https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517713778 Discourse & Society 2017, Vol. 28(5) 535–558 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0957926517713778 journals.sagepub.com/home/das The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics Crispin Thurlow University of Bern, Switzerland Adam Jaworski The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Abstract The underlying premise of this article is that the social meanings and cultural entanglements of the so-called super-rich or 1% reach far beyond any specific people or place. To be sure, the tightly managed, tailored spaces of super-elites are often less exclusive than first meets the eye, and the markers of super-elite status circulate in quite informal, banal ways. Drawing on a combination of textual and fieldwork data, we map three interlocking semiotic landscapes: the Luxury Travel Fair in London, the Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai and then ‘elite’ signage and ‘luxury’ labelling from around the world. Using this kind of discourse-ethnographic evidence, the point we make is a simple but, we believe, important one: the geographies of eliteness are deliberately permeable just as its rhetorics are strategically slippery. Indeed, the hegemonic power of contemporary class privilege lies precisely – albeit paradoxically – in a constantly maintained appearance of ubiquity, inclusivity and ordinariness. Keywords Class privilege, post-class ideology, elite status, super-elite mobility, discourse ethnography, semiotic landscapes Corresponding author: Crispin Thurlow, Department of English, University of Bern, Länggassstrasse 49, 3012 Bern, Switzerland. Email: crispin.thurlow@ens.unibe.ch 713778DAS 0 0 10.1177/0957926517713778Discourse & SocietyThurlow and Jaworski research-article 2017 Article