoliteness understanding that does not match the surface form or semantics of the utterance or the symbolic meaning of the behavior” (Culpeper, 2011: 17). Indeed, the key to reading this as a co-constructed instance of mock-impoliteness (or camaraderie, Leech, 2014: 238–241) is in the double mismatch between incompatible polite and impolite moves within the same utterance (the familiarizer ‘luv’ via-à-vis ‘bonkhaz’) and between the overall verbal message and the paralinguistics. ‘Innit’ too is an interactionally significant marker. We have seen that it is widely perceived as ‘chav’ (The Sun, 2004a, b) and that it is common in adolescent conversation, particularly in the London area (Fox, 2015). However, while it denotes working-classness in some areas (Cheshire et al., 2005), it appears to be used by all socioeconomic groups in others (Andersen, 2001). The expression has been commodified (T-shirts, mugs, etc.) and appears here in the function most strongly associated with it:

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attitudinal stance marking (Pichler, 2013: 200). It signals an assertive, speaker-oriented style (which may explain its greater presence in men’s speech as revealed by research, Pichler, 2013: 220). Used as a tag, it requests confirmation of common ground, but is it used as a tag here? Impossible to say in the absence of punctuation, but my overall impression is that it is not. The protagonist of the video is inhabiting and in fact instantiating three contexts, moving fluidly between the TikTok universe, the real world (what would appear to be her room), and the fictitious world (an outside where she pretends to be talking and shouting at someone while visibly gesticulating, cigarette in hand). Contexts are essential to the creation of stylistic meaning, but for the process of meaning-making to take place, it is indexicality that is crucial. Through indexicality, semiotic forms link up with context-specific social meanings. Despite the assertive tone of the caption and of some of the visuals in the full impersonation parts (sequences 4 and 5), the overall pleasantness of the tagline picture and the smile on the young woman’s face in the selfie would appear to make the three ‘pure’ indexicals fixed on it and framing the video as a whole (roughly speaking, the three expressive elements whose reference can shift from context to context: the heavy make-up, the Champion sweatshirt and the sentence in chavspeak), index a stance of subjective coolness and intersubjective solidarity and camaraderie. Mock impoliteness is both relationship- and identity implicative (Culpeper, 2011). In Chav check videos, stance is the expression of the content creators’ assessment of the object they have created vis-á-vis other TikTokers: it is the way they position themselves, in this specific case, in relation to other users’ positions about the topic of the Chav check trend (more specifically such chav features as heavy make-up, sportswear, and chavspeak in this video). Stance “has the power to assign value to objects of interest, to position social actors with respect to those objects, to calibrate alignment between stance takers and to invoke systems of sociocultural value” (Du Bois, 2007: 139). How does this young woman (and the person who posted the video) evaluate the chav features identified as indexical, thereby positioning herself, and certainly aligning herself with some users and disaligning from others? The young woman has stylized her face, which is already enhanced with a filter. However, the overall effect does not appear

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to be overstated, and she ‘gestures’ the style in her voice (which we can only guess since the audio we get is the snippet of the song gluing the Chav check videos together) with a textual rendering of the chav ‘variety’ which uses unconventional spelling, we have seen. However, this variety is expressed through specific fonts and colors, and these would appear to mitigate the expressive power of the unconventional spelling, if not totally understate, the content of the caption. I only noticed this through repeated watching and pausing. Being short, TikTok videos are dynamic footage, looping at the end: tactile action is required for detailed viewing. I want now to focus on the stylization of the face, which takes up most of this video and indeed most of the videos in the Chav check trend. Traditionally, a woman’s appearance was the signifier of her conduct, and this in turn was the expression of a sharp division between the sexual and the feminine. Despite this divide no longer being so prominent, it would appear to be still in place, though in less overt forms, today: “(m)odesty has been central,” with projection being the mechanism by which “those aspects of self from which one wants to draw distance are projected onto another person, or another object. […] A reading of [the chav] body as excessive is therefore to display the investment the reader has in maintaining propriety in themselves” (Skeggs, 2004: 100). Respectable femininity (cf. Skeggs, 1997) is still, for many, the desirable counterpart of the “slutty bitch” trope: The female “chav” fits into narratives of slut-shaming and taste-policing, implying unladylike promiscuity, lack of restraint, and vulgarity in dress, speech and behaviour. All heavily classed presentations, these are held to be especially objectionable when observed in women, with sexual excess seen as a central signifier of “disrespectable” femininity. (Jones, 2013: 21)

Taste is always defined by those who have the symbolic power to legitimate their judgment, and “(t)he exercise of taste is constantly drawing and redrawing the boundaries” (Cook, 2000: 100). What is expressed in

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this video is ‘respectable’ excess.32 But what does this equate to in practice? And how exactly is it conveyed? Against traditional constructions of gender, women can and do perform agency and empowerment in their daily lives. In this specific case, for example, the ‘parodic’ appropriation of chav signs may as well function, from my perspective, as a subtle, covert but active political practice of resistance that challenges the norms and stereotypes of femininity. Indeed, this woman appears to me to be appropriating the symbols and practices of chavs not just to create entertainment value but also to experiment with her identity: she appears to take pleasure in her chav transformation (sequence 6), thus also attaching seductiveness and assertiveness to her body, all the while expressing clear boundary markers to ultimately signify her own propriety. To claim seductiveness and assertiveness in feminine gender performance, vulgarity and excess must be avoided, and this can be done in different, often subtle, ways. Analyzing the public social network site profiles of young women aged between 18 and 21, Dobson has found, for example, that many contain representations of self that would typically be considered ‘unfeminine’.33 She has attempted to interpret this “symbolically inverted” depiction of feminine bodies (or ‘laddish’ performativity), developing the concept of “performative shamelessness”: […] performative shamelessness may be one of the few options available to young women wishing to maintain a sense of self-definition in the face of intense social and cultural scrutinizing, and often sexually objectifying, gazes. (Dobson, 2013: 142)

The variety of registers with which a person is acquainted “equips a person with portable emblems of identity” (Agha, 2007: 146). In this way, such features as heavy makeup and self-confident style, marking chavs as ‘gaudy’ and ‘bitchy,’ can become detachable and operate as  See Cairns and Johnston’s notion of calibrated performances of femininity and of performing the “ideal woman” as a balancing act (Cairns & Johnston, 2015). 33  Something similar happens with ‘man’ performances: some studies suggest, for example, that by exhibiting “spectacular masculinities” of white male excess, some “young men accrue a body capital that has a currency and a local exchange value within the circuits they inhabit” (Nayak, 2006: 813). 32

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mobile resources that can be transported onto other bodies. The result is that clusters that are presumed to go together disassemble. Ideologies create indexical relations linking qualities to typical personae. When qualities are attached to different personae, they take on different meanings; they become different ‘qualia.’ Stylistic features are multivalent and context-­dependent, and in transmodal stylizations, indexicalities become entangled in messy ways (Jones, 2020a). The chav aesthetic prosthetically applied to this young woman’s body—through the makeup and the confident style produced by using dual audio (one made acoustically available via the song34 and one visually gestured by the caption in chavspeak)—for example, allows sexuality to dialogue with femininity without hitting profligacy, and for self-confidence to converse with femininity without attaining ‘nastiness.’ What is projected onto chavs as the site of the immoral and dangerous appears to be re-valued (de-chaved, rather than rejected) as pleasant and appealing when it becomes attached to this woman’s body (cf. Skeggs, 2004). The young woman’s pleasant, understated smile would not match the make-up of the conventional woman chav in a chav picture, and yet the two do match in this picture, where chav clusters are disassembled and chav features are ‘normalized,’ cannibalized, extracted out of chav culture and used for the enhancement of this young woman’s identity. Different forms of power and different relationships constitute resources differently (Skeggs, 2004), however. In short, in this video, ‘chav’ appears to be plundered as a form of cultural appropriation: features of ‘others’ used as extensions of the self—a temporary possession—symbolically combine in the pantomime staged from this young woman’s bedroom for the whole world to watch. Chav features are not only used for others’ consumption but also for personal experimentation; indeed, through the pleasure she takes in her frolicking, this young woman also appears to be performing the coolness of ‘chav’ to expand her options of personal ‘mobility’ (cf. Skeggs, 2004). This means that what we get here could also be read as a complex representation of the dialectic of discipline and rebellion. The video could count as an  The song is rated as 68% for energy (Musicstax, 2020), which research on song likeability defines as the “perceptual measure of intensity and activity. Typically, energetic tracks feel fast, loud, and noisy” (Ashrith, 2018: n.p.). 34

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intersemiotic process of both overt and covert identity formation and evaluation, in which a young woman articulates the agency of supposedly nonchav young women. In other words, this video could be seen as the young woman’s personal way of dealing with the dominant ideology. A woman expressing seduction triggers the slut stereotype, and a woman expressing assertiveness triggers the bitch stereotype. Instead, this young woman would appear to be creatively utilizing the semiotic representations (heavy makeup and self-confident looks) of such ‘others’ as the slut and the bitch (which combine in the chav trope) to challenge some status quo sexist practices. She does not appear to laugh at ‘chav’; she appears to enjoy her chav performance. There is a fine line between privilege and oppression, and these processes appear to me to be intertwined in the construction of this young woman’s identity. She does not seem to be performing but reversing the so-called ‘middle-class’ gaze. What I see in this video is not a shaming and moralizing discourse about excessive bodies. ‘Chav’ would instead seem to serve here as an object of disidentification from the ‘middle-class’ gaze: a ‘protective’ mechanism whereby a young woman rejects or removes a trait of her group identity which is potentially harmful to her full development/accomplishment, attempting a sort of insulation from failure, by appropriating traits from other group identities. To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject” (Muñoz, 1999: 12; also Chávez, 2014). This video looks to me like some sort of ground-testing for this young woman: does she really wish to abide by the social expectations of her social group? For those young women who struggle to fit in with the ‘standard’ narrative of propriety, Chav check videos like this may prove to be a sort of safety valve, a world upside-down where norms are really tested and contested, the perfect locus of resistance. In her carnivalesque appropriation, the young protagonist of this video attaches such qualities as assertiveness and seduction to her TikTok persona, producing what appears to be a transmodal metaphor of herself through the semiotic processes triggered by the entanglement of audio, graphics, and moving visuals that characterizes the TikTok platform.

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The question that springs to my mind is whether these characterizations stem from the perspective of the creator of such a transmodal metaphor, like some sort of constitutive move in a personal project or only an experiment. Have such qualities as assertiveness and seduction been projected onto the young woman’s persona by the outsider perspective I have constructed for her? Whatever the correct alternative, if there even is a right alternative, Walker-Rettberg would probably contend that the outstretched arm in the still of Sequence 7 “very strongly includes the viewer35” (2014: 9), and the circulation of the chav narrative may have transformative potential. It may “open up possibilities for fleeting moments of resistance through which the Other ‘speaks back’ to dominant discourses” (Maegaard et al., 2019: 4). Such potential may or may not change things for the chav. In fact, this and other videos can generate complex dynamics of simultaneous subversion and reproduction. However, while this specific gender performance could look, on the one hand, like the typical ‘middle-class’ reading of the ‘working-class’ through physical demarcation, it is also true that the shared meanings about what chavs are like and what some chav values look like when applied to non-­ chav bodies (that is, when they are de-chaved) also work to produce perceptions of chav identities that rely on ‘chav’ not being the disgusting ‘other.’ Even as the components of ‘chav’ remain the same, this uptake, whether or not it is motivated by a different project and different values, may produce change: it represents a “splicing or interweaving, a rearrangement, of the contrasts” of the chav/non-chav axis: a reassembling of their specific qualities. The qualities are redistributed (spliced), and what we get as a result is a chav/non-chav geography (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 144, emphasis in the original). Of course, even if the protagonist’s intentions were to resist, this performance could not legitimate the chav perspective at large: “whilst some aspects [of chav] can be usefully opened up and  “As Katie Warwick points out, the outstretched arm is like a (forced) embrace, placing the viewer between the face of the person photographed and the camera (Warfield, 2014)” (Walker-Rettberg, 2014: 9). See also Page’s notion of a sense of shared perception, which the scholar refers to as “strategic use of synthetic collectivisation” (Page, 2018: 79); Marwick and boyd’s notion of a “many-to-­ many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets” could also be applied to the specific network considered here (Marwick & boyd, 2011:114). 35

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commodified as cultured properties, exchange-values, attachments or prosthesis, other parts […] are beyond appropriation” (Skeggs, 2004: 150). All reference to the practice typically and automatically associated with the feminine body (reproduction) is absent in this gender performance, despite being crucial in most female chav performances in the public sphere, where a symbolic connection is drawn between the feminine body and reproduction: ‘chavettes’ “are represented in political rhetoric and popular culture as excessively fecund” (Skeggs, 2004: 11). Fecundity “generates a powerful concentration of negative value, one that cannot be used as a resource, but only to mark a constitutive limit” (Skeggs, 2004: 111). The chavness which is figured as ‘cool’ here is a particular, safe, version of chavness: the seductiveness and assertiveness of ‘chav,’ minus the fecundity: some chav features are marketable, and they may be used as commodified resources and offered for other people to consume. The seductiveness and assertiveness associated with chav women have to be detached from the latter and attached to non-chav women to become useful: chav-phobia and chav-mania are part of the same phenomenon. Whereas non-chav bodies are allowed flexibility,36 chav bodies cannot move through the social space to trade and convert their cultural resources: “(t)he processes of inscription, exchange, value-­ attribution and perspective put limits on them” (Ibidem). However, when their cultural resources do acquire a value on other people’s bodies, something changes; the whole system is set in motion, and fluidity may also come to affect those who “speak a language who sounds to others as noise […] the noise outside the Parliament, the noise outside the established institutions of democracy […] the noise of democracy” (Butler, 2020: n.p.). It may affect chav bodies too. Social identity is a complex performance, and people use a variety of resources to construct theirs. In particular, young people increasingly move through “a mosaic discourse space, participating in its reproduction and transformation” (Bucholtz, Skapoulli, 2009: 3). This specific instance of resource use would appear to function as an act of self-representation in addition to counting as a critique, in which the user could  Skeggs argues that “similar characteristics are inscribed, marked and stuck on other bodies […]— femininity, hypersexuality, criminality, for example—whilst others do not” (Skeggs, 2004: 2). 36

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be seen as aligning herself with certain ways of looking at the social world rather than merely criticizing them. So the peculiar possibilities offered by the TikTok platform through the combination of audio, video, and writing coming from different sources may conjure up to queer the user’s intentions (or the user’s expression of their intentions). TikTok users do not merely communicate ideational meaning; they also perform interpersonal meaning in their videos. As this specific user chooses, from the many possible ways in which she can communicate her ideational meaning content (critique?), she may in fact also appear to align herself with the very social group whose practices she would seem to wish to criticize, at least in part. This young woman is ‘saying’ something. She is interacting, quoting ‘chav’ and using ‘chav’ to socialize. Social identity is constructed through communication, and alignment is the effect of a multi-channel sign configuration that blends all the elements at play, so an overall performance in which all the different semiotic cues do not appear to be congruent with the same alignment (Agha, 2007: 101–102)—which is very likely when elements coming together from different sources are assembled into one single object— may be queered by the medium used to express it. To conclude this reflection on the video being discussed in this section, let me focus on just a handful of the aspects emerging from the audio. Agha illustrates how “evanescent artifacts that link persons who are co-­present within earshot […] can also be recycled into more durable artifacts […], and, once transformed into durable forms, can be encountered in many disparate events of semiosis, separately and severally, by persons lacking propinquity in time and space […] all artifacts, independently of durability design, mediate many more forms of communicative activity than anticipated when they are designed” (Agha, 2011: 166). In addition to the more durable artifacts one can imagine these videos being recycled into (we have seen how they have been incorporated, through verbal and visual citations into written and video commentary in the public sphere), let us consider the song (lyrics and melody), that has been selected for the video, another material component of this digital object, mainly because it lends itself to one of the possible “intriguing parallels between language and media technologies”

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(Eisenlohr, 2011: 268). Indeed, its re-appropriation here is an exemplary case of the simultaneous salience and disappearance of the medium, which may be easily understood as a covert category, influencing cognition and the formation of sociocultural stereotypes in an especially pervasive and unconscious manner. This song, Shade by British rapper IAMDDB, is an acoustic artifact produced to be made more durable in places other than the recording studio through sound reproduction technologies. However, its use as a piece of the patchwork that constructs Chav check videos most probably queers the song artist’s intentions: Shade is not sung by the young woman who is the protagonist of the video I am discussing. To be accurate, the young woman in the video does not even lip-sync to it, so the song would seem to be just a side element that stands on its own, reproduced in precisely the same way thanks to sound reproduction technologies: in short, the performative style does not seem to be affected by the dynamic visuals it accompanies. However, we cannot but wonder: did the artist expect or wish to be associated with Chav check videos? Is she happy with her song being part of these semiotic objects? The artist (and her co-author) probably expected and hoped that more durable forms of the song would enable the production of evanescent versions elsewhere (fan visualizations, radio playing, cover versions sung by other artists etc.), but what about this sort of duplicate? Are they happy with it? Durable but also debatable as it is. The artist and her co-author are probably happy that the song has reached popularity through Chav check videos, but its uptake in TikTok mediates a far greater variety of social relations than those inferable at the time of recording. What changes is not the message format alone (not a song in a YouTube video or a song played at a wedding, but a song snippet in a TikTok video), but the cultural ideologies inferred about the song’s performative styles change as well. Each Chav check video mediates the salience and authenticity of who the singer is: the uptake of the song within each Chav check video recontextualizes and recycles variant construals of it as an act of communication, and similarly recontextualizes and recycles the characteristics of the person singing (and writing) it (cf. Agha, 2011).

