Transmitting class across generations

The voluminous literature on intergenerational transmission often engages with the transmission of poverty and poor educational attainment. This article reviews and questions the assumptions made within this literature. In particular, the paper seeks to engage with the central importance of the embodied experience of lived history and its transmission through generations. In understanding this, the article uses the work of psychoanalysts Davoine and Gaudilliere, Bracha Ettinger, and Felix Guattari, all of whom deal, in different ways, with affective transmission through bodies, in locations, and in history. In using this work to understand classed transmission, the paper suggests a number of possible routes to understanding from the past and from the embodied present of the current generation. In order to produce a complex account which does not pathologise the experience of the previous generation (usually the mother), this experience needs to be both re-theorised and placed in history.