Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood, University of Washington
A spoof called ‘Occupy Wall Street Divided’ draws ironic attention to class segregation within Occupy in the space of Zucotti park in fall of 2011 (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-november-16-2011/occupy-wall-street-divided). Amidst drum circles and bicycle-powered espresso machines, Daily Show comic Samantha Bee interviews the ‘hobos’ and ‘moochers’ from the ‘downtown’ end of the occupation and then goes ‘uptown’ to mingle with ‘college hipsters’, ‘elites’ and ‘aristocrats’. Even within a space produced by ‘the 99%’, Bee’s interviews delineate how each ‘class’ of protesters frames the contrasts they perceive at the other end of the park. Bee’s comedic treatment of stark class performance is deliberately overdrawn, but the parody poses key questions for poverty research. How do spatial encounters across social difference (even explicitly anti-inequality movements) challenge or reproduce poverty? We explore this question for middle class actors to understand how and where class difference is troubled and reworked (rather than always hardened) through zones of encounter.
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