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Each recontextualization creates a different narration of (and for) the song.37 Just like the combination of the song with chav style contributes to constructing a narration for chav style (The line “You’re my G” in the song, for example, is short for “gangster” or “gangsta,” and it is used in greeting to a friend or associate—Online Slang Dictionary 1996–2021— thereby evoking a style). What happens when the dynamic visuals of chav exaggerated makeup combine with the musical rhythms that the artist is keen to refer to as urban jazz (Gardner, 2012; Clément, 2017)? Will chav makeup conjure up issues of style warfare? Will the juxtaposition suggest to some, as has happened in my case, the zoot-suit as a possible parallel? Will the association travel through conversations? Will the conversations cross cities, borders, oceans? Will they produce a de-registerment of ‘chav’? Will this help produce a better narration for working-class youth? The zoot-suit is more than an exaggerated costume, more than a sartorial statement, it is the bearer of a complex and contradictory history. […] When the nameless narrator of Ellison’s Invisible Man confronted the subversive sight of three young and extravagantly dressed blacks, his reaction was one of fascination not of fear. These youths were not simply grotesque dandies parading the city’s secret underworld, they were ‘the stewards of something uncomfortable,’ a spectacular reminder that the social order had failed to contain their energy and difference. The zoot-suit was more than the drape-­ shape of 1940s fashion, more than a colourful stage-prop hanging from the shoulders of Cab Calloway, it was, in the most direct and obvious ways, an emblem of ethnicity and a way of negotiating an identity. The zoot-suit was a refusal: a subcultural gesture that refused to concede to the manners of subservience. (Cosgrove, 1984: 77–78, emphasis in the original)

Alternatively, will the song travel more in conversations detrimental to it and, potentially, to its artist? If you’ve seen one of the ‘chav check’ videos on TikTok (it’s hard not to, they’re everywhere right now), then you will recognise this song. Beyond the class issues with using ‘chav’ as an insult, the song’s actually pretty  First, was the song associated with Chav check videos because rhi (the TikTok user who started the trend) liked the song (and used it to mediate her feelings) in the first place? Or was the song meant to provide a commentary on the visuals? 37

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catchy in the videos. Though, if you hear that song in public, just know you’re probably going to see yourself in a ‘chav check’ video. (The Focus, 2020: n.p.)

Will people’s focus on the rap side of the artist’s music be prevalent in conversations and re-enforce existing associations of chavspeak and Black English? And, of course, when others appropriate the very same objects I am discussing in these pages, they will re-contextualize them, layering onto them their own stories and also their own embodied styles, extracting and building new indexicalities for ‘chav’ on top of the ones I have highlighted here.

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6 Pulling the Threads Together and Expanding on ‘Chav’ in Social Media

Together with the previous one, this chapter represents the original theoretical contribution of the book. Like Chap. 5, it focuses on the creative dynamics performed around ‘chav’ on social platforms, encouraging the reader to use discernment to distinguish what is used (the primary focus in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4) from how it is used. Specifically, after briefly summing up the arguments put forth in previous pages, the chapter illustrates how ‘chav’ has been further appropriated and ‘hijacked’ both on TikTok and beyond, contending that these creative uses may leave a mark on the category. Indeed, they appear to contain the necessary potential to enhance discursive re-elaboration of ‘chav.’ Time will tell whether current and future uptakes will be able to develop the latent power of the new indexicalities they are generating. Section 6.1 summarizes the main arguments advanced in previous chapters. Section 6.2 opens a window onto the cultural meanings of a few of the ‘chav’ indexicals taken as signs in the types of youth masculinity performed at the intersection of street-wear, grime music, the use of Jamaican Creole, and in the types of youth femininity performed in some current chav make-up videos. Here ‘chav’ appears to be made salient and available for re-use, on the one hand, in order to aim for a target of resilience—of being “prepared for whatever” in an age of volatility and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Di Martino, Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96818-2_6

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fear—in the figure of the ‘roadman’ or ‘new age chav’; on the other, at a much more generalized cultural level that potentially turns, through chav makeup videos, into a feminist tool inspiring women to construct and shape their place in the world through an intriguing form of ‘craftivism.’ The latter digital objects (also available on TikTok) appear potentially crucial in their embryonic capacity to mediate new values for ‘chav’ or at least to add new values to draw from when performing ‘chav.’ Section 6.3 opens up a window onto the presence of ‘chav’ on another social platform: some Instagram #chavvy posts do not so much appear to articulate ‘chav’ as an ideological object but refer to it as common knowledge through which a specific social type is performed: the relaxed, laid-­ back persona. These reformulations of ‘chav’ also potentially contribute to unsettling the category, making it available for further segmentation and (re)interpretation.

6.1 General Outline of the Book This book has investigated the concept of ‘chav,’ tracing its origins, and following its development through the processes of enregisterment whereby it has come to be recognized at a national level. It has explored and discussed the traits gradually associated with the social construct first in traditional media representations and, currently, in its re-­appropriations in intense social network activity—particularly by the younger generation—which has projected ‘chav’ beyond national borders, and in the public activitities of metasemiotic commentary that such recontextualizations have fed. Whereas traditional media discourses on ‘chav’ have mostly revolved around class narrative, in which the concept of ‘chav’ features as a lexical innovation merely meant to reproduce the centuries-old activity of maintaining the social order through boundary-making, I have tried to show that some of the chav artifacts constructed within the TikTok platform do not always (or do not merely) gesture class difference insofar as they foreground new, more advanced, more socially reticulated forms of

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subjectivity. The TikTok videos on which I have focused are collected under the label Chav check and feature, among other activities performed by the creators, comic sketches in which users impersonate ‘chav.’ These chav performances appear to have been widely enjoyed, and further appropriated within the platform, but they have also moved beyond the hosting site through sharp criticism in the public sphere. Today, individuals often pick and mix communicative resources to perform identity work, hijacking styles from their sources and reassembling them in novel forms, where they take on different indexicalities: equating ‘chav’ with ‘underclass’ may thus not be the whole story, certainly not in some of the Chav check videos I have analyzed, despite the motives of some users possibly also being those of highlighting and mocking diversity. Some Chav check TikTokers do seem to deploy a range of chav semiotic resources to reach out to other users and invite them to align with their performances in a construction of ‘chav’ that would appear to be essentially disapproving, i.e., intended to perform chav critique. However, the hybridity inherent in the semiotic objects produced through assemblage of elements stemming from different sources lends itself to queering the creators’ original intentions whatever they may be. Especially so because, in the case of many of the TikTok videos in question, this hybridity is amplified by the fact that the creators are unaware of traditional narratives of ‘chav,’ enjoying as they are the fruition and production of Chav check videos while being immersed in their different distant cultures. What is going to happen in this fluidity? The thought cannot but invite the possibility of using this as an opportunity to reflect on the notion—central to recent theorizations of linguistic anthropology—that social processes, even large-scale ones, mostly occur offline. The first—introductory—chapter of the book has outlined the methodological issues that provide the reflections carried out on ‘chav’ with their necessary foundations, first narrowing down the subject-matter of the study, namely style, and then grounding it within the disciplinary field of linguistic anthropology, more specifically that of embodied sociocultural linguistics. The chapter has also clarified that the contribution brought by this volume to the chav debate ultimately lies in its illustration that the meaning of Chav check videos is non-compositional: the chav resources appropriated by TikTokers mutate well beyond their

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creators’ intentions, so the meaning emerging from them requires a leap away from the linear and straightforward if we want to try to appreciate it in at least part of its open-ended potentiality. This opacity of the Chav check videos, which flows from the very nature of the TikTok platform— in which the individual user’s stance and their alignment/disalignment with previous TikTokers’ enactments of ‘chav’ is conveyed through a multi-channel sign configuration blending all the elements involved, would indeed appear to be the characterizing element of all the semiotic objects produced within the TikTok platform, assembled as they are from diverse sources. The mediatized moments of ‘chav’ these specific videos represent, then provide massively parallel inputs to recontextualization, and along the chain of communication these inputs will be further ‘abducted,’ often by individuals immersed in other cultures in which the object-signs used to gesture ‘chav’ already have other layers of meaning, acquiring further diverse formulations in distinct segments of the communication chain. The themes and concepts applied to the analysis in this study are indexicality, enregisterment, iconization, and fractal recursivity: indexicality, the ability of signs to signal the contextual existence of entities, is a process language shares with the other aspects of culture; my focus here has been on the power of indexes to encode stereotypes. Identities emerge through these stereotypes and are slotted into specific groups, identified by repertoires of forms recognized as distinct from those of other groups and ‘enregistered’ as such. Diversity is perceived to be caused by differences in the ‘actual’ social characteristics of the individuals performing such uses. Indeed, the features at the basis of grouping construct and re-­ enforce relationships between such features and social image: they appear to be iconic representations of the social groups that share them as if the features displayed these groups’ inherent nature. Through the process of fractal recursivity, diversity is then replicated within the group originally recognizing other social groups as different and naming these differences, producing contrasts of smaller magnitude there. Cross-pollination of ideas is inevitable when working under the umbrella of linguistic anthropology since the horizons of this discipline lean more toward anthropology than to linguistics per se. The emphasis is on language because it plays a crucial role in the social lives of individuals

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and communities, hence the broad approach I have adopted for this book. Disciplinary boundaries have not been retained as a matter of principle, and I have striven to combine the intellectual capital of individuals working from different disciplinary perspectives expressing diverse ways of thinking. The second chapter explores the surface aspects of the ‘chav’ phenomenon, attempting to trace its spatiotemporal coordinates. The most widely accepted hypothesis on the emergence of ‘chav’ is that the word came from Romany; it is now recognized within academia as the latest terminology used to classify and understand socially marginal groups. ‘Chav’ peaked in use in 2004, when it was announced as “Word of the Year,” soon producing folk etymologies seeking to make sense of the phenomenon, of which Council House And Violent is probably the most easily recognizable and widespread. The impression of excitement over ‘chav’ in academia that many outsiders appear to have picked up on is probably due to two concurrent processes. On the one hand, worldwide understanding that public engagement is crucial if the academic world is to actually affect reality has made research more accessible and more readily available in the public sphere in recent years. Conversely, ‘chav’ has proved to have its own special significance: the evidence of this being visible in the ubiquity of the term in conversation ranging from the daily to the speculative but also in its peculiar lexical productivity, political posturing via neologisms being only one of the many aspects this productivity has taken. Indeed, ‘chav’ and its inflections (‘chavvy,’ ‘chavalicious,’ ‘chavistocrat,’ among many others) have been applied to objects, events, and individuals of the most diverse social standing. The common variable has been, at least as far as the first decade of the twenty-first century is concerned, its undeniably derogatory quality, except for its use in some forms of nonconformist “chav pride” culture, which are, however, difficult to assess and potentially deceptive in terms of significance. More unprejudiced portrayals have emerged from works of art, books, films, and TV series, even more ‘mainstream’ ones, particularly after the publication of Chav. The Demonization of the Working Class. Indeed, Owen Jones’s book acted as a helpful signpost indicating watershed awareness: choosing to use the term ‘chav’ after 2011 meant positioning oneself ideologically and politically. However,

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unlike other stigmatized categories that have received, over time, some clear positive institutional recontextualization, chavs have only experienced appreciative representations from individual directors, writers, artists, and journalists. The third chapter has shifted attention from the surface aspects of ‘chav’ as a lexical item analyzed in the second chapter to the ‘inside’ aspects of ‘chav’ as a semiotic object. It has illustrated how, through ‘chav,’ the notion of the chav individual has emerged as an enregistered emblem and progressively become disseminated through “physical artifacts.” In particular, through mass-mediated ones, chav characterological figures have surfaced; among them, Vicky Pollard—a character played by comedian Matt Lucas in the sketch comedy series Little Britain that aired between 2000 and 2007—was immediately framed as a remarkably ‘accurate’ representation so much so that it even produced the identification of real-life Vicky Pollards by the press. This may have played a role in promoting heightened reflexivity on chav style and ‘identification’ of its diacritics, i.e., prosthetic extensions that would provide entry into chavness: object-signs or behavioral displays of chavness including eye-­ catching jewelry and clothes, and particular sportswear, with progressively more elements and qualities being drawn into the picture and becoming objects of public disgust and hatred for many. Out-of-control sexuality and maternity, reprehensible parenting, and ‘inborn’ laziness iconically depicted the chav in the first decade of the twenty-first century, who was, however, progressively recontextualized in diverse figures and events through different enactments and artifacts and subsequent broad and diversified uptakes, through each individual’s personal metasemiotic work on ‘chav.’ The celebrity chav figure—a public figure of intense media interest characterized by economic mobility but fixed in their chav roles due to a lack of taste, from Jade Goody to David Beckham—complicated the picture of ‘chav’ even more, dragging more indexicals into it. ‘Chav’ is currently still being recontextualized in diverse figures and events and is circulating through social space, sometimes creating temporary unities among disparate events, possibly on the verge of turning into a floating signifier. It constantly morphs into ever-changing objects and individuals (from the Burberry check through public figures of high standing to the captivating characters of a television show targeting

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teenagers), sometimes assuming intimidating and fearmongering undertones, other times overtly displacing any hint of class antagonism onto entertaining generational difference. Between 2005–2006, a common thread emerged between the chav and the hoodie, which substantified chav bodies in individuals supposedly wearing hooded tops and baseball caps to hide from the CCTV cameras in some English department stores and businesses. Then, in 2011, when riots spread across the country, the long-veiled construct of the chav as a tainted white came to the fore, but not a fully ethnicized one. Stylizations of chavspeak in the public space seemed to emphasize the chav as some sort of ‘inauthentic’ black. The fourth chapter examines some TikTok videos where the chav issue has recently re-emerged in an attempt to understand whether the chav enactments performed draw on and perpetuate the former bleak perspective of the chav or build on existing seeds of chav counterdiscourse, instead. First, it reviews the main aspects of TikTok, a platform designed to create, share, and respond to other people’s short videos whose defining feature appears to be that of metaxis—the condition of in-­betweenness in which metamodernism is embedded—with the TikTok individual caught between dichotomous directions: the real and the virtual, reception and production. The chapter then focuses on the nature of TikTok as an “appropriation accelerant” in which videos are assemblages of elements drawn from a variety of different sources, possibly the sign of an impending redefinition of the notion of intellectual property. This nature of hybrid repertoire of disassembled and differently reassembled parts— most of the times anonymous—gathered from a multitude of diverse sources is indeed the characterizing feature of TikTok. In Chav check videos in particular, content creators deploy a range of chav semiotic resources to reach out to other TikTokers and invite them to align with their own or other people’s enactments in the construction of ‘chav.’ This process is performed through a ‘queering’ of chav object-signs, which are detached from their supposedly original sources and re-used in novel contexts. This cannot but produce fresh indexicalities. Some of these stem from a view of ‘chav’ as a temporary personality state, shared by many school-age individuals. The “Chav phase” even appears in some artifacts as a stage of life retrospectively looked upon with nostalgia. This visuality of ‘chav’ links up with the formulation of ‘chav’ emerging from

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such media products as Misfits and Geordie Shore, treating ‘chav’ as an emblem of youth lifestyles, a value project in which ‘chav’ appears to be an attempt to fix the perfect stage of life—free from both the dependence of childhood and the worries of adulthood—as a possible response to the uncertainty that characterizes the current state of affairs for the younger generations and particularly for the more vulnerable among them. This picture of ‘chav’ queers both the ‘deprived’ and ‘aspirational’ and ‘posh’ meanings that ‘chav’ usually takes on in most metacommentary activities performed in the public sphere, in a destratification process that erases previous layers, producing common thread between TikTokers and Geordie Shore participants, in particular: both generate ways of experiencing rather than merely watching ‘chav’ and both brand their identities through visible performance, looking into the camera rather than looking away from it, thus drawing a clear boundary between themselves and the anonymous, socially excluded chav ‘other’ who is commonly depicted as refusing individual responsibility, hiding behind their hoodies, some sort of ‘superchav.’ In this chapter I also analyze one Chav check video in detail, to illustrate the semiotic processes through which some TikTokers appropriate chav object-signs and incorporate them into their performances, and the ways in which such recontextualizations de-chav chav resources, while retaining some of their stylistic functions. Alignment is the effect of a multi-channel sign configuration blending all the elements at play in a TikTok video. Thus an overall performance in which the various semiotic cues do not appear to be all congruent with the same alignment—very likely when elements generated from different sources are assembled into just one object—may be queered by the very medium used to express it. In the specific case analyzed—a video displaying a beautiful young woman first preparing for and then performing a chav impersonation—the protagonist of the semiotic object produced appears to potentially identify—and disidentify—with the ‘middle-class’ gaze that most adult commentators interpret as univocally performed on ‘chav’ in the videos. This allows us to see these TikTok objects as a ‘protective’ mechanism whereby young women immersed in a “bedroom culture,” which has transformed their private space into one of visibility, reject or remove a trait of their group identity that hinders their full

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development through the appropriation of traits conventionally assigned to ‘other’ group identities. There is a fine line between privilege and oppression, and these processes are intertwined even in the construction of ‘luckier’ young women’s identities. Does such a reading stem from the perspective of the TikTok content creator whose video I have analyzed, like some sort of constitutive move in a personal project? Or has it been projected onto the young woman’s persona by the outsider perspective I have constructed for her? Whatever the right alternative is—if there is a right alternative—the circulation of the chav narrative performed through such videos as this may have transformative potential. This worldwide circulation of hybrid ‘chav’ meanings, which are gradually becoming further disassembled from their sources and voided of previous stereotypical stratifications, may open up possibilities for occasions in which the chav ‘other’ speaks back to dominant discourses, which may or may not change things for the chav. This and other videos can generate complex dynamics of simultaneous subversion and reproduction. However, the shared meanings about what chavs are like and what some chav values look like when applied to non-chav bodies (that is, when they are de-chaved) also work to produce perceptions of chav identities that rely on ‘chav’ not being the disgusting ‘other.’

