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Growing up Working Class: Hidden Injuries and the Development of Angry White Men and Women

In Growing up Working Class: Hidden Injuries and the Development of Angry White Men and Women, Thomas J. Gordon, Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, uses autoethnography to explore themes of class injury, education, workingand middle-class cultures, and urban life—growing up, as he did, in New York City on the Brooklyn/Queens border in the 1960s. Coupled with demographic data, the author’s own prior research, and relevant theoretical and empirical studies that explore the contours of the author’s life, the book presents a deeply affective account of his formative years, paired with reflections both from his perspective and from some social media accounts of those who have also lived in his community. The first chapter of the book grounds readers in the geographic, demographic, and experiential elements of the neighborhood using maps, tables, and personal photos in an effort to make vivid the setting for the rest of the book. Chapter Two provides thick description of the author’s childhood experiences and the particular anxieties that social class brought to bear on him, including how these were amplified by his father’s alcoholism and the pressures of masculinity in that time and place. Chapter Three focuses on the author’s education and the tensions around religion and vocation created by his Catholic schooling and the employment pressures and assumptions present in his community for young men at that time. Chapter Four is a reprint of an article that Gorman published in 1998 comparing workingand middle-class parents and their attitudes toward education, followed by a reflection on how his findings align with his own personal experiences. Chapter Five explores relationships: romantic, peer, and sportsdriven, with the book’s theme of insecurities highlighted throughout. Chapter Six explores the connections between these experiences and larger religious, familial, political, and economic trends. Chapter Seven presents a cursory analysis of conversations about the old neighborhood with community members, past and present, on social media. Chapter Eight, the conclusion, highlights the themes in the book and their potential relevance to contemporary political and academic debates. Readers’ reaction to the autoethnographic approach of the book will likely shape their reception thereof. The author is quite candid in not only his detailed stories and reactions around his life experiences, but also the emotional terrain that surrounded them— a reasonable approach given his desire to explore the hidden injuries of class. Many methodologists have parsed ethnographies into two general categories, evocative and analytic. This book seems squarely evocative: ‘‘At the heart of this approach is thick description, a value of aesthetics, evocative and vulnerable stories with little concern about objectivity and researcher neutrality’’ (Le Roux 2017:199). Even so, ‘‘There are numerous definitions of autoethnography and, although they arise from scholars on all points of the continuum of evocative-toanalytic autoethnography, they all refer in some way to a systematic approach using ethnographic strategies, the linking of personal experience to social, cultural, and political issues, and a critique of certain discourses within a cultural context with a vision and hope for change’’ (Stahlke Wall 2016:5). However, as Stahlte Wall also notes, ‘‘If the authors wish to use them to make linkages between the micro and the macro, which is the stated purpose of autoethnography, there is a need for thick description, analysis, and theorizing’’ (2016:6). Gorman’s book is strong in its thick description but weaker in its analysis and theorizing; and it reads at times more as memoir for personal posterity, given his heavy use of reflection and reaction as one would in conversational style, than theory and analysis. I suggest additional caution around the book’s relative insensitivity to gender dynamics, as it emphasizes, at times, the role of testosterone and demonstrates an Reviews 541