Telling Our Own Stories: Working-Class Representation in the Arts
Kate Beaton's Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour: A Review by Janet Pollock Millar
July 19, 2025
Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour. Kate Beaton. University of Alberta Press. $14.99, 88 pp., ISBN: 9781772128000
When I used to watch Hollywood movies, I noticed how the characters were usually solidly middle class—or upper-middle class—unless the film was about being poor. The message: being middle class is the norm. Given that the films were Hollywood productions, it’s a good bet that even those few that featured working class or poor characters were made by people not from that demographic. Instead, working-class folks, when they appeared in film at all, were subject to the middle-class gaze.
Cape Breton author Kate Beaton discusses the problem of the middle-class gaze in Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour, the print version of the 2024 Centre for Literatures in Canada Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture, which follows her highly acclaimed graphic novel, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022). In Bodies, Beaton argues that the arts are generally not accessible to working class and poor creators, for a range of reasons, including the lack of a network and not having a financial safety net to fall back on in a field where wages are low or nonexistent. She emphasizes the importance of recognizing class as a vector of intersectionality:
[t]he arts is full of more people who came from wealthier backgrounds than not, people who in turn decide what stories are told, whose voices are heard, and, in essence, who decide […] what our culture is. If class is not a part of the rubric of demographics, of what we expect when we think of intersectionality and representation, then we are missing something critical. We are not looking for distinct voices that make up a large portion of this country. We need to talk about class.
No hypocrite, Beaton also emphasizes that “[t]here is no talking about class without talking about race,” and admits that she and other working-class white folks benefit from their whiteness even within their socioeconomic class.
Beaton argues that if people don’t see themselves represented in their own voices, they will see themselves the way outsiders see them. Her skill as a storyteller gives her message power while preventing it from devolving into a rant. She illustrates the lack of working-class representation in the arts with an analogy in which she compares medieval drawings of elephants by Europeans who had never seen one, and depictions of poor people by those with more money. She concludes, “[i]f there is no authentic representation, then all you will have are medieval drawings of elephants.” Such forays into analogy, metaphor, and story engage us as readers and, as they connect back to her argument, gently propel it forward.
Beaton presents a trope about working-class Atlantic Canadians that has long been employed by outsider/middle class writers: the myth of the Folk, where the working class is depicted as backwards but quaint, living in a bucolic setting. Beaton tells of an encounter she had as a youth with a woman tourist. The woman stopped her car to ask Beaton for directions, which Beaton gave her. At the end of the exchange the woman asked her if she spoke Gaelic, to which she replied that she spoke a little. Beaton describes the woman’s response: “‘Oh my god,’ I recall her saying almost to herself, pulling her head back in the car. ‘I just got here and I already met one of them.’” Beaton reflects, “I felt like something to be seen on a human safari.”
Representation of Atlantic Canadians began to change in the latter half of the twentieth century, when Cape Breton experienced a cultural renaissance. Beaton gives some credit to federal government initiatives, such as the creation of the student loan program and government support for the arts. She talks about how local music came to the national stage, as did writers with working-class backgrounds, such as Alistair MacLeod, Rita Joe, Sheldon Currie, and Lynn Coady. Cape Bretoners’ own stories began to be heard across the country. In our current time, when the idolization of ‘small government’ is intensifying, this is a good reminder of how government’s redistributive power can help level the playing field and widen the range of voices that is heard.
In Bodies, Beaton talks about the experience that led her to write Ducks: like many people in Atlantic Canada, she needed to leave home to find work—in her case, not only to support herself but also to pay off her student loans. Referring to this collective experience, Beaton writes in Bodies, “I knew the terrible choice between staying or leaving for somewhere ‘better’ only to break the heart of someone you love, or your own.”
Beaton also asserts the value of a nuanced depiction of working-class life, including not only the hardships but the connection and joy. She reminds us that “places like Glace Bay, Sydney, or New Waterford were also functioning communities where many people had happy lives. Where they lived with great familiarity and camaraderie, played sports together, made music together, supported one another, laughed a lot, and missed it when it was gone.”
There’s a common conception of art and culture as being highbrow, but Beaton – who grounds her writing career in her background – insists that art in all its forms also belongs to the working class:
I am the beneficiary of a long history of a community that values art. And that is a working-class legacy also. Art for no money, art for each other, art for shared history, for storytelling, for pleasure, art through hard times, art because it has value. In the working class, your body of labour is what it is: If there are not many options, then the job that is available is good and you have to take it. Your body has to take it. But your mind is a different story.
The passage also typifies what I appreciate about Beaton’s writing style: it is lyric and straightforward at the same time.
Readers from working-class backgrounds—and I include myself in this group—will recognize the truth in what Beaton says. Ideally, readers from the middle and upper classes will learn something about the reality of working-class lives. Representation matters: telling our own stories, reflecting the fullness of our lives, creating art in which “poor people from the working class […] get to be no more or less complicated or disappointing than anyone anywhere else.”
Janet Pollock Millar is a writer, editor, and educator living on lək̓ʷəŋən territory in Victoria, British Columbia. She writes fiction, poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and book reviews, and her work has appeared in publications including Herizons, Prairie Fire, The Ex-Puritan, Room, and The Malahat Review. Janet works in the Writing Centre at Camosun College. (janetpollock.ca)