6.2 A Wider Look at ‘Chav’ and Changing Youth Masculinities and Femininities In the final sections of this concluding chapter, I would like to open a window onto the cultural meanings of some of the chav indexicals taken as signs in the types of youth masculinity performed at the intersection of street wear, grime music, and the use of Jamaican Creole sometimes labeled as ‘roadman’ or ‘new age chav’, and in the types of youth femininity performed in some current chav make-up videos, since all these uses of ‘chav’ intertwine with the chav performances discussed in Chap. 5. I will start discussing the chav femininities first before opening a window onto the masculinities and then come back to conclude the section with more reflections on chav femininities.

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Make-up, music, dress, speech, accessories are, as we have seen in previous chapters, all perceived to display the attributes of their wearers/ users as, throughout our lives, we are all slotted into stereotyped and stereotyping categories intended to ease the processes of meaning-making that make it possible for us to function in our daily lives. Labeling is a powerful form of typification, a way of channeling and shaping experience (Gal & Irvine, 2019). Like other objects and/or activities, music, make-up, and clothes—the object-signs I focus on in this section—are enlisted in registers, in our minds, as part of a semiotic process of differentiation (Gal & Irvine, 2019; Gal, 2013) which helps us to assess individuals, objects, activities, and events, and to make decisions as we go, based on such assessment. They help us diagram person-, object-, activity- and event-types.1 What makes our assessment tasks difficult is that qualities change when people/objects/activities/events are taken up in new ideological frameworks. And this is—I argued in previous pages—exactly what would appear to be happening at the time of writing for ‘chav’ indexicals. New forms of femininity implying recourse to chav indexicals would seem to be emerging—at least when looking at the data presented in Chap. 5 from a specific (partial and positioned) perspective2—through what appears to be a form of transmodal iconicity that involves audio and dynamic visuals gesturing ‘chav’ assembled from different sources. To further explore the expression of these femininities, which revolve around ‘chav’ through what we could probably describe as a sort of synesthesia (that is, through the association of clues coming from different sensory pathways), let us consider again the Chav check video I have already  “‘Sign relation’ is an apt phrase for explicating the ingredients of ideologies. First, it highlights signs in general—not language alone. Sign relations invariably organize many expressive modalities, including those that do not involve language at all. Second, the phrase implicates differentiation by focusing on relations. A sign is the result of relationships; it does not preexist them. Any phenomenon may be a sign if it is posited to stand for something, in some uptake, from some vantage point.” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 87) 2  “Perspective is the point of view or line of sight that biographical persons can take up and bring to bear on a situation. [...] In semiotic terms, perspectives are clusters of conventional conjectures that are presumed by ideological work to go together, in some sense, in a particular time-place. They are related to a person’s social position—but never simply a reflex of that position.” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 17) “(T)here are always many vantage points. This multiplicity of vantage points in part reflects the fact that every social aggregate, even the smallest, provides multiple social positions.” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 87) 1

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analyzed in detail in the previous pages. Through the music gluing the Chav check trend together and the chav makeup, clothes, accessories, and mannerisms indexicals that also connect many of the videos produced in response to this trend, a hegemonic representation of femininity (primarily young, mostly white, mostly good-looking, and mostly ‘proper’) becomes iconically associated with ‘alien’ visual representations and fast and loud acoustic dimensions. Could these be taken to be incoming signs of the ongoing construction of new forms of femininity? This is the question I would like to try and answer in this section. Artist Abby Roberts, behind the chav make-up vogue, which would appear to be ‘cited’ in many Chav check videos involving makeup, is the creator of many popular “imaginative pop culture transformations” (Peters, 2020a: n.p.). She has garnered over 10 million followers and is now also bringing her talents to YouTube to “bridge the gap between the two platforms, introducing the fast-moving trends of TikTok onto the more mainstream YouTube” (Ibidem). Roberts has explicitly claimed authorship of the chav make-up trend, framing it as a style directly connected to a musical genre (grime; cf. Bramwell, 2015’s argument that grime aesthetic provides a technological prosthetic for subaltern subjectivities3). She also presents herself as a former chav: One of the big trends on TikTok right now is to put on chav makeup— a really unblended contour, nude lips, and way too much eyeliner. Is that weird to see, having grown up in the UK? I was that person! I was a chav, that’s how I know how to do [the makeup]. It was a huge thing in probably 2014, just every British girl had no idea how to do makeup. There weren’t a whole lot of tutorials on YouTube and everything, so we were kind of all just terrible at it. Grime music is resurfacing on TikTok, so all the British people find that hilarious, how the Americans have just discovered it because of TikTok. It’s so funny. (Jennings, 2020: n.p.)

Roberts is nineteen, and her version of the song M to the B, lipsynced and filmed in a very effective close-up wearing stereotypical chav makeup  Building up on the idea that grime is a medium of expression for marginal fractions of the population and that it provides a voice for the voiceless, Adams R 2018 argues that it can be understood as a type of English Folk Music. 3

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and clothes also went viral in the Summer of 2020. I want to focus on the acoustic side of this video. M to the B is a diss (‘diss’ being short for ‘disrespect’) song,4 i.e., one where one rapper makes derogatory comments about another rapper.5 The diss track genre belongs to the “time-honored hip-hop tradition” (as “part of a rap beef, or feud,” cf. Ridenhour, 2013: 98), but whose origins some identify in well-known songs of the recent (Barker, 2015) and less recent past (Katz, 2001; Atkins, 2015): [...] rappers sometimes “name and shame” other rappers—an act known as “dissing” or “battling”—with derogatory comments in songs, which can engender intense negative feelings. These battles are publicized by disc jockeys (DJ) to audiences of rap music, who consequently draw on these dissing ties between rappers to assess a rapper’s quality and decide whether or not to purchase a rapper’s music. (Halgin et al., 2020: 27)

The genre—a dominant practice among adolescents from inner cities of Britain (Adams Z, 2018)—certainly has strong connections with a peculiar speech event featuring ritual insults traditionally performed within the black community,6 later taken up by white communities in the United States, which Labov—quoting Dollard (1990[1939])— described as “playing the dozens.” This was an Afro-American contest  Saint-Amand emphasizes that the lexicalization of ‘diss’ is evidence of the institutionalization of the dissing trend: “La pratique du morceau invectif, visant spécifiquement une cible, est désignée par l’expression diss song (de dissrespecting), aux Etats-Unis—la lexicalisation témoignant de l’institutionnalisation de la tendance. En parallèle à celle-ci, il faut souligner le développement du battle rap, véritable joute” (Saint-Amand, 2016: 62, emphasis in the original). [“The practice of the invective piece, aimed at a specifical target, is referred to as diss song (song of dissrespect) in the United States—the lexicalization testifying to the institutionalization of the trend. In parallel to this, we must underline the development of battle rap, a real joust.” My translation]. 5  Tyler believes that the ‘chav’ phenomenon “reclaimed as an affirmative sub-cultural identity is mostly apparent in popular music acts, such as white teenage rapper Lady Sovereign and the acclaimed pop icon and urban poet Mike Skinner.” (Tyler, 2008: 31) Focusing on the Lady Sovereign phenomenon, the “Queen of Grime” (Jeffries, 2005: n.p.), Barron contends that it “reflects the council estate ethos (her childhood was spent on an estate in Wembley)” (Barron, 2013: 538). For instance, in ‘My England,’ Sovereign articulates her version of London, as she sings: “Big up Oliver Twist, letting us know the nitty gritty of what London really is/It ain’t all pretty, deal with the realness, it’s all gritty, deal with the realness”. 6  See also Charles’s reflection that key characteristics of the grime sound (predominance of repetition and low frequencies), “adhere to musical traditions streams within the African diaspora.” (2016b: 91) 4

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game in which two contestants, “in the presence of a spurring audience of peers, try to best each other in casting aspertions on each other or each other’s relatives, particularly the mother” (Chimezie, 1976: 401): A mother (grandmother, etc.) may be cited for her age, weight (fat or skinny), ugliness, blackness, smell, the food she eats, the clothes she wears, her poverty, and of course her sexual activity. As far as persons are concerned, sounding is always thought of as talking about someone’s mother. But other relatives are also mentioned (Labov, 1974: 96).

Recent research within the European canon has attempted to trace back the tradition of the diss song to Medieval Occitan literature, particularly focusing on the literary attacks of the catalogue poems of Peire d’Alvernha and the Monge de Montaudon (Pfeffer, 2020), revealing—in so doing—the keen interest that many scholars from different academic fields have for this music genre. The specific diss track I am reflecting upon in these pages, M to the B, originates from a ‘beef ’ (feud) between two young women rappers reacting to each other’s songs and attacking and dissing each another. The song, described as teeming with “blistering—and very British—insults” (Dawson, 2020: n.p.), is a ‘send’ by Blackpool-based grime artist Millie B to fellow Blackpool-based grime artist Sophie Aspin (Duribe, 2020) and it springs from the localized context of “a group of young rappers from the Lancashire coast whose careers centred on low-budget videos,7 crude lyrics about each other’s mums, and heated rivalries”: An unassuming video by US TikToker Bella Poarch ignited its return. The clip (named TikTok’s biggest viral video of the year) sees Poarch head-­ bobbing to the track, and is currently sitting at over 43 million likes. From there, “M to the B” took on a life of its own, soundtracking ‘chav’ make-­up tutorials, confusing the subjects of viral pranks, and generally taking over TikTok, being used as the sound for 7.4 million videos. Superstar influencers James Charles and Madison Beer even recreated Poarch’s viral video. (Dawson, 2020: n.p.)  Adams R 2018 emphasizes grime’s home-grown nature of music made on computers mostly purchased for schoolwork or family use, often with illegally copied software. Hence, the flavor of rawness, which resonates with younger generations. 7

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The lyrical content is mainly “material and literal,” that is, the person singing is doing something “tangible or relational to position themselves and their achievements as superior to others” (Charles, 2018: 6). I have used both grime and rap terminology within the same paragraphs here above because grime is looked at by some as “garage rap’s younger sibling, [...] relatively jagged and aggressive—it’s where the legacies of hardcore rap and hardcore techno collide” (AllMusic, 2021: n.p.). However, many strongly disapprove of the “incessant comparisons” with hip-hop, which “frustrate and mislead since—although there are shared characteristics between grime and hip-hop—grime is a musical form in its own right, with roots of its own”:8 Grime developed from a multitude of styles; primarily reggae, bashment, dancehall, garage, and drum and bass. To simply call it a subgenre of hip-­ hop disavows these vital influences, and denies the unique cultural heritage that has secured its place as one of the most vibrant and idiosyncratic performance forms that exists today. (Pigeons, 2015: n.p.)

‘Chav’ is very much part of the grime roots, with grime equating to ‘chav’ for many at the time the new sound was developing, as these Reddit users explain (Fig. 6.1): When it was first emerging, “it was solely just ‘chavs’ that used to listen to” grime, these users witness. This suggests that grime music was perhaps perceived as “an inscription that marks the unknowing, the uncritical, the tasteless group” (Skeggs, 2004: 149), as ‘alien’9 as ‘chav’ itself, and just as crucial to define current British culture:10  Charles explains that defining a genre is more than “just sonic distinctiveness but includes a sociological and ideological context, outlook.” (Charles, 2018: 4) 9  Charles clarifies that “[t]he Grime sound, often compiled of electronic sounds, is typified by synths of the 80s, PlayStation and video game music [...], in addition to the complex programming often found in Jungle music [...] typically characterized by music that is typically four beats to a bar and comprising of 8 or 16 bar cycles. It is one of the reasons why Grime was unofficially called 8 bar or 16 bar very early on [...] has lo-fi quality sounds; this means the sounds are not crisp or clearly defined; listeners are unable to trace sounds to a specific location or source. This quality and rawness has been likened to Punk.” (Charles, 2018: 5–6) These characteristics give grime “the multidirectional cacophony of sounds and experiences of everyday life [...] This connotes the fast life, swiftness, mobility, and maneuverability. It foregrounds being nimble and having to balance priorities and speed to keep afloat and keep moving.” (Charles, 2018: 7) 10  Research carried out more recently still reveals that liking grime is perceived to make an individual “a race apart; a Chav” (Charles, 2016a: 266). 8

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Fig. 6.1  Some user exchanges on “How has Grime changed?” in 2013 (Reddit, 2018: n.p.)

When its first mutoid beats started booming their way out of east London council estates in the early noughties, it sounded like alien music. The ­lyrics were in a language that most of us didn’t understand. When Dizzee Rascal shouted at you to ‘Fix up, look sharp,’ you thought: ‘What’s he fixing? And I hope he’s careful with that sharp thing!’ (Duggins et  al., 2016: n.p.) [G]rime didn’t come through the front door; it was never invited in the first place. In its very nature, it is oppositional. Sonically abrasive, characterised by sharp synths, jittery percussion and digital restlessness, it can sound antagonistic to unaccustomed ears. [...] Grime represents audio proof of discontent [...]. MCs [Masters of Ceremonies or Microphone Controllers] often riff on dark themes of aggression and criminal activity, not so much glorifying as reflecting the realities of urban poverty. In this sense, grime is a counter-narrative. It kicks back against today’s establishment and against New Labour’s pre-millennial optimism, revealing the

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darker side of the neoliberal dream. Grime has always recognised the bristling tensions that exist in London, threatening to combust (Boakye, 2018: n.p.) [...] marginal sounds are placed in the centre. What an unfamiliar listener is hearing are the energies and sounds experienced by the creators exacerbated through technology. This may seem alien and jarring. Alternatively, those who are familiar with the sounds on the margin have a central space to release and exert their position, gaining temporary power from the reorganisation of sensorial hierarchy, i.e., Sonic Dominance. (Charles, 2016b: 97)

The genre is geopolitical in the sense that it both emerges out of and generates conflicts over territory and reputation (White, 2017); indeed, clashes between artists are often interwoven with wider competitive logics based on belonging to a specific city or locality: “[t]he city is weaponised as a territorial marker of authenticity and, as such, the territorialisation of the city by artists renders it vulnerable to attack by competing artists.” (Woods, 2021a: 469) This territorialization gives grime a definite British flavor. What also peculiarly marks the genre as UK-based is the distinctively local accent (and vocabulary) used to spit bars, probably meant to distance grime from American hip-hop (cf. Alim, 2009) and index—in combination with the very local references just mentioned—authenticity and independence from the corporate structure of the music industry (cf. Beal, 2009): MCs spit in a British accent and dialects, use local slang and Jamaican infused/inspired accents during delivery. This element is crucial to Grime’s perception as authentically British. By the 1980s, parroting American or Caribbean accents in music declined as the diaspora in Britain attempted to negotiate omnipresence ‘i.e., knowable Blackness’ with their locality and specificity (Gilroy, 1993), and Grime is an example of how this was negotiated. ‘British’ cultural references and school life inform lyrical content (Adenuga, 2010) as does representing areas the artists are from¸ such as East London (Ansah, 2004). Iconography in some music videos include famous British landmarks (Mills, 2003) to connote Grime as an authenti-

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cally British music. British iconography such as British flags and the promotion of the artist and the music as British is displayed in concert contexts (Charles, 2016b: 93–94).

One feature of grime slang, th-stopping—the realization of the voiceless interdental fricative /θ/ as [t], e.g. the orthographic representation of ‘thing’ as ‘ting’ in many grime titles and lyrics (like “Grime is a road ting”), which is often strongly associated with black varieties of English and a characterizing feature of London’s multi-ethnic dialect (Multicultural London English, MLE, cf. Rampton, 2015; Cheshire et  al., 2011)11— would currently appear to be acquiring the strategic function of indexing street identity (Drummond, 2018; also Drummond, 2017). Another feature is the pronominal use of ‘man’ and frequent use of the attention signal ‘ey,’ also represented as and in several grime lyrics, where it is probably used to signal distance from more mainstream genres such as pop, where ‘hey’ is the ‘standard’ attention marker (Ilbury, 2019). Performing a street or tough identity has lately become trendy, probably following the representational transformation some grime artists have undergone thanks to access to digital media: “[u]biquitous access to digital recording, production and distribution technologies” has granted them “an unprecedented degree of representational autonomy, meaning they are able to integrate the street aesthetic into their lyrics and music videos, and thus create content that offers a more authentic representation of their (past) lives,” enabling them to “maximise the affective cachet of the once-criminal self.” (Woods, 2021b: 1) ‘Roadmen,’ described by some as street youths whom “outsiders consider to be threatening due to their way of dress and manner of speech” (Marsh, 2016: n.p.) currently come across as edgy, standing for ‘the new-age chav.’ Working-class appropriation would thus appear to represent ‘the new cool’ (Ibidem) (cf. Ilbury’s clarification that ‘roadman’ is an ingroup term and ‘chav’ a pejorative, outgroup one, so the two terms are essentially just two sides of the same coin). Performing a stylistic analysis of language variation in  Adams Z 2018 argues that grime may be an alternative way of understanding MLE and interpersonal relationships among adolescents from the multi-ethnic areas of London and beyond. See also Adams R 2018 and the observation in The Economist (2021), that grime is contributing to export MLE. 11

