What does it mean to partner across class difference? Based on 38 in-depth interviews with people from a range of class and cultural backgrounds, the 2024 book Love Across Class brings to life the role of class in shaping people’s childhoods, as well as the adult lives cross-class couples have built together. In this presentation, Rose and Eve explain the origins of the book, its focus on the lived and intimate effects of class in contemporary Australia, and highlight two key aspects.

First, their research serves as a stimulus to rethinking the relationship between class and migration in Australia today, and to how social mobility is conceptualised. They explore interviewees’ own descriptions of the intergenerational transmission of class capital within their families, and the complexities of its subjective and affective inheritance under new conditions that accompany migration. Second, their research reveals much about the various ways people relate to the idea of class and the consequences of using the word “class” explicitly. Some of the interviewees emphasised the emotional dimensions of class identification, and expressed relief, even catharsis, in narrating their experiences in class terms. Others were uneasy with the notion of class: rather than being a generative or affirming concept, to think in terms of class seemed to legitimate class inequalities. In this talk, Rose and Eve explore this confusion and certain interviewees’ sense that class represents a betrayal of egalitarianism and character.

Bios:
Eve Vincent is an associate professor of anthropology at Macquarie University. She is author of Who Cares? Life on Welfare in Australia (MUP, 2023) and “Against Native Title”: Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia. (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2017).

Rose Butler is a senior lecturer in sociology at Deakin University. Her most recent book is Love Across Class (MUP, 2024) with Eve Vincent, and she’s currently leading a Special Issue on 'Class and Migration: Interrogating Class Across Borders' with Sylvia Ang and Christina Ho for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

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