East European Politics and Societies and Cultures Volume 34 Number 2 May 2020 505–528 © 2019 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0888325419837349 journals.sagepub.com/home/eep hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Aspiring, Ambivalent, Assertive: Bulgarian Middle-Class Subjectivities and Boundary Work through Migration Polina Manolova Independent Researcher This article investigates the subjectivities of a group of aspiring middle-class Bulgarians and their boundary work in the context of their migrations to the United Kingdom. Drawing on Lamont’s critique of Bourdieu’s theory on class formation and reproduction, it shows how people from underprivileged social backgrounds can lay claims to middleclassness by strategically drawing on cultural and moral markers of distinction revolving around the notions of “civilization,” “culturedness,” and the “West.” The adoption of such narratives and their enactment in the cultivation of personal attributes, however, fails to guarantee full-fledged middle-class membership for people who lack the necessary economic and social capital. Thus, boundary- building becomes the key mechanism for negotiating ambivalent middle-class sub- jectivities and rejecting objectively assigned positions in the social structure. The article traces the emergence of ideal-type models of middle-class belonging since 1989, their adoption by aspirational middle-class people, and the boundary work and self-differentiation by which they try to reassert their superior status both before dur- ing and after their migrations to the UK. It concludes that the observed everyday processes of group classification through the defining of and distancing from cul- tural, moral, and racial “others” reproduces class antagonisms that preclude a more critical understanding of the discontents of Bulgaria’s capitalist transition. Keywords: postsocialism; migration; “the West”; middle-class subjectivities; bound- ary work Introduction The emergence and proliferation of the so-called “new” middle class in global peripheral localities has given rise to a renewed ethnographic interest in class sub- jectivities. The penetration of the neoliberal variant of capitalist economic logics and relations of production, exchange, and consumption into non-Western societies since the 1980s has been the main impetus behind this dynamic. 1 Clustered around centres of global capital, the new middle classes have been seen as the main beneficiaries of 837349EEP XX X 10.1177/0888325419837349East European Politics and SocietiesManolova / Aspiring, Ambivalent, Assertive research-article 2019