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Lakeside, an East-London area, to examine how speakers adopt MLE features to construct local-level identities, Ilbury contends that roadmen have come to represent a type of commodity register (a characterological figure of a youth subculture), and affiliation towards road culture is performed through deploying such semiotic diacritics as interest in street-­ wear, grime music and use of Jamaican Creole. However, whilst for many youths who engage in aspects of road culture, this is just a form of expression, for some—the gully, an exclusively male group specific to Lakeside— participation in this culture is much more concerted, i.e., deliberately performed through appropriation of its emblematic signs, which have come to index a particularly hegemonic form of heteronormative masculinity12 (Ilbury, 2019; also Gunter, 2008; Reid, 2017). The gully emulate the enregistered components of the ‘roadman’ style to access the cultural capital connected to it, i.e., to acquire status (Ilbury, 2019). In a crude summarization, the gully is a micro-level identity that draws on the macro-level reality of the roadman as a ‘commodity register,’ adopting its aesthetic and linguistic diacritics for identity construction. In particular, Ilbury explains the fact that MLE and grime have become diacritics of road culture (in the sense that employing some of their characterizing features provides entry into it) with the consideration that linguistic variety and cultural orientation “claimed to have originated in the working-­ class neighbourhoods of East London” (Ilbury, 2019: 302). As one of the diacritics of the chav/roadman, grime music is often still viewed with suspicion (Hancox, 2011), if not actually criminalized (Fatsis, 2019a, b; Swain, 2018, for example). One of the most controversial political attempts to censor the genre is probably represented by the risk assessment protocols issued through Form 696 (Zuberi, 2014, Woods, 2020, 2021a, b), whose completion (and submission 14 days in advance of an event in 21 London boroughs) was required by the London Metropolitan Police of the event’s promoters and licensees. Form 696 mandated all live shows featuring a DJ or MC performing over a prerecorded backing track to submit their names, private addresses, and phone numbers to the police. Initially, it also implied the indication of details of  Bakkali contends that road cultural capital has a “gendered dimension, which largely disadvantages women.” (Bakkali, 2018: 100) 12

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ethnic groups likely to attend the performance but this point was reviewed in December 2008. These protocols, which were finally scrapped in 2017 (cf. Bernard, 2018), were apparently based on the rationale that grime performances are high risk events; however, they also contributed to reproduce the structures of inequality from which grime had emerged, limiting its public performance and expression (Woods, 2021a; also Noisey, 2014 and Amnesty International, 201713).14 As a consequence of this long-standing suspicious attitude towards the genre, grime is often referred to as a form of dark leisure, the symbol of ‘Broken Britain’  In this interesting booklet, we learn that the concept of ‘gang association’ has recently emerged as a measure for assessing potential harm to public safety by young people, and the data collected “includes information gleaned from individuals’ Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts and YouTube, particularly grime music videos that contain gang names or gang signs” (Amnesty International, 2017: 14): 13

It crops up not only in police strategies to tackle violent offending but across a range of public sector services: from local authorities to the criminal justice system, from schools to the UK Visas and Immigration Authority. “[...] Our research shows that the Gangs Matrix is based on a vague and ill-defined concept of ‘the gang’ that has little objective meaning and is applied inconsistently in different London boroughs. The Matrix itself and the process for adding individuals to it, assigning ‘risk scores’ and sharing data with partner agencies appears to be similarly ill-defined with few, if any, safeguards and little oversight. Not only does this data collection amount to an interference with young people’s rights, but the consequences could be serious for those labelled as ‘gang nominals’ [...]. Data sharing between the police and other government agencies means that this stigmatising ‘red flag’ can follow people in their interaction with service providers, from housing to education, to job centres.” (Amnesty International, 2017: 1–2) 14  On the other hand, Ilan emphasizes the performance of respectable public personas by popular grime artists to make it clear that this type of music does not emerge from a desire to transgress or resist but ultimately to comply with overall economic values and music industry practice. If anything, certain manifestations of grime are a form of defiance. The transgressive aspect some identify in this music genre may well be “a form of speculation, [and] it could be argued that there is a tendency for those from a particular branch of the left, who some might label as ‘liberal’ [...] to lionize the cultural practice of the disadvantage as a form of resistance based on an aspiration that it is some kind of basis for transformational politics [...] there is a hope that the anger sensed in these cultural forms of the dispossessed might naturally channel itself into political demands for a more equal society. In this way, transformational politics (the most unquestionable form of resistance) might emerge organically without the need for a marshalling of the underprivileged against social structures so powerful that they naturally reproduce their injustices.” (Ilan, 2014: 7) See also Swain, 2018, who believes some forms of grime exude a sense of moral responsibility and have encouraged youngsters in deprived inner-city areas to value education and abstain from gang culture.

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(Swain, 2018).15 It is frequently conflated with class, working-class experience actually constituting the glue which—according to some—keeps different ethnicities together in this music genre: Grime originated as a predominantly black British musical form, yet appeals to young people irrespective of race or ethnicity.16 The common ground in its appeal was the focus on class based oppression and British cultural references. While racism remains pervasive and impacts young people in different ways, we live in a time of diverse multiculturalism, particularly in the inner city home of grime. There is a level of commonality in the British working class experience. (Charles, 2017: n.p.)

Endowed with a “resolutely cultural, spatial nature [...] an experientially rooted music about urban locations” (Barron, 2013: 531), grime resonates Bourdieu’s reflections on the petit-bourgeois secluded in his own home sacrificing immediate satisfactions to expected satisfactions as opposed to “[t]he being-in-the-present which is affirmed in the readiness to take advantage of the good times and take time as it comes [...], in itself, an affirmation of solidarity with others17 (who are often the only present guarantee against the threats of the future)” (Bourdieu, 1996[1979]: 183). Foregrounding the intersubjective character of rap and grime music, Bramwell (2015) clarifies that grime practices are not primarily oriented towards economic accumulation, developing an interpretative community of cultural practitioners rather than a market of consumers. A recent study examining address and reference terms18— aspects of language central to the establishment and maintenance of human relationships—in the lyrics of grime artists, confirms that the latter adhere to rules that suggest “their relationships are characterised by solidarity within an imagined community.” (Adams Z, 2018: 11) In  This makes grime invisible to many and relegates its influence to the margins (Swain, 2018).  Quoting Bradley, 2013, Stratton and Zuberi explain that it is the cultural Britishness of the present generation that enables artists like Dizzee Rascal to “create a new sound that crosses over racial and cultural divides to become popular with British people of both black and white heritages.” (Stratton & Zuberi, 2014: 4) 17  Solidarity, like toughness, is a form of stance-taking for true masculinity (Ilbury, 2019). 18  The most frequent in Adams Z 2018’s study are Fam, Blud, Cuz, Dawg, Don (address terms) and Man, Nigga, Guys, Brudda, Mum, Mandem, Dawg (reference terms). 15 16

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particular, Ilbury shows that the th-stopping grime slang drawn from MLE has become lexicalized in [tɪŋ],19 fulfilling an interpersonal function among members of the gully in Lakeside, i.e., it is used to build rapport, so as “to establish a mutual understanding of concepts amongst the ingroup” (Ilbury, 2019: 143). Similarly, ‘man’ draws in-group and out-­group boundaries, being used in some of the contexts analyzed by Ilbury as a way of constructing a stance of solidarity with the other members of the gully and index oneself as part of the group when utilized as a first-­person singular pronoun and as a way to demarcate someone as an outsider when in the third person.20 In short, grime “resignifies Hip Hop not as the consumerist bling bling soundtrack to upward mobility, but as the cri de cœur of the dispossessed, the narrative form of urban life” (Melville, 2007[2004]: n.p.), presenting “documents of urban spaces that are marked by deprivation” and producing “a cultural articulation that is defined by an ethnographic ‘poetry’ of social life.” (Barron, 2013: 541). This social picture of grime fits the political view of the genre as emerging from “the bastard sons of Blair’s Britain, trapped in long abandoned pockets of the country where violent crime is rife and the street economy holds sway. Music is their only way out of the grime” (Campion, 2004: n.p.). Unsurprisingly, grime provided the unofficial soundtrack to Labour’s resurgence under Jeremy Corbyn,21 support being encapsulated in the #grime4corbyn tag associated to the campaign of 2017 intended to get young people to become more politically active so that a ‘youthquake’ (Travis, 2018) could be generated: The campaign was launched after a number of grime stars had encouraged their followers to vote for Labour. In exchange for registering to vote, the campaign group offered free tickets to a secret party, and it was so successful that on the morning of the official Labour manifesto launch, at one point more people were tweeting the hashtag“#grime4corbyn” than  It has developed distinct pragmatic value from standard and fronted realizations [θŋ]/[fŋ].  The third linguistic feature associated with the gully (attention signal ‘ey’) is used to deploy a dominant stance and therefore, as an indexical functioning as a stance-accretion mechanism, it is central to performing hegemonic masculinity (Ilbury, 2019; See also Ilbury, 2021). 21  Whereas Williams contends that “the genre would fall under Adam Krims’s designation of ‘party rap’ rather than politically tinged rap genres” (Williams, 2017: 99), Bramwell (2015) shows how music is, in London, a form of political resistance for black and white urban youths. 19 20

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“#LabourManifesto.” [...] “The link between Corbyn and grime is because we’re both for the little man, so what he says connects with us,” Bantzz said. “But Theresa May—I don’t think she’s ever felt like a little person. [...] The way we’re coming together against her is starting to feel like a Marvel film, like we’re The Avengers forming against the bad guy. Every young person here is a superhero and they’re going up against a supervillain. [...]” (Duggins, 2017: n.p.)

#Grime4Corbyn: grime artists explain why they backed Labour Awate [...] Corbyn answers questions with thoughtfulness and without contempt for those who are suffering and want answers. This election also showed us that young people are against war—that Britain’s racist and murderous foreign policy of the last 500 years should be discontinued and the wounds that the rest of the world have suffered need to heal. For immigrants to this country and their children, Corbyn and John McDonnell’s history on these points is an important change of tone. [...] Maxsta [...] The idea that government spending on social welfare can be how society looks after its citizens, rather than shaming them, has never featured in mainstream politics in my lifetime. We’ve been at war with the Middle East since I was 11, so a leader who doesn’t champion bombing people into “freedom” is weirdly refreshing. Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign pushed back against mainstream beliefs that have been presented as the truth all my life, closing the gap between Westminster and the East End. [...] Krucial [...] Jme is a colossal figure in popular culture. Him meeting Jeremy gave Labour legitimacy in the eyes of young people. Once that link was made, Jeremy built the connection by personally, publicly and genuinely acknowledging grime music and the supporters of grime. Now we had young people wanting to read manifestos to see what the general election was really about. And it’s easy to know what you want, once you’ve seen it: funding for education and hospitals, and lower taxes for people not on a high salary. [...] Slix [...] I started paying attention to the general election mainly because of the #Grime4Corbyn campaign. As soon as I heard the word “grime” I

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became interested. [...] After watching JME interview Jeremy Corbyn, I started doing my research and realised that this is bigger than politics—this is about social change. Politicians usually come across as scripted but Jeremy’s approach seems different. (Awate et al., 2017: n.p.)

Bramwell and Butterworth suggest that the ‘coincidence’ of Corbynite politics and grime was generated, in large part, by the politician’s “upturning of the status quo, leading to a reimagination of national belonging via the prism of social justice in a way that privileges urban, ethnically-diverse and working class subjectivities.” (Bramwell & Butterworth, 2019: 2524) However, some grime artists later came to question the effectiveness of the grime/Labour connection (Tendrell, 2017a): [...] now grime pioneer Dizzee has questioned his connections to the scene. Speaking to NME for this week’s cover feature, Dizzee asked: “Grime 4 Corbyn? I just don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about that—does he even listen to grime? Did he say anything about grime onstage at Glastonbury? No? Well, there you go.” (Tendrell, 2017b: n.p.)

Indeed, some, considering the 2017 campaign a “missed opportunity,” and feeling “let down by the way they have been treated since,” went so far to announce their intention of stepping back from the 2019 campaign: “The general consensus is that they were used,” said one grime manager, who asked not to be named. “They didn’t follow up. They weren’t expecting a general election so soon, and it’s a bit late to go to the grime community now after ignoring us.” (Bakare, 2019a: n.p.)

However, British rapper, singer, and songwriter Stormzy, who had used his 2018 Brit Awards performance “as an opportunity to chastise the [then] prime minister, rapping “Yo, Theresa May, where’s that money for Grenfell? What you thought we just forgot about Grenfell?”” (Boakye, 2018: n.p.), and whose line “Fuck the government, and fuck Boris”22 22

 See Stormzy’s single ‘Vossi Bop’ (2019).

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became the slogan of a campaign aimed at unseating current Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Bakare, 2019b; Gebrial, 2019) persevered in backing Corbyn on Instagram, “telling his followers to register to vote and how vital it was to go to a polling station”: “I will be registering to vote and I will be voting for Jeremy Corbyn. “For me, he is the first man in a position of power who is committed to giving the power back to the people and helping those who need a helping hand from the government the most.” He branded Boris Johnson as a “sinister man” with a “long record of lying.” The Londoner said: “I believe it is criminally dangerous to give the most powerful role in the country to a man who said the sight of a ‘bunch of black kids’ makes him ‘turn a hair,’ compared women in burqas to letterboxes and referred to black people as ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles.’” (Carter H, 2019: n.p.)

In addition to politically identifying with working-class interests, grime is very much focused on the concept of authenticity, and the “game of respect” is central in it, with emceeing—the emcee or MC is the master of ceremonies or official host of grime events—being a characterizing element of the style: In grime music and in the stream of videos produced and uploaded by men claiming street/gang authenticity, talented MCs ‘spit bars’ purposely designed to big up the reputation of a particular group (and the MC himself ) while also throwing down status challenges to the other enemies. Given that video formats allow the producers to visually dramatise the status challenge as well as narrate it, such formats with their violent aesthetics function perfectly as media through and by which the game of respect is played out. (Hallsworth, 2013: 152)

More specifically, in the honed lyrics of M to the B—the song lip-­ synced by Abby Roberts, the Instagram star behind the chav makeup vogue whose video I started discussing in this section before opening a long window on grime, a young woman challenges another one to prove her superior ability to rhyme, with “spitting bars” indicating (in the lines

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provided below) the uttering of words in the number of lines in a 4-count beat: rappers ‘spit’ (say) these rhymes in 16 counts of 4 beats (urbandictionary, 2014a): Sophie, you’re not the only girl who can spit bars I’ve just showed you how it’s done You said you’re not gonna send back We’ll see, won’t we (M to the B 2016)

The spitting challenge takes on many different facets of the song, makeup probably being the easiest to fit into the reflections on changing youth femininities I make in these pages, and the two young rappers’ sexual habits probably representing the most inflammatory: Sophie, yeah, you’re a little whore Looking at your face, what the fuck’s your contour? Do you want me to lend you a blender? I’m being serious, I’m not trying to offend you Sophie, yeah, you should stick to singing ‘Cause when you spit, my ears are ringing (M to the B 2016)

Proving to be a chav would appear to be the real objective of the challenge, with being a chav and being the best MC seemingly representing the same thing (“You think you’re a chav” vs “We all know, the best MC It’s M to the B”): You think you’re a chav with your string jacket Turn Sophie Aspin off, what a fucking racket What a fucking racket We all know, the best MC It’s M to the B, it’s M to the B It’s M M M M M to the B It’s M to the B, it’s M to the B Bang (M to the B 2016)

In addition to lying against the backdrop of the linguistic (and literary) traditions hinted at just above, the content of these lyrics must be

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understood within a recent trend in the contemporary music landscape that tries to capitalize on the creation of controversy on social media “by pumping out music with a hardcore persona” (Ruiz, 2020: n.p.). Unsurprisingly, lyrics like these have been read as symptoms of the current existence of a form of sexism performed by women rappers, which revives old sexist narratives:23 Although female [...] artists articulate a feminist approach in their narratives by employing empowering, autonomous, and independent lyrics, many of them also reappropriate the sexist and misogynist tropes that present women as hypersexual beings who are contained and controlled by, in this case, other women (Oware, 2009: 797)

A different uptake of the same phenomenon24 contends that this “macho image” is actually being used as a tool for female empowerment in these interactions: “(a)dopting the bad bitch persona not only gives Black women the opportunity to survive economically and socially in a Eurocentric male-dominated society, but also provides them the freedom  See also Charles, 2016b’s indication that grime is a male-dominated genre, and Randall 2017’s argument that this aspect is reproduced by grime artists, particularly women, to win the support of major music labels: 23

To get the support of major labels, women and black musicians all too often have to remodel themselves according to the blinkered vision of wealthy, middle-aged, mostly white men. UK pop/grime artist Lady Leshurr declined a deal with Atlantic Records in the USA after she was told ‘Nicki Minaj is your competition and we’ll blow her out of the water.’ Leshurr reflected that ‘It pushes the gaps between us—girl rappers are afraid to work together because we get fixed in these imaginary competitions. The industry just doesn’t know what to do with women.’ (Randall, 2017: 125) Charles explains that grime is used to construct masculinity, and “[t]o achieve agency, women masculinise themselves.” (Charles, 2016a, b: 349) 24  See also, on this point, Randall, 2017: Often, when journalists and other commentators challenge one form of prejudice, they reinforce another. They fight muck with muck. For example, many only seem able to find sexism or homophobia in hip-hop, grime or reggae, arguably revealing their own racism. Likewise, they disproportionately scrutinise the choices of female performers. This is still sexist even if their conclusion is that the artist plays too much to the male gaze. There’s a lot of hypocrisy in all the muck slinging. (Randall, 2017: 129)

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to assert their power under their own rules without apology” (Layne, 2014: n.p.). These contrasting readings of the types of femininity also emerging from songs such as M to the B mirror a still current underlying postfeminist sensibility,25 stemming from the entanglement of both feminist and antifeminist discourses where “notions of autonomy, choice, and self-improvement sit side-by-side with surveillance, discipline and the vilification of those who make the ‘wrong’ ‘choices’” (Gill, 2007: 442). On the one hand, the two ‘beefing’ rappers fit well into the wider picture of the “bad bitch” culture, revolving around the figure of “a hardcore woman who makes money and proudly flaunts her sexual libido and sexuality” (Dunn, 2008: 26), where feuding is a way of destigmatizing anger, “dealing with anger through release instead of suppression” (Arbee, 2019: n.p.). On the other hand, the attitude would readily lend itself to interpretation as the ugly resurgence of anti-feminist rhetoric when looked at from a more ‘traditional’ vantage point. As a result of legal obstacles like those represented by Form 696, grime artists have developed considerable creativity in constructing opportunities for the dissemination of their music. With ever-wider access to digital technologies, this creativity has blossomed through self-produced videos which—often personally uploaded and shared online—have been unexpectedly successful. “[S]tripped of the ability to perform in public, grime artists have embraced the power of the digital to reclaim agency, and to (re)produce new, and more affective, forms of audio-visual content” (Woods, 2021a: 468). The communication associated with M to the B in the chav TikTok makeup video I am discussing is based on a similar logic, territorializing its content “in ways that push the spatial boundaries and affective potential” (Woods, 2021a: 468; also Forman, 2000, 2014) of the representation since it implies contenders ‘clashing’ with each other in not spatially proximate ways (previously feuding artists had to be co-­ present to clash). On TikTok, which, like other social platforms, decouples the once interlocking logic of space-time, territory “becomes an active, evolving, and digitally mediated construct that can be

