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scintillyyy · 5 months

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actually there is another super interesting way in which you can tell dixon is trying to narratively reward steph for her perserverence (aside from writing her to fit his sexist worldview and rewarding her for that) & almost the... "pick oneself up by their bootstraps and succeed no matter your circumstances and what barriers there may be" narrative he kind of has for her and that is with the evolving nature of her social class through her appearances while he writes her imo (the ultimate bootstraps story that conservatives love) (which also contributes to the vast difference of interpretations of steph's economic status)

so honestly, in her first appearance in detective comics #647-649 she is very much coded as coming from a background of lower class/working poor/welfare stereotypes with a criminal father and an addict mother.

their house is visibly run down & not taken care of. crystal is emaciated and wears a robe all day/doesn't bother to get dressed, doctor shops for pills, and is whiny about how she'll get sicker without the prescription pills she's addicted to (you know nothing about crystal's initial aesthetics screams welfare queen imagery to me, tbh. they certainly don't seem to be implied to be "scamming the system just to live it up on steaks and lobster" and dixon would be way more overt about welfare fraud. i would call this more "white trash poor person" imagery as i imagine he sees it.).

interestingly though is the framing of steph by dixon as incredibly positive in comparison to her surroundings. in a way she's conceived as someone who is fighting against the poor circumstances that she was born into--she's going to be spoiler and rise above her criminal father and compared to her mother who can't be bothered to get dressed because she's always high, steph's going to dress nicely. those jeans she's wearing? that back pattern pocket is pretty iconically calvin klein. those were like. status symbol jeans of the 90s. now i'm not here to argue about affordability indicating she's way richer than she actually is here, because this was the 90s and steph very much could have afforded nice clothes and a vespa for herself on her summer/part-time job (in fact the clothes she wears on her vespa are pretty implied to be some sort of part-time job uniform), but it's a very interesting contrast that dixon draws, especially considering his biases. like you can tell he thinks that steph is in no way responsible for her circumstances (it's not her fault that her dad is a criminal and her mom is an addict) & and that being born into her circumstances don't mean she's doomed to end up like them--as long as she works hard and does the right thing, she'll be rewarded. in this case, she'll present herself as higher class/act classier than her unfortunate surroundings (via her external presentation of herself--she'll work hard and get the things she deserves for her hard work and effort) & resoundingly reject following her criminal father's footsteps by becoming the spoiler in order to cement herself as Not Like That. like he went out of his way to make her circumstances be more stereotypically poor and then show her as being above all that. she's the noble poor to her unfortunate white trash circumstances. (which is in line with dixon's classism and conservative viewpoint that it's okay to be poor, as long as you're white and don't act like those people do and hate your circumstances/are motivated to rise above them).

and this thread of how crystal is/stephanie's circumstances continues through crysal's next two appearances in robin #3 and showcase '95 #5 (though this was was written by keri kowalski, not dixon). she's still presented with very stereotypical aesthetics: she's never dressed, at this point, it's not implied she works...

and again, you can tell that dixon likes steph despite the fact that he wrote her as poor in her initial appearances because he often writes her as though he considers her above her circumstances (because those aren't her fault and she's working hard to not be like that).

the interesting thing is how this evolves once crystal kicks her addiction. which. frankly, i don't believe we ever see exactly when this happens? she's still an addict in showcase '95, but by her next appearance in robin #43 in 1997, she seems to. certainly be different than she was portrayed in her few initial appearances and appears to probably be sober at this point.

