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'Chav': The emergence of a new Identity by James K. Walker
Continued...
My starting point for when
the chav identity became a more concentrated form of knowledge, in
contrast to origin, was when Mia Wallace and Clint Spanner created
www.chavscum.co.uk. The website encouraged active participation from
users in nominating 'celebrity chav-scum' (picture 1 and 2) and by
sending in photographs of people and events that they felt were 'chavesque.'
These varied from photographs of houses with excessive Christmas decorations
(picture 3) to teenagers in branded sportswear (picture 4). As the
site became more popular T-Shirts were designed and sold which (picture
5) helped to 'out' the 'chav' in public as well as private space.
What started as a 'joke' on the internet suddenly began to spiral
with an accompanying book 'Chav! A User's Guide to Britains new Ruling
Class' (2004) which allowed the identity to be consumed through a
more conventional and respected medium. As knowledge of the chav spread
it was embraced by niche magazines such as Nuts and Zoo whose style
requires stories to be stripped down into caption and facts with minimal
content, the perfect forum for easily recognisable 'types' such as
the chav. (Adams 2005) As this identity grew in public consciousness
long established magazines such as Max Power began to be named as
a 'chav magazine' through its celebration of modified cars and objectification
of women as material possessions, photographed topless across the
bonnets. Behaviour which previously had gone unchecked suddenly was
deemed instrumental in the emergence of chav culture and was sucked
into the whole mythology, partly as another means through which this
phenomenon could be understood. Television debates, comedy sketches,
radio documentaries continue this identities assimilation into social
consciousness.
What we see is the consumption of this identity through numerous processes.
At present there are chav-dating, chav-car and even online chav jewellery
web sites. If we briefly take the popularity of the 'chav party' in
which girls dress up as 'Ho's' (prostitutes) and men as Chav's ('boy
racers', 'wide boys' etc) we see that rather than being a new phenomenon
it has instead taken residual elements of the 'Vicars and tarts' scene
whose popularity has declined in line with that of Christian religion,
and appropriated its sentiments (sex, controversy) into an emergent
popular cultural form. The retelling of this story in essay form sees
the chav understood in academic language, where its meaning will be
further contested between conflicting ideological backgrounds.
I am claiming that the chav is the product of various knowledge economies
which reify and naturalize cultural space. The function of the media
is to externalise ideas, images, and information for public consumption
which otherwise would be available only privately. (Couldry, 2000:101)
As information technologies becomes more pervasive we see further
diversifications and intersections so that instead of having an identity
with its meaning fixed we have a series of inseparable networks of
meaning under constant negotiation. As forms of media become more
accessible to all, as with internet hosting, there is a greater democraticization
in the production of knowledge. Instead of seeing a chav stereotype
emerge we see a progressive slippage of meaning as the identity is
negotiated and transformed along the cultural circuit (du Gay et al.,
1997) resulting in the production of emergent and |
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