 Despite the widespread idea that we have entered a fourth wave of feminism (Cochrane, 2013; Abrahams, 2017; Grady, 2018). 25

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manipulated for creative gain.” (Ibidem) Let us focus on the visual side of Abby Roberts’s video (abbyroberts, 2020). Wearing what looks like a puffa jacket with faux fur on the hood (I expand on these chav indexicals below) and overdrawn eyebrows (‘slug,’ or ‘slug-like’ as the “ultimate epitome of laziness,” urbandictionary, 2014b: n.p.), in this video Roberts actually reclaims the audio of M to the B for Brits (“brits reclaiming our audio ib26”). Whereas the digital logics have led to the creation of circuits of cultural content that transcend the specificities of physical time and space, Roberts appears to encourage here the reterritorialization of the deterritorialized space of digital representation to maximize her agency and increase the affectiveness of the content she has created and shared, following the example of many grime artists (cf. Woods, 2021a). Indeed, another TikToker’s version of the song—by Bella Poarch  (cfr above)—has reached the wider public. Poarch, a Filipino-American influencer, lip-­synced in a ‘hypnotic’ video (bellapoarch, 2020) using the Face Zoom filter (an effect based on the camera automatically zooming in on the user’s face, making it stand out with a close-up shot, Travis, 2020a), producing “TikTok’s biggest viral video of the year” (Kastrenakes, 2020: n.p.), and inspiring a number of deepfakebased memes27 (Hao, 2020). I mentioned above that I would expand on puffa jackets and faux fur as ‘chav’ indexicals. Let us start with the puffa jacket, “a staple of hip-hop culture in the 90s”: “Notorious B.I.G. rapped on “Party & Bullshit” in 93, referring to the bubble-like exterior and goose down insulation of his favorite jacket” (Sams, 2016: n.p.): I used to have the tre’ duce And the duce duce in my bubble-goose (Party & Bullshit, 1993)

 “Often, when you see ‘ib’ (or #ib) in the caption of a TikTok video, it’s followed by someone’s username—not the person whose video you’re watching. ... Basically, ‘ib’ stands for ‘inspired by.’ People tend to use ‘ib’ as a way to give credit for a certain dance or trend when it has inspired them to make their own video.” (Travis, 2020b: n.p.) 27  Research is currently looking into the harmful potential of deepfakes: “Deepfakes have already been used to harass women by nonconsensually swapping their faces into porn videos. Scholars also worry about their ability to disrupt elections. While the deepfakes created for memes are still obviously fake and relatively harmless, they may not stay that way for long.” (Hao, 2020: n.p.) 26

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This item of clothing has long been recognized as a ‘chav’ index: The female chav (chavette) will have peroxide blonde hair scrunched so tight into a pony tail with colourful scrunchies that her forehead stretches. She will wear a dark blue tracksuit with white stripes, an enormous puffa jacket, hoop earrings, and white trainers. (Urban Dictionary as cited in Snell, 2010: 62)

For example, it is used, in combination with accent, hairstyle, and accessories, for the characterization of the young chav woman in About a girl, a short film directed by Brian Percival that won the 2001 BAFTA Award for Best Short Film (YouTube, 2014[2001]; cf. Fig. 6.2). Moreover, the puffa jacket is widely used to sketch stereotyped representations of working-class individuals at large. The exchanges below (Fig.  6.3), extracted from several others appearing on the The F-Word website, dedicated to contemporary UK Feminism, follow a short text published by women’s rights activist Pavan Amara to foster perception and the inclusion of working-class women. They feature criticism directed at Amara from other contributors for presenting precisely one of the women the activist intended to give voice to in a way that appears

Fig. 6.2  Still from About a Girl (Percival, 2001). (Youtube, 2014[2001])

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Fig. 6.3  Some user exchanges on “Feminism: still excluding working class women?” on The F-Word (Amara, 2012: n.p.)

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patronizing in its stereotyping visuality, of which the puffa jacket is a central element: The item of clothing has long been “associated with bad taste and a certain ‘naffness’” despite being ‘donned’ by David and Victoria Beckham (Outsons, 2021: n.p.), and it is still the object of specific mockery in many of the Chav check videos I addressed in Chap. 5 (“‘Hey yo, chav check’ is the sound clip on TikTok, used to ridicule puffa jackets, leggings and sitting around town,” Lockwood, 2020: n.p.). However, it has also been embraced in all its ‘chavvy’ implications by a considerable number of trendy fashion lovers—cf. Negra and Tasker’s (2014: 4) discussion of the narration constructed around the term ‘recessionista’ “to designate the budget-conscious yet highly fashion-forward woman”, with the chav even becoming “somewhat of a fashion icon” (Ibidem): ‘chav’ has had such an impact, “both aesthetic and economic wise [...] to represent truly a unique case”28 (Caruso, 2018: n.p.): [...] Regular scourers of online fashion sites and the High street shoppers will have noticed that the Puffa jacket is having it’s [sic] moment. After asking others of my generation the general consensus is that it fits in with the 90’s sporty street style trend. But being blatant as most would say nowadays, it’s ‘chavvy as fuck.’ [...] I now have to admit that the Puffa jacket is a trend i’m loving at the moment! (natteroffact, 2016: n.p.) Whereas before to dress like one was frowned upon, now fashion houses everywhere have begun to look to the chav for inspiration, and more often than not, collections have been largely based upon what chavs wore when they came to the fore in the Noughties. Now the ‘lad’ culture that is associated with chavs has been appropriated in the fashion industry and it is not hard to see the impact it has had. (Outsons, 2021: n.p.)

 Consumer behavior research tells us that “this market segment [...] is very important to marketers and retailers.” (Mason & Wigley, 2013: 181) 28

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LOVE Island’s Molly-Mae Hague proudly showed off a £1,950 “chav chic” Gucci puffer jacket. The reality star, 21, was chuffed with the latest addition to her wardrobe as she displayed it on her Instagram Story. [...] She captioned the pic: “Chav chic and I’m here for it.” (Capon, 2021: n.p.)

Puffa jackets have also been embraced by the latest subculture I was discussing above, the roadman, “brother species to the chav” (urbandictionary, 2019: n.p.) or just an ingroup term for ‘chav,’ as we have seen. And the roadman has also taken on, in a generalized perception, the fake-­ black language features associated with chavs (cf. Bennett, 2012).29 The roadman is the current vehicle of British youth culture throughout the world, which brings together ‘chav,’ grime, and hoodie towards the common target of resilience, of being “prepared for whatever” in an age of volatility and fear, when uncertainty presses from multiple fronts: [...] while Grime may have been the vehicle through which the rest of the world came to discover the aesthetic of the British streets, the genre and the clothes so closely tied to it have their roots in British roadman culture. [...] The peculiar aesthetic is born from a mix of two things: practicality and posturing [...]. Hoodies All Summer, the recently released album by grime MC Kano [...] is a nod to the ubiquity of the garment on London’s streets. In Kano’s eyes, hoodies aren’t just worn on the streets for utilitarian reasons, they’re “a defense mechanism—a coat of armor […] we’re resilient, we wear hoodies all summer. We’re prepared for whatever.” (Richardson, 2019: n.p.)

As briefly mentioned above, in the TikTok video I am discussing in these pages, Roberts wears a puffa jacket with faux fur on the hood, and this second element of clothing makes her outfit twice as chav, due to the extra ‘chavvy’ (even criminal) connotations that fake fur has carried with it through the last few years:  Some strenuously criticize this aspect: “We’ve all met someone at uni who’s white, lives in Windsor, has their own horse and a villa in the South of France to boot, yet uses words like ‘wagwan’ or ‘gyaldem’ on the reg. You’re not a big man from South London, your name is Harry or Hettie or Harriet or something of that ilk and you just got a little too emotionally attached to Top Boy and love that ‘road’ aesthetic for clout. Seeing a group of white middle-class people using words like, ‘endz’ or ‘bruv’ will never cease to make a Black person even slightly uncomfortable, so here we are, asking you to cut it the fuck out.” (Mensah & Lijadu, 2020: n.p.) 29

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[...] a chav is a person who wears lots of burberry stuff & fake fur [...] (urbandictionary, 2009: n.p.) PeePantz 29 November 2010 6:17 pm [...] From what I know, a chav refers to a kid from the UK that comes from a working class family and dresses in track clothes, wears a chain, and often a Burberry lid. During wintertime, a chav is usually spotted with a big coat that has a hood donning a fake fur trim. Chavs tend to be considered something of a lowlife (maybe?). [...] Celtic_Kerr 29 November 2010 6:23 pm You described the physical description rather well, but based on my british ex-gf, a chav is basically your UK version of a wigger (white man who sees himself as as a “gangtsa” they tend to dress a little more of the over-­ done hip hop style. The problem with chavs is they tend to be rather violent fellows. They take no shit, they are judgemental [sic], and ususally [sic] carry a knife on them and hang around in gangs. If they don’t like the look of you, they’ll make mention of it. If they really don’t like you, you can get into a fight or stabbed in a moment. That’s what she told me pretty much [...] Eggy32 29 November 2010 6:30 pm Your description was right on the ball. (the escapist, 2010: n.p.) This combination of Yankees cap and fake fur coat is the preferred outfit of many low-level British criminals, or, as they are known in the U.K., “chavs.” These chavs regard themselves as criminal-fashionistas: those who look good while mugging. (Rogan, 2017: n.p.)

However, Roberts’ overall visual in the TikTok video of M to the B, in foregrounding the glowing and healthy look of the young woman’s face, adds a glamorous layer to the ‘chav’ meanings implied. It also suggests further (possibly deliberate) implications in the choice of faux, pushing toward more positive associations:

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There, I said it. Faux fur can come across as chavvy. It’s a terrible thing to say, but it happens because some people take the look far too fur (—did you see what I did there?) [...]. There’s also the other fact [...]. Fake fur can sometimes be considered cheap, and as such, “chavvy.” [...] However, there’s a problem here. If being “chavvy” is wearing faux fur then being “sophisticated” means wearing real fur. That means being sophisticated is the same as being cruel—an animal had to perish for us to wear their coat. (dressedinlucy, 2017: n.p.)

Faux equating to the ethically and environmentally responsible sits well with Roberts’ admiration for celebrities who act as role models “in helping the environment” (Peters, 2020b: n.p.). It also sits well with the practicality and posturing implicit in puffa jackets, which some interpret as being “(r)einvented by rebellious women who unknowingly reject fashion’s ‘mens/womens’ distinctions” (Koku, 2020: n.p.). Interviewed for the New York Times about the implications of another recent makeup trend that involves swiping brownish lipstick beneath one’s eyes in lieu of concealer—the trend was launched by TikToker Sara Carstens’s idea of normalizing dark circles (“Sometimes, it can be beautiful,” [...] Plus, “we’re Gen Z. We’re all tired and have bad sleeping schedules”)—Roberts does read this trend as a form of rebellion: “Every few years we have something like this where people get sick of beauty standards and kind of rebel,” said Abby Roberts, a makeup artist and TikTok creator who stitched her own video with Ms. Carstens’s. (Issawi, 2021: n.p.)

In this light, Roberts’ use of chav makeup and stereotypically chav clothes in the video I am discussing may be read as potentially indexical of other aspects of identity construction. More specifically, it may be considered a badge of female participation in youth subculture, with Roberts acting as a self-employed “subcultural entrepreneur” (McRobbie, 1988). Indeed, recent youth subculture research contends that, despite undergoing significant change, this concept is still alive and crucial to understanding how today’s young people construct their identities and make their way in the world (Bell, 2013). The subcultural being of many young people today is “neither transient nor irrelevant”; moving away from the

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forms of expression of spectacular subcultures, contemporary youth use “cultural knowledge and creative engagement as significant factors in youth group affiliations,” and among them, ‘purists’ (compared/contrasted to ‘peripherals’ by Dedman, 2011) “exert significant degrees of autonomy over their cultural participation and openly reject mainstream sensibilities in favor of claiming a sense of ownership and connection to their personalized variant” of globalized forms of youth participation (Dedman, 2011: 507). Let us focus on make-up in particular. We have seen that, as a commodity, heavy make-up is an enregistered social indexical in British society. More precisely, we have seen that, through the enregisterment of the qualities it is presumed to instantiate in British women—gaudiness and tawdriness—heavy make-up has participated in the social construction of the chav woman and contributed to the persuasiveness of political and ethical discourses around ‘chav’ in British society. Precisely because of the qualities it is presumed to embody, deliberate gesturing to it in this video (seemingly devoid of any critical intention), would appear to become swept up in a changing regime of femininity: co-existing formulations of heavy make-up create conflicts between different constructions of femininity; indeed changing embodied uses of heavy make-up both transform what category it ‘counts as’ and the qualities it is presumed and seen to display. I might add with Gal that “the qualities of objects are not fixed; their construal is a semiotically mediated, open-ended, historical process.” (Gal, 2017: S129) Heavy make-up in this video lends itself to being seen as a way of taking a stance on femininity in the form of provocative posturing: a way of ‘doing gender,’ or more precisely a way of resisting traditional gender norms. It acquires this social meaning here through the interplay of visual and acoustic dimensions, generating an association with both the rebellious gender-posturing potential implicit in puffa jackets (cf. above; Koku, 2020) and with the specific implications of grime music, whose acoustic features embody “a street/urban/tough lifestyle” (Drummond, 2018: 190). The visual and acoustic dimensions played with here are also imbued with precise social meanings related to gender, frequently emphasizing “female empowerment and equality with male MCs (A.Dot’s collaboration with Kano on ‘Semantics,’ for example, with Kano’s refrain that A.Dot ‘Don’t do the dishes/She don’t do the

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food’).” (Barron, 2013: 538–539) From this standpoint, grime music contrasts with Hip Hop’s even more predominantly masculine discourse: Hip Hop culture being “largely a masculinist gangster paradigm, where the female figure is the grieving mother or girlfriend” (McRobbie, 2005: 63).30 We have seen above that the specific tune associated with this video shares much of the peculiar feminine quality of grime artists, with its “aggressive, fast-paced, expletive-loaded rhymes” (Barron, 2013: 539): [...] given the gendered quality of the genre, that it contains numerous and significant female MCs, and from differing ethnic backgrounds, Grime, from an ethnographic perspective, offers a holistic social, ethnic, and gendered perception on British culture from the standpoint of Grime rappers. (Ibidem)

Thus, content from British culture and grime music transcends its original context (all the while reterritorializing the deterritorialized space of digital representation, as I have argued above) and becomes the scaffolding for a process of cultural interaction of potential global significance. Through her TikTok bricolage, Roberts appears to engage in a stylistic move that makes ‘chav’ available for re-use and salient at a much more generalized cultural level (cf. Eckert, 2008). It becomes a potentially feminist tool, with Roberts’s make-up skills pointing to a view of craft as power (Bratich & Brush, 2011, for example). Makeup enhances the young woman’s personal ability or capacity to act, while inspiring other women to construct and shape their place in the world; a form of ‘craftivism’ (Gualtieri, 2009; Greer, 2011). Willis calls “grounded aesthetics” the process whereby ordinary people make cultural sense of the world, and the world “is made human to them and made, to however small a degree (albeit ultimately symbolic), controllable by them” (Willis, 1993[1990]: 22, emphasis in the original):31  However, Barron recognizes that “Gupta-Carlson (2010) argues that there are contemporary examples of an alignment between US Hip Hop music and female empowerment (the Planet B-Girl network, for instance) that utilizes the sound as an empowering political feminist force.” (Barron, 2013: 538) 31  It may also be a form of grounded aesthetics that converts chav make-up into use-value through modifications that make it appropriate to cultures for which they were not intended (see Willis, 1993[1990]). 30

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People bring living identities to commerce and the consumption of cultural commodities as well as being formed there. They bring experiences, feelings, social position and social memberships to their encounter with commerce. Hence they bring a necessary creative symbolic pressure, not only to make sense of cultural commodities, but partly through them also to make sense of contradiction and structure [...]. The results of this ­necessary symbolic work may be quite different from anything initially coded into cultural commodities (Willis, 1993[1990]: 21).

From a certain vantage point, this video appears potentially crucial in its embryonic ability to mediate new values for ‘chav’ or at least to add new potential values to draw from when performing ‘chav.’ Stylistic choices are socially meaningful, but their social meaning is not predetermined. It is created within the larger contexts in which those choices are deployed, where they sometimes occupy entirely different positions, with individuals producing stance-taking moves, and positioning themselves differently even when making the same stylistic choices. Qualities change with recontextualization, and as axes of differentiation are recast in the transmutation. Additions to the indexical value of a variable create what Eckert (2008) calls an “indexical field”: Variables have indexical fields rather than fixed meanings because speakers use variables not simply to reflect or reassert their particular pre-ordained place on the social map but to make ideological moves. The use of a variable is not simply an invocation of a pre-existing indexical value but an indexical claim which may either invoke a pre-existing value or stake a claim to a new value. (Eckert, 2008: 464)

Of course, only time will tell whether uptakes of Roberts’s chav performance along the chain will be able to fully develop the latent power of these new indexicalities: change can only be assessed retrospectively. For the time being, this certainly adds to the competing indexicalities of ‘chav,’ stretching chav discourse and potentially steering it into a different, more positive direction.