she's well put together and clearly employed, a far cry from the initial imagery dixon initially used for her. now it doesn't say she's a nurse here, just that she works at the hospital, but the white shoes and dress are an imagery giveaway. and now making steph's mom a nurse is actually kind of a soft retcon of her previously implied situation and a pretty interesting one at that because nursing--nursing and teaching occupations back in the 80s and 90s (and even today for nursing) iirc were considered good jobs to the middle class, on account of them being professional and steady jobs that required a degree of some sort that couldn't be automated or sent overseas (and there's a shortage, they need nurses!), like other jobs that were being lost at the time. so by making her mom a nurse, dixon was explicitly cementing their family circumstances as middle class as opposed to implied poor like their very initial appearances (or even what might've been considered "working class" at the time by certain economic theories, given that nursing isn't necessarily considered an "unskilled" job and does require college + it may be considered a pink collar job but in general there's good job security so it's such a gray area) (forgive my use of quotations here, i don't personally believe that jobs are unskilled and that the working class is a nebulous term that is illdefined and covers many different jobs with vastly different potential salary opportunities. a union working class electrician could very well be upper middle class based on salary, low cost of living, and lack of debt compared to someone who works at minimum wage, lives in a HCOL area, and has 75k in college loans but both are considered working class because they provide labor for wages) (i'm thinking of a 90s working class that was viewed between the middle class and the poor that consisted of a lot of what people considered blue collar or routizined work, but again, that means almost nothing in terms of salary potential and economic opportunity. plumber and warehouse worker are both considered blue collar, but their economic circumstances can vastly differ, but i digress-)

which is actually a pretty interesting evolution to her initial implied socioeconomic circumstances. because if her mom is a nurse & has a middle class job, then their economic issues previously weren't necessarily just that they were poor. it's that they were middle class fallen on hard times. which also coincides with the shift in the 90s where people were starting to be frightened of the middle class getting ravaged by the opioid/drug crisis. so now crystal isn't a stereotypical poor white trash addict, she's a middle-class worker who fell on hard times. and if they were struggling with finances, it wasn't that they were poor, it was more to do with struggling on account of crystal's addictions and having to deal with steph's dad/pay for him/he used their money and house for his villainy. and you end up because of this retcon having this issue where yea, she was initially presented as poor. but for the vast majority of her appearances, when she more consistently started to have a presence, she's written as middle class fallen on hard times. and you get this dissonance in her reading where it's like, yea, at the beginning, she was poor (and in far more stereotypical circumstances), so you can't say she never struggled financially. but also to claim she's just poor is to go against a lot of imagery that indicates more of a lower middle class (middle class, but struggling/tighter finances/no significant wiggle room), such as having a mom who's a nurse, having a home computer, etc. and in this case i really don't think this was just a case of dixon not knowing how to write a poor person (though that's definitely somewhat involved, this is dixon after all), because the choice of profession for her mother and giving her access to a home computer in the 90s and the overall improvement of her perceived home environment as the series progressed do seem like a deliberate choice on dixon's part. he probably would have known that nursing was considered a "good, steady" job to have.

anyways, i don't necessarily think this retcon is. necessarily worst thing in the world. it's much less stereotypical than poor/bad people are in poor/bad situations because of their choices and it acknowledges that people in all socioeconomic tiers can struggle with issues like crime and addiction.

alright, continuing on. there's an interesting thread in the steph pregnancy arc that has crystal ruminate on how steph ended up that way because crystal was a bad influence for marrying arthur and the pills. but because chuck has decided that the browns are more lower middle class than straight lower class there's a bit of a redemption/reimagining of his initial poor view of crystal once she gets sober and a marked improvement in the appearance of their socioecomonic status. take robin #58 for example.

crystal gets to support and affirm steph, be present (unlike her initial appearances). and in robin #84 after she's aware of steph's going out as spoiler after having recently found the spoiler costume (and trying to put her down about it--compared to when steph was doing spoiler stuff in the kitchen and her mom didn't even notice because she was high) and the visual design of the inside of their their house has definitely improved from run down to standard middle class, fairly nice looking.

which again feels fairly deliberate to me. because it doesn't just seem like dixon not understanding what it means to be poor, there's a deliberate moving of steph's socioeconomic status up more towards middle class once her mom gets sober which i feel like aligns nicely with chuck's viewpoint that if you're poor, you're poor because of bad choices and once you make good choices you can settle back into relative comfort.

