“There is nothing new or novel about representations which align those who occupy certain social positions with a particular type of sexual practice or sexuality. [...] The homoeroticization of working-class subjects can be found in historical representations as diverse as the 19th-century political writings of Edward Carpenter on class and same-sex love [...], E.M. Forster’s literary depiction of cross-class desire in Maurice, and the visual imagery employed in Tom of Finland.[...]
Representations of chavs and scallies share a number of common features with most representations of working-class sexuality. Most notably they fix particular sexual attributes to persons and bodies through the notion of excess and vulgarity (Skeggs, 1997, 2004). The working class are often depicted as all body (Stallybrass and White, 1986) – bodies which house sexual/biological drives not entirely amenable to bourgeois codes of civility. In representations of chav masculinity, like in many representations from Victorian society onwards, working-class sexuality is depicted as rampant, immoral and animalistic [...].
[...]
The working class has always been viewed by middle-class observers [...] with a disgusted fascination because they function as repositories for so many middle-class fears. Those ‘hard Essex lads’ which figure so prominently in the representations under discussion here perfectly express the relationship between fear, anxiety, fascination and desire. They are ‘hard’ and therefore they are potentially dangerous; yet they have a fascination precisely because they symbolize all that is ‘other’ to middle-class life.
[...]
The most pernicious aspect of this process is that while the male chav has value in one context, value created by his use as a sexual object, such value is based on a continual assertion of his worthlessness. The chav remains an object – before, during and after his use – of disgust, filth and repudiation.”
Paul Johnson (University of Surrey), “Rude Boys”: The Homosexual Eroticization of Class. Sociology, 2008, 42: 65.
imagem: Franco Citti em "Accattone", de Pasolini