The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics

The underlying premise of this article is that the social meanings and cultural entanglements of the so-called super-rich or 1% reach far beyond any specific people or place. To be sure, the tightly managed, tailored spaces of super-elites are often less exclusive than first meets the eye, and the markers of super-elite status circulate in quite informal, banal ways. Drawing on a combination of textual and fieldwork data, we map three interlocking semiotic landscapes: the Luxury Travel Fair in London, the Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai and then ‘elite’ signage and ‘luxury’ labelling from around the world. Using this kind of discourse-ethnographic evidence, the point we make is a simple but, we believe, important one: the geographies of eliteness are deliberately permeable just as its rhetorics are strategically slippery. Indeed, the hegemonic power of contemporary class privilege lies precisely – albeit paradoxically – in a constantly maintained appearance of ubiquity, inclusivity and ordinariness.