‘Getting over it?’ Reflections on the melancholia of reclassified identities

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Abstract
Recently I gave a presentation on class, success and subjectivity. One response was that I should ‘Get over it’. This comment informs the following discussion exploring some contradictory views about speaking personally in relation to class experience. There is a continual need to review the feminist mantra of the ‘personal is political’. Does revisiting ‘wounds’ suggest the regressive tendencies of class ‘identity politics’? Or is there something else at stake? How do and how can we speak? To the extent that academic positions also inscribe complex class and gender positions what do we make of these competing injunctions to speak or be silent? Who can grant us authority and approval to speak and what might it mean to leave ‘identity, or a ‘wounded’ identity behind? Can exploring the tensions and difficulties of speaking class revivify an understanding of habitus? This paper opens up these questions using Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia to argue for the im/possibility of ‘getting over’ class.