For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things, Lennard J. Davis labels this genre “poornography”: distorted narratives of poverty written by and for the middle and upper classes. Davis shows how poornography creates harmful and dangerous stereotypes that build barriers to social justice and change. To remedy this, Davis argues, poor people should write realistic depictions of themselves, but because of representational inequality they cannot. Given the obstacles to the poor accessing the means of publication, Davis suggests that the work should, at least for now, be done by “transclass” writers who were once poor and who can accurately represent poverty without relying on stereotypes and clichés. Only then can the lived experience of poverty be more fully realized.
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface. What’s It All About?
- Introduction. Scenes from a Life and from Lives
- Interchapter 1. Why Me?
- Chapter One. How to Read This Book and How the Lives of Poor People Have Been Read, or, Why You?
- Chapter Two. The Problem of Representing the Poor
- Chapter Three. Transclass: Endo- and Exo-writers
- Chapter Four. Biocultural Myths of the Poor Body
- Chapter Five. Female Sex Workers
- Chapter Six. The Encounter, or, the Object Talks Back
- Interchapter 2. They Got It Right Now?
- Conclusion. What Is to Be Done? Endings and Beginnings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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