on being “fashionably poor”

When I was just beginning to think about grad school, one of my professors warned me that I would be poor throughout. On the other hand, she rhapsodized about it as “fashionable poverty,” or a strain of what Sandra Tsing Loh calls being a part of the “bohemoisie.”

Now that I’m here, I can’t say that being poor is all that fashionable, especially being in LA; but it is far more bearable than one might expect. To refer again to Sandra Tsing Loh, she wrote a fantastic review of Money: a Memoir, which considers our obsession with women’s economic status. It got me thinking. Liz Perle’s “Memoir” concerns women and money. Rather than the well-trodden road of the evils of Walmart or the 50 cents to a dollar argument, Memoir takes a professional/middle class view:

Craving not just the convenience but the metaphorical stability of a double oven, Perle admits to being a member of “the emotional middle class,” to experiencing downward mobility as a kind of “egocide,” to caving in professionally to her own acquiescent “inner stewardess” (who’s too polite to protest a bad job assignment or lobby for a raise). It’s fertile, relatable territory — what woman, feeling blue, hasn’t practiced retail therapy (during PMS, how often have I fondled aromatherapy candles named “Tranquility,” rosemary soaplets startlingly named “Refresh!”)? What XX-chromosomed human hasn’t hoped her dreadlocked spoken-word barista may one day transform into a (still soulful) stockbroker with a bulging portfolio? (For one singletess in Perle’s book, saving money is actually painful — it’s an admission that “no one is coming to take care of her.”)

Then Loh makes a suggestion:

What if, instead of trying to change the still-male-dominated worlds of government and business and contemporary work culture from the top down, we American Women in Financial Jeopardy went the other way? To fill our womanly coffers with the cash we need, what if — in a group strike à la Lysistrata — we all just said no to … buying stuff we don’t need?

She has a thorny indictment of the depths of our consumeristic void:

I can’t name one female self-help book that urges you, now that you’re forty, to simply accept … the extra seven pounds (talk about egocide). If we were all wearing sarongs, no one would know the difference — that’s why we need skinny jeans. When it comes to oppression, jeans are our burka, our religion, our god. We labor for the jeans, we starve for the jeans, we pray to the jeans that they’ll close … The fact that we’re paying $300 is only good news. Female emancipation is always defined in terms of expanding our economic presence. Our personal power is defined by our earning, our cultural power by purchasing, how we vote with our dollars.

Which is to say, conversely, the woman who buys nothing is nothing.

Nothing … nothing … nothing.

I resent it bitterly, and I am in revolt.

I highly recommend the whole review. I got a lot out of it. Now, as a woman who really has very little (about $1,000/month for rent; my stipend pays pretty much just for rent and food), what am I to make of finally being fashionably poor? A member of the bohemoisie?

To tell you the truth I like it a great deal. But I am not a member of the bohemoisie, and I am far from fashionable. I am just…a poor, dumpy (happy) intellectual. No dazzling Sontag am I.

There are definitely intellectuals–definitely quite a few graduate students among them–who ARE a definite part of the bohemoisie. They know how to be stunners, somehow, on our shitty budgets. But even that takes money and effort and attention to consumer culture. I lack that. Not from an initial want of such adeptness, I guess, but just from unfamiliarity with it. And that initial want faded into apathy.

Sweet, sweet apathy. It gets slammed far too often. One can care only so much, you know? And what capacity one has for caring really ought to be devoted to certain things, or people. And being that my particular brand of apathy is enforced by the iron hand of my stipend, it gives me a good vantage point for reflection.

I don’t have a car; I ride the bus ($.25 with student ID!). I use the student gym. I eat out once or twice a week, on the tab of my loving boyfriend. I have bought exactly 2 pieces of clothing since September. I saved the nifty plastic containers from Indian takeout to serve as tupperware. I haven’t bought a single piece of fiction since the summer. I purchase gifts through the year when they’re on sale to save for the holidays. I buy housewares from Ross and Ikea if I’m feeling extravagant.

Speaking of extravagance, I admit to having some major, major expenditures this year. I bought a new computer after my old one crashed, and Word and Endnote to go with it. I also pay for ballet classes. After my 6-yr old (read: ancient) iPod crashed last week, I invested in a new iPod nano. I guess for me, these things don’t seem to be extravagances: I need a computer for day-to-day academic work, and without an iPod I won’t exercise. As for dance, there is a deadline. Once I hit middle/old age, my body will simply not respond as it does now. So it’s now or never, and I will deeply regret it if I don’t, so my choice is clear.

As Loh says, “Truly cheap people are, in their secret hearts, individuals. Iconoclasts. Rebels.” Hear, hear. But I’m no individual/iconoclast/rebel by choice. Such is the state of the unfashionable low-income grad student. Somehow I’ve become the lowest common denominator of all these categories; still, like Loh, I’m pretty content.