In this Article “Embodying Deficiency Through ‘Affective Practice’: Shame, Relationality, and the Lived Experience of Social Class and Gender in Higher Education” written in 2016, the author, Vik Loveday, details the feeling of Shame and how it is felt by those who are female and of a different social class than their peers in Higher Education in England. While the male perspective is investigated in the paper when it discusses class, the majority of the participants in the study are female. The Author describes the approach she uses from Bourdieu as ” a dynamic and relational framework for thinking through how multiple forms of advantage are reproduced by some groups at the expense of others, that is, through practices of exclusion.”
Within the study she examines the stories of women and men in higher education and the situations in which due to their class or their class and gender, they have felt ashamed of themselves within the higher education institutions that they have attended. In several cases people took participants accents and background to signify that they were inferior intellectually leading to the participants feeling ashamed in their experience. The author argues that this Shame that is felt by participants in this study is symptomatic of the unequal relations that they experience due to their social class. The main gendered aspect of this research, and the aspect that gender exasperates, was that women tended to fear being discovered as “lower class” at a much higher rate than male participants in Higher Education.