Jacquelyn Baker interviews Rose Butler and Eve Vincent about their book Love Across Class (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2024).
Congratulation on the publication of your book, Rose and Eve! I found it to be an insightful and thought-provoking read that sparked conversations about class with my partner. This is not just a book about class, but about the way that class interacts with gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. Can you explain to our readers why you decided to conduct this research?
Rose Butler: Thank you, Jacquelyn! It’s wonderful to hear when people find it to be generative beyond academia. Yes, that’s right, we never set out to write a book only about class — it was very important to us that we remained alert to how class in the settler Australia context is always shaped by race and colonialism, migration, gender and sexuality. But we knew from the outset that class was to be our central focus in studying these relationships, and we really wanted to talk to people who were already thinking about class in this way or maybe even talking about it with their partner. This is why our call for participants used the word ‘class’ openly’. We have found in our previous Australia-based research undertaken separately that ideas and feelings about class are so formative in people’s social and personal relationships, as they are in how people think and talk about themselves, but that class itself is rarely spoken of in a direct way.
Eve Vincent: I will add that our focus on class in this project also stemmed from previous research we undertook together in inner Sydney with our colleague Christina Ho on schooling, gentrification and multiculturalism. As part of this study, we interviewed many white, middle-class parents about their views on close proximity to classed and racialised difference through their children’s public school communities. We found that it was relatively easy for these parents to recognise, feel positive, and know what to say about forming connections across ethnic difference in these culturally diverse school communities. However, forming friendships across class difference was not seen as desirable by these same interviewees, and many people struggled to even find the vocabulary to talk about the nature of these differences. This is part of why we thought it was important to design new research with ‘class’ as a much more explicit focus.
In the interest of shedding light on your collaborative project, can you outline your roles as co-researchers and co-authors?
RB: Eve and I have been working together for over a decade now (and have been friends for longer than that), which meant we already had an established and really fruitful way of working together from the outset. Having said that, neither of us had interviewed couples directly about class differences in their relationships before, so we spent a lot of time thinking and talking about how best to do this. In a nutshell, we shared all activities, from project preparation to interviewing, debriefing after interviews, analysing the data and developing a shared writing voice. This process enabled us to keep reflecting on our findings at each stage of the research. But I think it also helped us to remain more critical of our relationship to and interpretation of the data than we might have been able to do if undertaking this research alone.
EV: Yes, as Rose says, our practice involved us collaborating on all stages of the research rather than delegating tasks to one or another. Of course, one of us would volunteer to take the lead on something, but we always talked a lot first before we embarked on a specific task, then swapped, reviewed and revised. We also developed an incredibly productive shared writing practice, which I really enjoyed and will miss. The sense of shared purpose, our respect for each other, our friendship – all of it – meant we were accountable to each other and this kept the words flowing!
For many, class is a bit of a taboo subject. While some of your interviewees were eager to speak about class, others expressed discomfort. Why do you think people have found it difficult to speak about class and do you see this changing any time soon?
RB: I’ll answer this one. We argue in this book that having a vocabulary around class is essential to understand powerful structural and social forces that play a key role in shaping our lives. Some people benefit much more from class inequality and privilege than others, and it’s important that we grapple with these realities. But at the same time, the origins of class as a system of classification were based on very powerful and discriminatory ideas around stigma, shame and prejudice. Two people we interviewed had very valid concerns that class labels carried innate social judgements, and that to look for class difference was to apply a value judgement. For these interviewees, preferring not to talk about class or describe social life in class terms was offered to us as an act of egalitarianism. We know of course that such narratives weigh heavily in national mythology, but also that this mythology has only ever been available to some people. I actually thought we would encounter more reticence to talk about class than we did! Of course, the research called for participants interested in class, but I was still gratefully surprised by how much people had to say and wanted to share. I do think interest in class is growing and we’re seeing increasing efforts to grasp what class is and how it operates in Australia through a variety of perspectives and experiences.
For this project, you interviewed couples. Are there any difficulties or challenges when it comes to interviewing couples?
EV: I can answer this. We conducted individual interviews for this project. We did half of the interviews each: in 15 cases we interviewed members of couples, separately, and in 8 cases we only interview one member of a cross-class couple as their partner had resolved not to take part in the research for various reasons – they were too busy, they were not keen to be involved, they were “shy about class”, to quote one person who reflected on their partner’s decision not to take part. It was important to us to talk one on one with people: because of the pandemic many of these conversations were conducted over the phone. There is actually something very personal about being on the phone to someone, and creating a sense of dialogue, of an exchange between the interviewer and the interviewed, was really important to us. The challenge of course was to make sure this was an ethical exchange, and that it didn’t descend into an opportunity to complain about one’s partner to a sympathetic ear. However, what happened in fact was that even when our interviewees devolved into very painful topics and tensions, they did this in a respectful way, finding ways to protect the relationship and their partner.
Did you come across any insights or opinions that were surprising or challenged your own understandings of class?
EV: I’ll jump in here. I was very struck by the moments in our interviews where certain interviewees were hesitant to talk, explicitly, about “class” or think in terms of class, but not because they stood to gain from obfuscating the question of class. These interviewees were often people who had been severely disadvantaged by class structures, but they didn’t necessarily feel that “class” was an illuminating or helpful lens to understand their personal experience or the situation of their family or the community they were brought up within. To think in terms of class, they seemed to say, was to adopt a language of categorisation or moral judgment that felt uncomfortable and disloyal.
If there was one lesson or takeaway that you would like readers to glean from your book, what would it be?
RB: For me it would be that readers experience a sense of validation or empathy, or come away from the book wanting to better understand more personal and visceral dimensions of class privilege and inequality.
EV: I would like the book to prompt readers to pay more attention to how their intimate selves—their feelings, their expectations of life, as well as their material circumstances—are shaped by class. And I would like them to understand how long-lasting and deep reaching the class world of our childhoods is, even if our lives involve us moving class according to more objective and standard measures of class.
What’s next?
RB: I’m still researching class but in a couple of different ways that I was able to think about more while writing this book with Eve. One is the question of how migration and class intersect, and I’m currently collaborating with Sylvia Ang and Christina Ho on a Special Issue on this theme for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. The other is the rise of trade and housing-generated affluence, and what this means in terms of class and inequality in Australia.
EV: I’m not sure! In 2023, I published an ethnographic and interview-based book about life on welfare, Who Cares? Then this year I published a book about class, also with MUP. I think I am searching for a new project that comes out of the meeting point of these two books, or the thoughts and questions I have left over upon their completion. I’m reflecting on the lessons from those two books – the lessons about method as well as the insights into contemporary Australia that I am left with, and I hope to embark on a new project that will grow out of that reflecting. It’s also hard to think ahead as I am preoccupied with work stress in this current turbulent moment for higher education in Australia. But the meaning of work and experiences of work, in fact, are topics that link my two books, and something I’d like to think more about it.
