TASTING CLASS: INVESTIGATING DISCOURSE AND MIDDLE-CLASS SUBJECTIVITIES IN SINGAPORE’S SPECIALTY COFFEE COMMUNITY

Abstract

How can middle-class subjectivity be enacted through a single cup of specialty coffee? This study explores the discursive constructions of class within Singapore’s specialty coffee community through a series of participant interviews and ethnographic observations. Utilising analytical frameworks of indexicality and stance-taking, this study uncovers the seemingly contradictory mix of identities that surface. Specialty coffee discourse allows members to index qualities of connoisseurship and refinement, allowing these connoisseur-artisans to distance themselves from uninformed consumers and those who are unable to afford similar luxuries of taste. At the same time, discourses from social justice are invoked to align members with impoverished coffee farmers, indexing social awareness and authenticity to ameliorate negative social labels that inadvertently arise as a result of their claims on eliteness. From a theoretical standpoint, these simultaneous and contradictory positions illuminate post-structuralist understandings of language and identity, and may serve to complexify theoretical understandings of discourse and the indexical field – from a discrete focus on ‘one scale at a time’ to a more dynamic focus that could include multiple (and as this study will demonstrate), even opposing social scales. Furthermore, this study attempts to illuminate the social implications of specialty coffee talk, demonstrating how such discourses may unknowingly engender relations of inequality across class boundaries by allowing middle-class members to ascribe eliteness to themselves at the expense of others. These findings align with the work done in critical discourse studies to show how subjectivities that are often implicated with power and unequal relations may creep into language and taken for granted as true and innate, reaffirming the need to critically analyse even the most mundane of utterances to uncover its impact on social relations and identity.