Feeling Working Class: Affective Class Identification and its Implications for Overcoming Inequality

This article is a provocation, discussing the ways class measurement is complicated in efforts to understand participation and barriers to access for working class people. I explore class as a structure of feeling, emerging as a not-yet-worked through aspect of the theatre experience. I ask what would need to happen in theatre institutions if we took seriously people’s self identification, rather than relying primarily on external measures, and suggest ways that doing so might offer strategies for overcoming inequality.