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6.3 ‘Chav’ on Other Social Platforms: Beyond TikTok Chav check videos have even inspired—as we have seen in Sect. 5.4 (Konbini, 2020; Shadijanova, 2020)—the creation of a popular Instagram filter (“orange foundation, patchy concealer, huge black brows, wiggly eyelashes, and huge gold hoops”), with the author defending their idea of ‘chav’ as non-ideological: Cebrecos told The Tab that the idea came from TikTok. “I made it because it reminded me of the girls on Geordie Shore, and I thought it would be nice to have that make-up and look. It has no negative connotation, that’s why I decided to make it,” [...] “In every country, there are always people who love that look or had it when they were younger,” [...] “I wasn’t aware the word ‘chav’ had a negative meaning, I gave that name to the filter for the look.” (Lockwood, 2020: n.p.)

The creator of a second, less widespread filter, Chav Luv, also defended the idea as non-ideological32 but appeared to be better disposed to adjust it to avoid offence: “I like when people can use a filter to create something funny with it. But some people also push a negative narrative and create something hateful to hurt a group of people, which I find very upsetting.” Maxim encouraged feedback and said he would consider adjusting the features if people were offended by them. (Ibidem)

Even beyond the filter, Instagram is rich in #chavvy posts, where the impression is that, in most cases, ‘chav’ use is devoid of ideology. Cf., for example, @amilemay 2021, which associates ‘chavvy’ with #drinks, #adidas, #saturdaynight, #friends, hashtagging them one after the other; and @jessicamariee.xo 2020, about “One of them days #chavvy #addidas  Shadijanova 2020 too sums up the result of her survey, stating that none of the TikTok users she interviewed seemed to have an awareness of the historical and political weight of the term. 32

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Fig. 6.4  Instagram #chavvy post by helenpimmsy (Helen generously allowed free reproduction of the picture). (@helenpimmsy 2020)

#comfylife #blondey #chillvibes”. Also @jessashton6 2020’s caption “Embracing the inner chav today #puma #tracksuitbottoms #colours #chavvy #relaxedstyle #quarantine #bored #waitingforbetterdays.” The images associated with these hashtags/captions all appear to depict a relaxed, easy-going individual like the one featured in the post which follows (Fig. 6.4). ‘Chav’ in these pictures does not as much appear to be articulated as an ideological object but as “completely transparent and taken-for-granted cultural knowledge (common sense).” (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010: 41) These Instagram users do not seem to be “adopting an identity previously seen as downmarket” (McNamara, 2018: 108), nor do they appear to be claiming to be chavs. However, they are certainly affiliating themselves

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with qualities of ‘chav’ that they perceive to be positive. It is not class but social types that seem to be conjured up through the symbolic use of eye-­ catching make-up, a pulled-back hairstyle, and sportswear in these Instagram posts. Indeed, all these women appear to stylize themselves using chav features to perform a relaxed, laid-back social persona. In so doing, they are also potentially contributing to unsettling the category, destabilizing ‘chav,’ and making it available for further segmentation and (re)interpretation. What has turned ‘chav’ into a “desirable behavior” for some? What has triggered rewarding re-enactment? What has brought about an indexicality shift in chav performances like these? Awareness of the rigidity of the ‘chav’ definition, of its inadequacy if viewed from a different perspective may have produced, for some, the kind of ‘intentional,’ subversive laughter that Butler presents as a sort of “laughter of relief ”,33 the kind of laughter that occurs after one leaves behind all illusory ideals of the ‘normal,’ recognizing that “what tortured us insofar as we could never really live up to it” was actually just an arbitrary construction:34 “The loss of the sense of ‘the normal’ [...] can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when ‘the normal,’ ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived” (Butler, 2010[1990]: 189, emphasis in the original).

 The opposite of laughter as “an effect of incongruities”: “an unexpected and surprising violation of the normal makes us laugh─often unwillingly” (Helbig, 2009: 353). 34  Reflecting on Butler’s notion of laughter as a way of making conventional gender roles look odd, Helbig contends that it “implicitly defines laughter as an intentional act that constitutes the comic—a typically poststructuralist idea. Normally, one would think that the comic causes the laughter and that laughter is not necessarily an intentional act: We often laugh unwillingly when we are faced with something ‘funny.’ However, Butler seems to suggest that we should laugh–intentionally–at concepts and definitions that are, in her view, too rigid in order to make the person who believes in these concepts and takes them as natural aware of the ‘fact’ that they are in no way god-­ given and irreversible but can also appear inadequate when viewed from another perspective.” (Helbig, 2009: 352) 33

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Labov. (1974). The Art of Sound and Signifying. In W. W. Gage (Ed.), Language in its Social Setting (pp. 84–116). Anthropological Society of Washington. Layne, A. (2014, April 24). Now That’s a Bad Bitch!: The State of Women in Hip Hop. Hampton Think. https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/now-­thats-­ a-­bad-­bitch-­the-­state-­of-­women-­in-­hip-­hop. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Lockwood, R. (2020, August). ‘It Isn’t Offensive’: Creator of Instagram’s ‘Chav’ Face Defends the Filter. The Tab. https://thetab.com/uk/2020/08/26/it-­isnt-­ offensive-­creator-­of-­instagrams-­chav-­face-­defends-­the-­filter-­172673. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Marsh, G. (2016). Working Class Appropriation is the New Cool. Epigram. https://epigram.org.uk/2016/04/27/working-­class-­appropriation-­is-­the-­ new-­cool/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Mason, R. B., & Wigley, G. (2013). The ‘Chav’ Subculture: Branded Clothing as an Extension of the Self. Journal of Economics and Behavioral Studies, 5(3), 173–184. McNamara, S. (2018). Tatler’s Irony: Conspicuous Consumption, Inconspicuous Power and Social Change. Palgrave Pivot. McRobbie, A. (1988). Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket. In A.  McRobbie (Ed.), Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music (pp. 23–49). Unwin Hyman. McRobbie, A. (2005). The Uses of Cultural Studies. Sage. Melville, C. (2007[2004]). Beats, Rhymes and Grime. New Humanist. https:// newhumanist.org.uk/articles/822/beats-­rhymes-­and-­grime. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Mensah, K., & Lijadu, F. (2020). If You’re a White Middle Class Student, Please Stop Talking Like a Roadman. The Tab. https://thetab.com/uk/2020/07/08/ if-­y oure-­a -­w hite-­m iddle-­c lass-­s tudent-­p lease-­s top-­t alking-­l ike-­a -­ roadman-­165210. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Natteroffact. (2016). Me:’What do you think to Puffa Jackets?’ Boyfriend: ‘Chavvy as f*ck.’ Natter of Fact. https://natteroffact.wordpress. com/2016/10/12/mewhat-­do-­you-­think-­to-­puffa-­jackets-­boyfriend-­chavvy-­ as-­fuck/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Negra, D., & Tasker, Y. (2014). Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity. Duke University Press. Noisey. (2014, May 29). Form 696: The Police Versus Grime Music. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/kw9qbe/the-­police-­versus. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Outsons. (2021). The Rise of the Chav Fashion. Outsons. https://outsons.com/ the-­rise-­of-­chav-­fashion/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021.

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Oware, A. M. (2009). Man’s Woman? Contradictory Messages in the Songs of Female Rappers 1992–2000. Journal of Black Studies, 39(5), 786–802. Peters, A. (2020a). TikTok Star Abby Roberts Has a New Weekly YouTube Series Coming. Dazed Digital. https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/head/ article/49751/1/tiktok-­star-­abby-­roberts-­has-­a-­new-­weekly-­youtube-­series-­ coming. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Peters, A. (2020b). Abby Roberts Answers Every Question You’ve Ever Had About Her. Dazed Digital. https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/head/ article/49618/1/abby-­roberts-­interview-­dazed-­100-­2020. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Pfeffer, W. (2020). Negative Reviews in the Troubadour Vidas. Studia Neophilologica, 92(3), 328–336. Pigeons. (2015, November 3). Deeper Than Rap: Grime is Not a Subgenre of Hip-Hop. Complex. https://www.complex.com/pigeons-­and-­planes/2015/11/ grime-­hip-­hop. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Rampton, B. (2015). Contemporary Urban Vernaculars. In J.  Nortier & B.  A. Svendsen (Eds.), Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century. Cambridge University Press. Randall, D. (2017). Sound System. The Political Power of Music. Pluto Press. Reddit. (2018). How Has Grime Changed? https://www.reddit.com/r/grime/ comments/7xi173/how_has_grime_changed/. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Reid, E. (2017). ‘On Road’ Culture in Context: Masculinities, Religion, and ‘Trapping’ in Inner City London. Unpublished PhD thesis, Brunel University. Richardson, M. (2019). Top Boys: What is Roadman and Grime Style? Grailed. https://www.grailed.com/drycleanonly/roadman-­style. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Ridenhour, J. (2013). ‘Anything is Possible for a Man in a Top Hat with a Monkey with a Monocle’: Remixing Steampunk in Professor Elemental’s The Indifference Engine. In J. A. Taddeo & C. J. Miller (Eds.), Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (pp. 89–104). Scarecrow Press. Rogan, T. (2017, December 4). The Yankees and Raiders Have a British ‘Chav’ Problem. Washington Examiner. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-­ yankees-­and-­raiders-­have-­a-­british-­chav-­problem. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Ruiz, B. (2020). 6ix9ine: The Rise of a Social Media Supervillain. JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium. 313. https://www.mackseysymposium.org/virtual2020/all/presentations/313. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Saint-Amand, D. (2016). ‘Morts, avec Supplément Frites’. Invectif et Logique Conflictuelle dans le Champ du Rap Français. Études de Lettres, 3. http:// journals.openedition.org/edl/1206. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021.

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Sams, M. (2016, Mar 25). Why Fashion is So Obsessed with Puffer Jackets. i-D. https://i-­d.vice.com/en_uk/article/gyg9qq/why-­fashion-­is-­so-­obsessed-­ with-­puffer-­jackets. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Shadijanova, D. (2020, April 23). The ‘Chav’ Caricature Has Made a Comeback On TikTok. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/939p45/chav-­caricature-­ comeback-­tiktok-­2020. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Skeggs, B. (2004). Class, Self, Culture. Routledge. Snell, J. (2010). Yeah but No but Yeah’: A Linguistic Perspective on the Humour of Little Britain. In S.  Lockyer (Ed.), Reading Little Britain (pp.  53–71). I.B. Tauris. Stratton, J., & Zuberi, N. (2014). Introduction. In J.  Stratton & N.  Zuberi (Eds.), Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 (pp.  1–10). Ashgate Publishing. Swain, S. (2018). Grime Music and Dark Leisure: Exploring Grime, Morality and Synoptic Control. Annals of Leisure Research, 21(4), 480–492. Tendrell, A. (2017a, December 22). Skepta Says Politicians ‘Used’ People and the #Grime4Corbyn Movement During the General Election. NME. https:// www.nme.com/politics/skepta-­slams-­current-­state-­politics-­grime4corbyn-­ movement-­2185457. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Tendrell, A. (2017b, July 14). Dizzee Rascal: ‘What Has Jeremy Corbyn Done for Grime? NME. https://www.nme.com/news/music/dizzee-­rascal-­jeremy-­ corbyn-­done-­grime-­2110814. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. The Economist. (2021, August 27). Grime and UK Drill are Exporting Multicultural London English. https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/ 01/30/grime-­and-­uk-­drill-­are-­exporting-­multicultural-­london-­english. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. The Escapist. (2010). What Exactly is a Chav? The Escapist. https://v1. escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.247812-­W hat-­e xactly-­i s-­a -­c hav. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. The Notorious B.I.G. (1993, June 29). Party & Bullshit. Who’s The Man? Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Travis, A. (2018, January 29). Youthquake: Why Age Did Matter for Corbyn in 2017. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/ jan/29/youthquake-­why-­age-­did-­matter-­for-­corbyn-­in-­2017. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Travis, A. (2020a, April 28). The Face Zoom Effect Is Back on TikTok—Here’s How to Use It. Distractify. https://www.distractify.com/p/face-­zoom-­effect-­ on-­tiktok. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021.

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Travis, A. (2020b, August 21). What Does It Mean When People Say ‘IB’ on TikTok? Distractify. https://www.distractify.com/p/what-­does-­ib-­mean-­on­tiktok#:~:text=Often%2C%20when%20you%20see%20%E2%80%9Cib, whose%20video%20you’re%20watching.&text=Basically%2C%20 %E2%80%9Cib%E2%80%9D%20stands%20for,to%20make%20 their%20own%20video. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Tyler, I. (2008). ‘Chav Mum Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain. Feminist Media Studies, 8(1), 17–34. urbandictionary. (2009, October 25). Chav by lolsl. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Chav&page=43. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. urbandictionary. (2014a, June 26). Spit Bars (Top Definition) by DirtyD-­ Damnit. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spit%20bars. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. urbandictionary. (2014b, July 2). Slug (Top Definition) by Xephh. https://www. urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Slug. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. urbandictionary. (2019, March 29). Roadman (Top Definition) by Funtimeswiththegang. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term= Roadman. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. White, J. (2017). Controlling the Flow: How Urban Music Videos Allow Creative Scope and Permit Social Restriction. Young, 25(4), 407–425. https:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1103308816644110. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Williams, J. A. (2017). Rapping Postcoloniality: Akala’s ‘The Thieves Banquet’ and Neocolonial Critique. Popular Music and Society, 40(1), 89–101. Willis, P. (1993[1990]). Common Culture. Open University Press. Woods, O. (2020). The Digital Subversion of Urban Space: Power, Performance and Grime. Social & Cultural Geography, 21, 293–313. Woods, O. (2021a). Clashing Cyphers, Contagious Content: The Digital Geopolitics of Grime. Transactions, 46(2), 464–477. Woods, O. (2021b). From Roadman to Royalties: Inter-Representational Value and the Hypercapitalist Impulses of Grime. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 1–18. YouTube. (2014[2001]). About a Girl. Brian Percival. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=JV1_TXm0XHs. Last accessed 15 Aug 2021. Zuberi, N. (2014). ‘New Throat Fe Chat’: The voices and media of MC Culture. In J. Stratton & N. Zuberi (Eds.), Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 (pp. 185–201). Ashgate Publishing.

7 Concluding Remarks

This section pulls the threads together still further, arguing that, of course, access to resources is crucial to enable such uses of ‘chav’ for personal or broader enhancement as those presented in this book (‘chav’ as the boosting of an experimental self, as the growth of a subcultural identity, and the development of a social type). This means that not everyone is allowed the same degree of expression and mobility. However, the symbolic work and creativity currently set in motion may as well produce short-circuits through a multiplicity of diversified uptakes and abductions, activating alternative possibilities for all the ‘chav’ stakeholders. The section also clarifies that the book has only drawn attention to individual encounters with the digital objects analyzed. The analysis should have been integrated with other data, but even then, the picture would have only been partial since the capacity to impact what actually happens and produces change in society is dispersed among participants, circumstances, and concomitant events. Despite choosing to close the book with this awareness, I would like to emphasize that, even shared, each individual’s responsibility in the overall effects of their social activity is certainly no less crucial.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Di Martino, Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96818-2_7

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Following the methodological introduction in Chap. 2, in Chaps. 3 and 4, I illustrated how ‘chav’ was semiotized as ‘alien’ at its first emergence in British culture. In particular, in Chap. 4 I examined such features as eye-catching jewelry, heavy makeup, a particular type of sports garb, even kinds of food, cars, and housing as things to which social personas are attached; more precisely, as emblems serving as salient examples of what chavs are about. Such signs as these have become enregistered emblems because many people have come to view them as marking the same social persona, as aspects which point to ‘chav.’ To understand why these specific features have become emblematic of chavs, we have to think of their pragmatic salience, i.e., of the awareness of their social significance (Wong, 2021). First of all, it is important to focus on the multifacetedness of these features, which favors their indexical expansion, hence on their “indexical field” (Eckert, 2008): the constellation of their ideologically related meanings. Eye-catching jewellery, heavy make-up, a certain type of athletic clothes, some kinds of food, cars, and housing all convey other meanings and associations: for example, they are indicative of sexual incontinence, of “the micro-politics of the street” (Nayak, 2003: 89), of unhealthy lifestyles, of unrestrained consumption. The other crucial element in the identification of the pragmatic salience of these features, which has certainly contributed to turning them into emblems, is the ‘storiability’ of their indexical meanings, that is, “the potential of these meanings to be co-opted into the construction of a narrative that makes an already established characterization of a social type seem natural and reasonable” (Wong, 2021: 65): Once differences in appearance, manner, and speech are noted by an observer’s conjecture, people invariably proceed to explain, motivate, and justify perceived differences by reasoning with the qualia they have themselves posited through rhematization. (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 125) […] narratives of rhematization […] attribut[e] the similarity of sign and object, and differences among signs, to something “inside” (or inherent to) the occupiers of the category […] whether the category is people or objects or territories or something else. (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 275)

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We have seen that the process with the pivotal role in transforming a feature into an emblem is rhematization; through rhematization, signs are construed as iconically displaying some underlying qualities of the objects they represent. By assigning cause to a connection that is merely contingent, the iconic link between features such as eye-catching jewelry, heavy makeup, a certain type of sportswear, kinds of food, cars, housing, etc., and chavs has become naturalized. This means that chavs and their emblematic features have come to be seen as the same thing: chavs have come to be perceived as tasteless because of the eye-catching jewelry, heavy make-up, and sports gear they wear and because of the types of food, cars and housing they opt for (the qualia of these features have been projected onto personality types), and eye-catching jewelry, heavy makeup, sports gear, those kinds of food, cars and housing have come to be perceived, in turn, as trashy because of the lack of taste of the social personas of which they are emblems (the qualia of these person types have been projected onto these features). Erased from the picture is the fact that the use of these ‘emblematic’ features is, in reality, distributed throughout society: when identified in nonchavs, they are considered as non-permanent dispositions and are stigmatized as such. However, axes of differentiation are fractally reiterated all the same, producing “cascades of differentiation” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 127) amongst nonchavs: those people who are judged as showing chav qualia are perceived to have some chav in them, which is temporarily displayed on certain occasions, so a further subdivision of the nonchav into chav/nonchav comes about.1 Like any axis, that of chav/nonchav is totalizing: it categorizes every sort of semiotic object, claiming a single perspective. Moreover, there is social power in rhematization: “its stories are often the basis on which policy and action are proposed and justified” (Ibidem). Hence, the clothing restrictions and bans adopted by various businesses in the UK between 2004 and 2006, for example.