and notably he gives even bigger reward to crystal for kicking her habit and make better choices and renouncing her husband's criminal ways (when she found out steph was spoiler and turned him in she was like "hah, serves him right"--compare this to when she was implied to be visiting him in steph's first appearance and she was being presented poorly): she, like steph, will now get sympathy for being put in a situation out of her control and the hard times that have fallen upon them. in robin #93 and #94 arthur comes home and parks himself there and nobody likes it.

and yea, they're shown to be struggling--crystal doesn't have extra money laying around to hire a lawyer to kick our her husband--a long, arduous, expensive process (+in robin #94 she's shown as being fed up with the court process as well). but rather than her being treated bad by narrative for not having money, she's presented quite sympathetically. she doesn't want them there or have anything to do with them. she's a hardworking, middle class woman who maybe fell on hard times because of her past addictions and having a criminal husband, but because she did the right thing and got clean and renounced those ways. she's not being seen as culpable to the situation--she's being seen as a victim of it this time. anyways, dixon eventually resolves the situation by sending dinah over to kick out the villains inhabiting her home, which shows that he thinks that they're (crystal and steph) deserving of being saved from the circumstances that keep them down (because they're hardworking people who are actively trying to get out of their situation and better themselves). and it aligns quite nicely with his conservative view of the world, that people who work hard get rewarded for their hard work and good things happen to them.

like i'm not going to pretend that the browns are rich by any means. they're clearly not. but there's an interesting way in which dixon improves steph's class as a reward for her perserverence. the last mention we get of any potential class by dixon is her conversation with tim in robin #100 where tim is catastrophizing about the loss of his money (which i know is nagl), but it also doesn't exactly imply she's poor and she's not exactly mad at him for being tone-deaf. she's just matter of fact about not understanding the big deal--just that she fights crime on a budget. so it's more her way of telling tim that he doesn't have to worry about the money thing/going down to middle class when it comes to being robin--after all, she's done just fine as spoiler by being smart with her money. which is actually fairly in line with dixon's viewpoint that if you make good decisions with your money, you'll do just fine and can/should afford to do what you want.

his biases and politics are sooo obvious with the browns tbh. all in all, the way he writes the browns (crystal & stephanie) wrt class i get a lot of flavors of that stupid fucking hillbilly elegy book. they're not poor welfare recipients because they're the true, hardworking people who deserve to be middle class. they were down on their luck and made bad decisions and had unfortunate things happen to them (arthur, crystal's addiction), but they overcame that like good hardworking americans (became spoiler, got sober) and as a result their economic situation improves as god intended. anyways, like i said before. it makes it so hard to be like "yea, steph was poor!" without leaning into dixon's stereotypes of poor people (addiction, criminality) and when he does write them as poor/struggling he writes them as the "true poor" "the good poor people who would never depend on aid, they just work hard to reject their circumstances and elevate themselves as they should". but it's also hard to uncomplicatedly say she was middle class, because despite being presented as lower middle class for a lot of her appearances, it's also another part of dixon's classism that has him improving their economic class over time because it's an improvement inexorably linked to his belief that hardworking americans can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps because he shows steph and crystal doing just that.

& i think of how it was initially dixon's idea to maybe make steph robin in a storyline & i can't help but feel that's almost a continuation/conclusion of the bootstraps narrative he has for steph.

idk it's just hard for me to say that dixon looked down on steph for being poor/being lower middle class because her story of self-improvement is so tied to the conservative belief of upward mobility with hard work. it's extremely classist. and yet it's still there. on the paper.

bonus, just to prove he sees them (the browns) as a lower middle class family who wouldn't be struggling so much if the government would just stop taking all their money in taxes:

#listen tim gets to be a dixon mouthpiece a lot to extoll the virtues of the rich #but the browns are also very much written as his way of extolling the 'poor dears plighted by taxes to pay for the poors' lower middle clas #and it's hard to be like well that's unrealistic when that socioeconomic class has gotten convinced of the ideals of conservatism #it's just another one of the unfortunate realities of her creation and the fact that she was dixon's darling #no matter which way you perceive her...classism and conservative ideals of economics are involved

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