 “An axis of differentiation, once established, has the potential to create ever more differentiation. Whatever items have been classified as belonging on one side of an axis––including perspectives–– can be subdivided using the same contrasting qualities.” (Ibidem) “The qualities arrayed in the axis––its schema––are defined as opposed and co-constitutive” (Gal & Irvine, 2019: 130, emphasis in the original). 1

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When a cultural construct “has a recognizable reality only for a sub-­ group within a society,” it is easily brought to the attention of other members of society by processes of communicative transmission. In this way, the construct becomes more widely known and “presupposable in use by larger segments of the population” (Agha, 2007: 78). But the construct can also come to be re-interpreted during this process. In particular, those who are de-valued through the specific construct are still able to produce value for themselves from these negative attributions, re-evaluating the inscriptions and opening the negative value up to contestation––cf. Butler’s contention that “by being called a name, one is also, paradoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, [...] the injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response” (2021[1997]: 2). Of course, it is most challenging to contest when the negative value is institutionalized, or written into social relations by forms of authorization and legitimation (cf. Skeggs, 2004), as it often has been in the case of ‘chav’: So I am on a train and three rows down there is screaming. Not real screaming, worse luck, for at least real screaming is always, eventually, destined to end. This screaming is coming from a DVD player, which is being watched by a splodgy child. Next to him sits his mother, chewing like a lobotomised farm animal. […] It is wrong, I know, to fantasise about assaulting young mothers. But as the carriage fills with the sound […], I must admit to urges […] The mother looks through me and burps, perhaps regurgitating a bit of her last burger so she can enjoy it anew. I sit down. Does she think that kids are just kids, and we all have to deal with it together […] There must be some rationale here, to be eked out of her bovine, walnut-sized brain. (Rifkind, 2008: n.p.) A marketing campaign for a gym that promoted classes including Chav Fighting […] has been cleared by the adverising [sic]  watchdog despite complaints it condoned and encouraged violence […] Gymbox said Chav Fighting was a self-defence class and cited the Wikipedia definition of the word to point out that it refers to agressive young adults who often fight. The company said the leaflet was meant to communicate the class in a “witty manner” and was not offensive to anyone in particular as “nobody

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in society would admit to being a Chav; it was not a group to which people wanted to belong.” […] In its ruling the ASA noted that the references to “Burberry belts,” Asbos as “trophies,” and Bacardi Breezers as “swords” would indicate that Chav Fighting was “tongue-in-cheek and at a move from reality.” (Sweney, 2009: n.p.)

However, change does happen all the time, and the chav trope may hold the potential for positive re-evaluation in some contexts. Chapter 5 and its further expansion in Chap. 6 have focused on what appear to be current reformulations of some chav features2 on social networks, with the effects such reformulations may have on the category of ‘chav’ in general. In particular, I have illustrated how the specific TikTok videos I have analyzed would appear to be consumptive rather than instrumental ‘chav’ objects (Boesch, 1991) in the complex bricolage resulting from the assemblage of parts coming from different sources. Semiotic strings emerge from the TikTok Chav Check creators’ acts of weaving together diverse objects belonging to different sign systems; these acts are generated by the individual creator’s intuition of the world as an organized system of knowledge and values that can be referred to but also played with, queered and collaboratively transformed through the perceptual mechanisms of intersemiosis. Of course, queering intentions may in turn be queered, and indeed these videos do seem to aim for subjective-­ functional effects of enjoyment also, rather than merely serving to produce (or re-produce) the dangerous social effect that many commentaries in the public sphere fear (if this was indeed the creators’ original intention). In point of fact, a label initially conceptualized for a specific purpose (to designate the underclass) appears to be currently appropriated and re-used for a second purpose: we have seen the specific case of a transformation through makeup, clothes, other props (cigarette and lighter), and language—a video during which a young woman visually and acoustically morphs into a chav persona. We have also argued that, from a particular perspective, the metamorphosis appears to invoke qualia (cf. Gal, 2013; Harkness, 2015) projecting seduction and  Reappropriation is possible because “already visually evaluated body parts, practices or culture can be used as a resource in the process of self-making” (Skeggs, 2004: 157). 2

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assertiveness in the construction of her femininity.3 Uses of ‘chav’ for a secondary purpose (personal enhancement or mere enjoyment) produce fluidity in the category of ‘chav.’ Focusing on the label used to glue the Chav check videos together rather than on how ‘chav’ is put to use in individual videos may risk missing the point, even considering that these are anyway just single moments along the chain of communication and that uptakes are very complex events in which meanings are constantly re-constructed and made available for new uses. Who or what is made visible in the recontextualizations? What aspects of ‘chav’ are made salient? Which scripts are suggested? Which are inferred? How is the ‘Other’ represented? How is the ‘Other’ perceived? Through which gaze? It is crucial to capture these creative dynamics, clearly distinguishing what is used from how it is used. It is precisely on this aspect––on the how––that the theoretical effort of this book––mostly concentrated in the second part (Chaps. 5 and 6)––has focused, whereas the first part was mostly aimed at the what. In particular, in the final chapter, I have shown how ‘chav’ has been further appropriated and ‘hijacked’ both on TikTok and beyond TikTok, arguing that these creative uses might leave a mark on the category. Indeed, overt invitation––in some cases––to justify using such a heavily connoted category in new, non-ideological contexts may enhance its discursive re-elaboration, making it possible to imagine alternatives to traditional images and discourses of stigmatization. Of course, access to resources is crucial to enable the enhancement of an experimental self (as in some of the TikTok videos considered in Chap. 5), of a subcultural identity, or of a social type (as in some other TikTok videos and Instagram pictures presented in Chap. 6). This means that not everyone is allowed the same degree of expression, flexibility, and mobility: there are different economies of exchange in the new global, too, and omnivorousness is a privilege restricted to some “because of the money, time and knowledge required to know what to access and how to use what has been accessed” (Skeggs, 2004: 145). Not everyone is fully aware of the exchange value of signs, and personal investment in identity  This is performed through the interconnectedness of different media: multiple intersecting dimensions construct the young woman’s identity. 3

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development is about a projection into the future of a self with value: individual features and “bits of non/bodies (prosthesis) all have an exchange-value”; the individual has to learn to judge which signs accrue value towards the attainment of their future personal projects, “what figure to appropriate, what to attach, what choices to make” (Skeggs, 2004: 147). However, it is also true that the aesthetic/prosthetic (AP) self “is more interested in boundary plundering than in boundary maintenance” (Skeggs, 2004: 148), an elite status currently manifesting itself not in hiding and restricting, but in the display of knowledge and practices: knowledge and display of access to other cultures and their resources become central in this process. Skeggs reminds us, for example, how black working-class culture has long been plundered for its cultural attributes, which have been re-packaged as objects, each with a specific exchange-value based on its making certain properties (‘coolness,’ for example) of black culture accessible to a white audience. I have tried to illustrate that what has currently set ‘chav’ in considerable motion–– through the interpretative approximations/recontextualizations of international TikTokers, but also through the deliberate re-formulations of some British users––is the result of a similar process of ‘extraction’ of elements of chav culture carried out first of all within its ‘original’ local context. This ‘local’ process has made ‘chav’ available for further attachment/detachment practices on the broader world-wide market. Following Diawara (1998), Skeggs emphasizes the unidirectionality of such processes as these:4 the value of an object-sign depends on the body to which it is attached. The abstraction of cool from repugnant, in our case, would thus only work when applied to nonchav bodies; cool and repugnant would continue to stick together when applied to chav bodies. While accepting that this is, of course, the case within the current functioning of Western societies––which appears unlikely to significantly change in the short term––I would like to tone down at least in part the  Another difference may be identified in the use to which elements of chav culture are put by those who appropriate it. For example, Willis (1993[1990]) shows how young unemployed people use the lyrics of popular songs to make sense of their lives. Individuals who plunder ‘chav’ for culture may, for example, make their (acquired) ability of making-up the chav way and their (acquired) knowledge of grime music work for them, using these chav elements to increase their personal exchange-value, i.e., performing a conversion from cultural to economic capital (see Skeggs, 2004 about sub-cultural capital: 149–150); through plundering, appropriation and distinction-making. 4

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pessimism underlying this consideration by foregrounding “the dynamic and living qualities of everyday culture, and especially their necessary work and symbolic creativity […] symbolic work and creativity mediate, and are simultaneously expanded and developed by, the uses, meaning and ‘effects’ of cultural commodities” (Willis, 2006[1994]: 568, emphasis in the original). “(I)maginations are not easily tamed to specific political-­economic purposes” (Harvey, 1993: 23). How are other people around the world appropriating and using ‘chav’ in response to these TikTok and Instagram posts? Could these re-appropriations affect the ‘chav’ local economy in some way? Cultural commodities are catalysts, and their wide circulation amongst users who are for the most part young and located in many different corners of the world may as well produce breakdowns and shortcircuits through a multiplicity of diversified uptakes and abductions. A criticism of chav might have been the incentive that started Chav check videos; however, it has also activated “alternative or oppositional symbolic work,” thus potentially “supplying materials for its own critique” (Willis, 1993[1990]: 139): despite its intentions (if this is the case), it has made wider indexical creativity around ‘chav’ possible, and this may as well “open up the way to a better way” (Willis, 1993[1990]: 160). Evidence of wider indexical creativity around ‘chav’ has been observed as already being performed in other activities on TikTok and on other platforms; this appears to be stretching mainstream chav discourse through what we may refer to, rephrasing Gee’s effective description of Discourse, as a recognizable “chav dance”: The key to Discourses is “recognition.” […] Whatever you have done must be similar enough to other performances to be recognizable. However, if it is different enough from what has gone before, but still recognizable, it can simultaneously change and transform Discourses. […] In the end a Discourse is a “dance” that exists in the abstract as a coordinated pattern of words, deeds, values, beliefs, symbols, tools, objects, times, and places (Gee, 2005[1999]: 18–19).

In this light, ‘chav’ would appear to be currently approaching the status of a floating signifier, particularly in light of recent cross-cultural circulation; this may generate new vocabulary for the maintenance of social boundaries.

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295

Recent popularizations of quantum physics have made most people aware of the principle of relationality,5 teaching that “[…] the information content of anything does not reside in the object itself, but is a relational property of the object in connection with the rest of the Universe” (Vedral, 2018[2010]:181). This book has drawn attention to individual encounters with the digital objects analyzed. The analysis would have benefited from being integrated with other users’ comments to see how individual content was evaluated by immediate recipients, for example. However, even then, the picture would have only been partial since the capacity to impact what actually happens and produces change is dispersed among participants, circumstances, and concomitant events. Regarding individual encounters with the digital objects analyzed, some of the semiotic activities that such objects presuppose (as conditions of their intelligibility), and some of those into which they are recycled in subsequent social life (as consequences of their intelligibility), have been considered. However, despite being involved in elaborate processes of mediatized communication, such digital objects are only communicative chain segments “of larger processes of non-mediatized semiosis, which precede and follow them” (Agha, 2011: 165). Attention to mediatized moments alone does not convey a complete picture of the phenomenon, which implies “inter-linkages among semiotic encounters of diverse kinds, some of which may involve mediatized objects, others may recycle mediatized images in other activities, others do neither, and others, which, while they do neither, may later be recycled in mediatized depictions from which other, altogether distinct and far more varied social processes ensue” (Agha, 2011: 165). However, this certainly does not make each individual’s responsibility in the overall effects of social activity in any way less crucial: There are no singular causes. And there are no individual agents of change. Responsibility is not ours alone. Nevertheless, our responsibility is greater  In the early twentieth century, structuralism as a theory of culture and methodology introduced, in many areas of study, the idea that elements of human culture must be understood in virtue of their relationship to the broader system in which they are immersed. In linguistics, for example, Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) presented language as a system of signs and meaning as relational, not to be understood in isolation. 5

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than it would be if it were ours alone. Responsibility entails ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of the self and others, here and there, now and then. If, as Levinas suggests, “proximity, difference which is non-­ indifference, is responsibility,” “then entanglements bring us face to face with the fact that what seems far off in space and time may be as close or closer than the pulse of here and now that appears to beat from a center that lies beneath the skin.” (Barad, 2007: 394, quoting Levinas, 1981: 139)6

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Index1

A

B

Abduction, 164, 173, 174, 240, 273, 287, 294 About a girl, 265 Acts of ventriloquation, 163, 164, 176 Aestheticization of everyday life, 195 Aesthetic/prosthetic (AP) self, 293 Aesthetics of disgust, 7, 8, 186 See also Middle-class gaze Affective authenticity, 185, 191 Amara, Pavan, 265, 266 Appalachian hillbilly, 134 See also Outersuburban bogan; White trash Arnold, Andrea, 106 Asbo teen, 45, 107n27, 291 Aspin, Sophie, 261 Attitudinal stance marking, 209

“Bad bitch” culture, 263 the bad bitch persona, 262 Bakunin, 4 Banlieue riots, 131, 132 Bauer, Otto, 4 Beckham, David, 100–104, 115, 242, 267 Bedroom culture, 161, 193, 201, 212, 244 Beef, 249 Benefits Street, 53 Big Fat American Gypsy Weddings, 126n39 Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, 126n39 Blair, Tony, 53, 119, 120, 120n36, 257 Bok, Lee, 182 Little Books, 182 Boundary maintenance, 293

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Di Martino, Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96818-2

359

360 Index

Boundary plundering, 293 Bourdieu, Pierre, 53, 55, 75, 103n24, 114n32, 157, 256 Bow, Clara, 33n7 Brodkin, Simon, 182 Lee Nelson, 182 Burberry, 31, 31n3, 50, 103, 105, 108, 114, 115, 120, 120n36, 166, 182, 242, 269 Burchill, Julie, 181 C

Cameron, David, 53, 97, 127, 129 Catherine Tate Show, 80, 109, 119 Lauren Cooper, 119 Celebrity chav, 99–103, 133, 242 Celebrity culture, 181 Changing youth femininities Roberts, Abby, 247 chav make-up, 247 craftivism (see Grounded aesthetics) doing gender, 271 ethically and environmentally responsible, 270 fake fur, 268, 269 female empowerment, 271 grime aesthetic, 247 “imaginative pop culture transformations,” 247 provocative posturing, 271 puffa jacket, 264 recessionista, 267 subcultural entrepreneur, 270 Changing youth masculinities the street youth, 253 resilient, 268

the ‘roadman’ or ‘new age’ chav, 253, 268 Characterological figure, 20n18, 69, 81, 91, 95, 102, 105, 254 Charver, 33, 33n6, 34, 93, 95, 133, 187n26 Tyneside riots, 34 Waynetta Slob, 33 Chatham Girls, 33n6, 37n16, 72, 73 Chav aesthetic, 212 chav commodified resources, 215 confident style, 212, 218 makeup, 212 object of disidentification from the ‘middle-class,’ 213 practicality and posturing, 268 Chav ban, 129 2004 bans, 133 2005 bans, 133 code of conduct, 128 customer ban, 129 dress code, 128 Chav-bashing, 5, 51, 54, 55, 125, 197 See also Chav-chastising Chav bop, 121, 122, 124, 125 chav-themed fancy dress, 124 ‘townie’ rave, 124 Chav-branding, 87, 88 council house facelift, 82 pramface, 87 prison whites, 82 Chav characterological figures, 242 celebrity chavs, 96 Goody, Jade, 96 McLoughlin, Coleen, 103 Rooney, Wayne, 103

 Index 

Lauren Cooper, 109 Vicky Pollard, 80, 242 ‘Chav’/‘charver’ connections, 33 Chav-chastising, 77, 83, 112, 113, 126 See also Chav-bashing Chav check, 12–14, 31n3, 48n27, 51, 155, 156, 175, 177, 179–181, 183, 185, 190, 192, 193, 196–201, 203, 204, 207, 209, 210, 213, 217–219, 218n37, 239, 240, 243, 244, 246, 247, 267, 274, 291, 292, 294 ‘Chav’ commodification, 111 Chav chic, 121 chav make-up tutorials, 249 chav make-up vogue, 247 chav nights, 113n29 please make me a chav, 125 ‘Chav’ competing indexicalities, 267 About a Girl, 265 Beckham, David, 100 Burchill, Julie, 181 Chav chic, 121 Cheryl, 102 Fish Tank, 105 Geordie Shore, 191 HP, 114 Misfits, 106 please make me a chav, 125 puffa jacket, 267 St Trinian’s, 105 Wasp, 106 “Chav dance,” 294 The Chavette, 46, 46n26, 215, 265 “disrespectable” femininity, 210 excessive fecundity, 215

361

hypersexuality, 215n36 slut-shaming, 210 (see also The “ideal woman”; Non-­ mainstream femininities) the “slutty bitch” trope, 210 the bitch stereotype, 194 the slut stereotype, 194 ‘Chav’ etymology, 32 Chav Fighting, 290 ‘Chav’ folk etymologies, 40 Cheap and Vulgar, 41 Cheltenham average, 41 Council House And Vermin, 40, 41 Council House And Violent, 40, 241 Council House Associated Vermin, 41 Council House Average Vermin, 40 Chav hate, 77, 88, 181 Chavinism, 113n29, 182, 182n21 chav night, 113n29, 182 ‘Chav’ Instagram filter, 274 Chav Luv, 274 ‘Chav’ lexical productivity, 30 affixational productivity, 44 non-affixational productivity, 44 non-humorous wordplay, 44 political posturing, 44, 56, 241 reactive neologizing, 44 wordplay, 47 Chav lifestyle, 115, 117, 126, 189, 244 Chav make-up, 218, 245, 247, 249, 260, 270, 272n31, 293n4 Chav-mania, 215 See also Chav aesthetic

362 Index

Chav masculinities “combustible masculinities,” 34 (see also Metrosexual) traditional hegemonic masculinity, 100 heterosexist, 101 (hyper)masculine, 101 Chav object-sign, 209, 242 bling, 103 bucketfuls of Bacardi breezers, 103 Burberry gear, 103 Chav names, 104 Blane, 114 Chantel, 114 Kayleigh, 114 Tayler, 114 Chavspeak, 209 consonant-free estuary English, 84 fast food, 103 heavily-gelled hair, 84 heavy make-up, 209 hedonistic holidays, 103 hooded tops, 84 hoop earrings, 84 lack of respect for and disengagement with education, 177n20 McMansion, 104 mottled legs, 84 reprehensible parenting, 112 slack-jaws, 84 sportswear, 209 spray-on tan, 103 sullen, pasty faces, 84 unruly and often violent behaviour, 177n20 white trainers, 84

Chav personality type, 186n25 Chav phase, 185, 186n25, 187, 189, 208, 243, 274 affective authenticity, 6 Chav-phobia, 215, 269 Chav pride, 46, 56, 181–184, 241 “Chav riots,” see London riots Chavs, 176–193 the disgusting ‘other,’ 214 excessive bodies, 213 grime, 250 the noise of democracy, 215 scum, 51, 77 tainted white, 243 See also Lumpenproletariat; Underclass Chavscum.co.uk, 43, 70, 77, 83, 104 Chav social type, 275 Chav Solidarity, 5, 54 Chavspeak, 43, 135, 136, 193, 196, 201, 204, 205, 209, 210, 212, 219, 243 attitudinal stance marking, 209 camaraderie, 209 (see also Mock impoliteness) innit, 205, 208 l-vocalization, 205, 206 mock impoliteness, 209 (see also Camaraderie) vowel lowering, 206 Chav-spotting, 43, 49n28, 72n2 Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, 51, 241 Chav stylization, 244, 261 #Chavvy posts, 274, 275 Cheltenham Average, 41n21, 42 Cheryl, 20n18, 102, 133 Church, Charlotte, 103

 Index 

Citizen Sociolinguistics, 22, 92, 93, 177, 186, 187 Class fraction, 55 See also Fractal recursivity Conspicuous consumption, 38, 38n17, 89n18, 101, 103 ‘Flawed’ consumer, 95 Corbyn, Jeremy, 260 Council house facelift, 40, 71, 265 Croydon facelift, 109 Croydon facelift hairdo, 105 Craftivism, 272 Cross-modal iconism, 84 Cultural construct, 72n1, 105, 290 Cultural plundering, 163 D

D’Amelio, Charli, 162, 163 Dark leisure, 255 Davis, Angela, 54 Dean, 132 Diacritics, 72, 73, 83, 91, 96, 100, 101, 117, 242, 254 See also Prosthetic extensions Discipline and rebellion, 194, 212 Diss, 248, 248n4, 249 ‘send,’ 249 beef, 249 (see also Medieval Occitan literature) Dizzee Rascal, 251, 256n16, 259 Doing gender, 271 E

Economies of exchange, 292 Emblem, 69, 72, 73, 91, 102, 117, 126, 189, 195, 211, 242, 244, 288, 289

363

emblematic, 91, 100 Embodied sociocultural linguistics, 12, 17, 20–21, 201, 239 Semiotic assemblage, 20 See also Posthumanist sociolinguistics Emerging youth subcultures creative engagement, 271 cultural knowledge, 271 (see also Spectacular subcultures) Emo, 186, 187, 187n26 Engels, Friedrich, 2 Enregisterment, ix, 18, 20, 85, 85n16, 204, 238, 240, 271 enregistered, 69, 72, 73, 76, 95, 102, 195, 240, 242, 288 Entanglement, 21, 46n26, 175, 175n18, 176, 183–185, 191, 212, 213, 263, 296 entangled relation, 177 Erasure, 121 Essex Girls, 72, 72n1, 80n11 Excessive body, 213 Experimental individualism, 194 ‘Ey,’ 253, 257n20 F

Fabian Society, 51n31, 89 Fairy Jobmother, The, 74 Fairytale of New York, 182 Fake fur, 269, 270 Female empowerment, 272n30 Fish Tank, 106 Floating signifier, 207, 207n31, 242, 294 Folk etymology, 29–42, 241 Form 696, 263

364 Index

Fractal recursivity, 55, 91–126, 119n35, 240 See also Class fraction G

Game of respect, 260 Gang culture, 133, 134 “gangsta” culture, 135 gangster rap culture, 135 hip hop, 135 Garza, Antonio, 158 Gay chavinism, 113 Geordie Shore, 115, 117, 189–192, 244, 274 Geordie Shore participants, 190, 244 See also The ‘Superchav’; TikTokers Goody, Jade, 96–100, 102, 104, 192, 242 Jade fat suit, 97 Goth, 187n26 Gramsci, Antonio, 54, 55 Grant, Richard E., 125 Grime, 196, 245, 247, 247n3, 248n5, 248n6, 249–260, 249n7, 250n9, 250n10, 253n11, 255n13, 255n14, 256n15, 262n23, 262n24, 263, 264, 268, 271, 272, 293n4 A.Dot, 271 Semantics, 271 Corbyn, Jeremy, 257, 258 dark leisure, 255 Dizzee Rascal, 251, 259 Form 696, 254 game of respect, 260

geopolitical, 252 #grime4corbyn, 257, 258 youthquake, 257 grime slang, 253 ey, 253, 257n20 pronominal use of 'man', 253 th-stopping, 253 Jme, 258, 259 Kano, 268, 271 hoodies all summer, 268 “the little man,” 258 Masters of Ceremonies or Microphone Controllers (MCs), 251 May, Theresa, 258 McDonnell, John, 258 solidarity, 256 #Grime4corbyn, 258 Grime slang, 257 Grounded aesthetics, 272, 272n31 Grounding, 171, 177, 239 common ground, 171, 177, 209 Gully, 254, 257, 257n20 ey, 257n20 ‘man,’ 257 (tɪŋ), 257 Gypsies, Romanies and Travellers (GRT), 126n39 H

Harmon, Jalaiah, 162, 163 Heteronormative masculinity, 254 Hip Hop, 250, 252, 257, 262n24, 264, 269, 272, 272n30 Hoodie, 31, 69, 107, 121, 126–133, 126n38, 136, 186, 243, 244, 268

 Index 

hood, 126, 127 hooded young men, 135 hoodie demonization, 132 ‘hug a hoodie,’ 129 Hooligan culture, 129 How to Get Your Dream Job, 74 Humor, 183, 191, 192, 197, 198, 200 Hunter, D., 5, 54, 55 Chav Solidarity, 5 Hypostatization, 40, 43n24

365

176–193, 207, 209, 212, 219, 239, 240, 243, 273 index, 112, 118, 128, 257 indexical, 77n8, 83, 84, 101, 112, 118, 119n35, 127, 127n40, 128, 132, 172, 176, 185, 209, 212, 245, 247 indexing, 83, 85, 118, 127, 163, 170, 204, 209 Indexicality shift, 20, 276 Innit, 193, 203–205 Intensive parenting, 179 Intersectionality, 46n26

I

IAMDDB, 168, 169, 217 Shade, 168, 169 urban jazz, 218 Iconization, 19, 128, 240, 242 iconic, 119n35, 123, 127, 127n40, 132, 240, 289 I, Daniel Blake, 54 The “ideal woman” hegemonic representation of femininity, 247 (see also Non-mainstream femininities) respectable femininity, 210 intensive parenting, 112n28 propriety, 213 Identity set, 20 Ideological move, 101, 272, 273 Ill Manors, 116n33 I, Ludicrous, 50 Chav it Up, 50 Indexical claim, see Ideological move Indexical field, 101, 115, 273, 288 Indexicality, 6, 17, 18, 21, 91–126, 132, 156, 165, 174,

J

Johnson, Boris, 260 Jones, Owen, 34, 35, 51, 79, 80, 88, 89, 134, 241 The Demonization of the Working class, 51, 241 K

Katona, Kerry, 100, 102 Kyle, Jeremy, 50 The Jeremy Kyle Show, 50, 182 L

Lady Sovereign, viii, 181, 248n5 Lammy, David, 135 Lauren Cooper, 119 Lexical priming, 167n10 Linguistic anthropology, 11, 12, 17, 23, 43n24, 87, 239, 240 characterological figure, 78 diacritics, 72

366 Index

Linguistic anthropology (cont.) emblem, 72 enregisterment, 17 erasure, 118 fractal recursivity, 17 iconization, 17 indexicality, 17 mediatization, 16 qualia, 73 rhematization, 118 uptake, 16 Little Britain, 78–82, 91, 109, 242 Little Brexit, 80 Vicky Pollard, 78 London riots, 34, 134, 205, 243 Lumpenproletariat, 2–5 Bakunin, 4 Bauer, Otto, 4 Engels, Friedrich, 4 Marx, Karl, 2 L-vocalization, 205, 206 M

‘Makeover’ paradigm, 109 Man, 257 Marx, Karl, 2–4 Master of ceremony, MC, 260 Matthews, Shannon, 52 May, Theresa, 259 McCann, Madeleine, 52 McLoughlin, Coleen, 103, 105 Mediatization, 16, 17, 20, 22, 43 Medieval Occitan literature, 249 The Monge de Montaudon, 249 Peire d’Alvernha, 249 Metamodernism, 243 Metaxis, 155, 160, 243 Metrosexual, 101, 102

See also Beckham, David Middle-class gaze, 110, 194, 198, 213, 244 self-control ethos, 198 See also Aesthetics of disgust Miliband, Ed, 135 Millie B, 249 Misfits, 107, 108, 110, 111, 176, 185, 244 Mock impoliteness, 208, 209 Moralizing discourse, 76, 213 Mosher, 187n27 M to the B, 248, 249, 260, 261, 263, 264, 269 anti-feminist rhetoric, 263 Aspin, Sophie, 249 ‘chav’ make-up tutorials soundtrack, 249 diss, 248 playing the dozens, 248 female empowerment (see “Bad bitch” culture) Millie B, 249 Poarch, Bella, 249 postfeminist sensibility, 263 (see also Grime; Roberts, Abby) Multicultural London English (MLE), 253, 254 Afro-American patois, 135 Jafaican, 136 Jamaican Creole, 205 Jamaican patois, 135, 205 Murray, Charles, 2 N

Ned, 93, 95, 184, 184n23 Neoliberalism, 75 Netnography, vii, viii

 Index 

New age chav, 245 ‘commodity register,’ 254 See also Roadman Non-mainstream femininities, 211 “performative shamelessness,” 211 ‘laddish’ performativity, 211 O

Object-sign, 83, 84, 112, 156, 170, 172, 200, 201, 207, 240, 243, 244, 246, 293 Observational linguistics, 30, 30n2 On Benefits and Proud, 53 Orthographic metonymy, 206n29 Othering, x, 76, 76n6, 197 Outersuburban bogan bogan, 134n44 (see also Appalachian hillbilly; White trash) P

Percival, Brian, 265 About a girl, 265 puffa jacket, 265 Performatism, 158 Peripheral, 32n5 Personal exchange-value, 293n4 The petit-bourgeois, 256 Plan B, 116n33 Drew, Ben, 116n33 Playing the dozens, 248 Poarch, Bella, 249, 264 The Pogue, 182 Fairytale of New York, 182 MacColl, Kirsty, 182 Political posturing, 44, 56, 241 Portable emblems of identity, 211

367

Positionality, 19n13 position, 83 positional, 115 positioning, 46n26, 72n3, 76, 76n7, 91n19, 109, 112, 119n35, 200, 209, 241, 250, 273 Possessive individualism, 194 Postfeminist sensibility, 263 Posthumanist sociolinguistics, 20 See also Embodied sociocultural linguistics Pound, Stephen, 105 Poverty porn, 53 Pregnancy: My Big Decision, 74 Price, Katie, 100 Jordan, 100, 103 Prince William, 121, 123 Prison whites, 82n14 Prosthetic culture, 194 aestheticization of everyday life, 195 aesthetic/prosthetic (AP) self, 244–245, 293 cultural plundering, 162, 196, 212, 244, 253 experimental individualism, 194, 195, 199, 244 personal exchange-value, 195, 212, 293n4 prosthetic extension, 200, 242, 247 (see also Diacritics) seconded nature, 195 self-extension, 194, 195, 199, 200, 212 Prosthetic extensions, 73, 76, 83, 91, 193–219 See also Diacritics Prosumer, 157

368 Index

Provocative posturing, 271 Puffa jacket, 179, 180, 197, 264, 265, 267, 268, 270, 271 Q

Qualia, 73n5, 128, 212, 288, 289, 291 R

Reactive neologizing, 44 Recessionista, 267 Register, 71, 73, 76–78, 77n8, 81, 85n16, 91, 95, 96, 105, 112, 119, 120, 168, 172, 211, 246, 254 Relationality, 295 Representational economy, 175 Respectable femininity, 210 Rhematization, 118, 119, 123, 127, 288, 289 rheme, 127, 127n41 Road culture, 254 grime, 254 Jamaican Creole, 254 street-wear, 254 Roadman, 238, 245, 253, 254, 268 See also New age chav Roberts, Abby, 247, 260, 264, 268–270, 272, 273 Rooney, Wayne, 102, 103, 105, 114 S

St Trinian’s, 105 Scaling, 172 Scum, 2, 41, 98

Seconded nature, 195 Self-control ethos, 198 Self-deprecating humor, 191, 192 Self-extension, 194, 212 Semantic prosody, 166–168, 166n8 priming, 167, 181 semiotic environment, 167 Semiotic assemblage, 7, 155, 158, 163n4, 172, 176, 201, 217, 240, 243, 244 abduction, 240 transmodal iconicity, 246 transmodal metaphor, 213 Semiotic ideology, 1, 173, 174, 174n17 Shade, 217 Skinner, Mike, 181, 248n5 The Streets, 181 Smith, Adam, 3 Socha, Lauren, 108 Spall, Timothy, 125 Spectacular masculinity, 211n33 Spectacular subcultures, 271 See also Emerging youth subcultures Spendaholics, 74 Splicing, 194, 214 Stance-taking, 19n13, 76, 256n17, 273 stance, 76, 76n7, 91, 109, 209, 240, 257, 257n20, 271 Starkey, David, 134, 135, 205 Storiability, 288 Stormzy, 259 Street wear, 245 Stylistic accessory, 19 Stylistic bricolage, 19

 Index 

Stylization, 19, 21, 91–126, 114n32, 163n4, 164, 172, 195, 201, 204, 205, 210, 212, 243 Stylizations of chavspeak, 80 chav pilots, 136 The Armstrong and Miller Show, 80 Lauren Cooper, 80 The Catherine Tate Show, 80 Vicky Pollard, 80 Little Britain, 80 Subcultural entrepreneur, 270 Subculture, ix–xi, 31n3, 33, 34, 38, 39, 70, 95, 115, 254, 268, 270, 271 Subversion and reproduction, 214, 245 The ‘Superchav,’ 104, 244 Symbolic capital, 102 T

Tainted white, 243 Teen killings, 131, 132 Thelma’s Gypsy Girls, 126n39 Th-stopping, 257 TikTok, vii, ix, 5, 7, 11–17, 15n6, 21, 48n27, 155, 156, 177–180, 186n25, 192–197, 199, 201, 203, 209, 210, 213, 216–218, 218n37, 238–240, 243–245, 247, 249, 263, 264n26, 267–270, 272, 274–276, 291, 292, 294 metamodernism, 155, 158, 159, 159n3

369

anti-utopism, 159 metaxis, 160 TikTokers, 157 “former audience,” 157 “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” 157 (see also Geordie Shore participants; The ‘Superchav’) prosumers, 157, 243 Transmodal iconicity, 246 Transmodal metaphor, 214 Tyneside riots, 34 U

Underage and Pregnant, 74 Underclass, the, 2, 4–6, 34, 37, 38, 71, 77, 95, 98, 105, 134n43, 136, 171, 239, 291 Murray, Charles, 2 Unprejudiced chav portrayals, 105, 241 Arnold, Andrea, 106 Fish Tank, 105 Wasp, 106 Overman, Howard, 107 Misfits, 107 St Trinian’s, 105 Lady Sovereign, 105–106 Uptake, 16, 16n7, 37, 69, 77–79, 81, 82, 87, 90, 91, 105, 112, 118, 123, 125, 132, 133, 166, 175, 176, 179, 192, 194, 203, 214, 217, 242, 246n1, 262, 273, 287, 292, 294

370 Index

Vicky Pollard, 79–81, 79n9, 85, 91, 98, 109, 242 Vowel lowering, 206

‘not-quite-white’ status, 133 (see also Appalachian hillbilly; Outersuburban bogan) ‘off white’ status, 133 Wordplay, 44, 47, 56

W

Y

V

Wag, 126n39 Wasp, 106 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 32, 32n5 Waynetta Slob, 78 West, Kayne, 133 Westbrook, Danniella, 114, 166 White trash, 136, 181 ‘dirty white,’ 133

You Are What you Eat, 74 Young Mums’ Mansion, 74 Youth-crime complex, 111, 186 Youthquake, 257 Z

Zoot-suit, 218 emblem of ethnicity, 218 subcultural gesture, 218