This article explores how a psychosocial approach to class can shed light on the ways in which neoliberal governmentality works through moral judgements and how different emotions within a ‘regime of judgements’ are rooted in class relations.First, I look at sociological arguments about health in terms of the risk logic of healthism and theories about the neoliberal imperative of moral value display in order to build a theoretical framework on a key feature of neoliberalism: the field of moral judgements. Second, I look at psychosocially oriented class theories, which specify morality and respectability as key features of class.I then illustrate the theoretical points through two empirical cases consisting of two very different mothers, involved in their six-year-old children’s start in the final preschool class. Two theoretical concepts unfold in dialogue with the cases and the psychosocial approach: habitus’ emotional implications and class consciousness understood as a sense of being judged. I show how, for the privileged middle-class mother, judging is associated with a feeling of entitlement and moral superiority, while the less privileged mother seems to feel a judgemental gaze, and is thus uncomfortable and nervous in relation to moral judgements of respectability.The article concludes that the psychosocial potential lies in exploring both how class morals currently shape subjectivity and how the emotional implications of this are drivers of the ways in which neoliberal governmentality relies on moral judgements related to healthism, risk and responsibilisation.

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Class, Mothering and the Values of Food.The data analysed in this empirical paper stems from ethnographic fieldwork among new school parents at three Danish primary schools. I draw on empirically grounded theories on the cultural and subjective dimensions of class, inspired by the 'English School' of poststructuralist informed, feminist scholars, to explore how class matters. Using the values ascribed to food at social arrangements as a lens, I explore different ways of doing class and mothering: through the exchange values of the food, through its use value and through its healthiness. I conclude by arguing that food studies hold a huge potential for the development of empirically grounded theories on class in Scandinavian society, where class hitherto has been ascribed as a thing of the past.

The purpose of this article is to explore how parents of children with higher weights are represented in policy documents constituted by health authorities in the Danish welfare state. It focuses on how discourses of moral judgements might play a role in child rearing, by framing child obesity as a parental problem in health professionals' practical guidelines. The article is based on a discursive analysis of cases from three guidelines published by two respected Danish health bodies. The cases describe how health professionals should perceive families with obesity when providing interventions. Using sociocultural class theories, we find that the cases in the guidelines display a middle‐class hegemony, which implies a preoccupation with moral judgements. Combining this with a post‐structuralist concept of discursive subject positions and representations, we reveal how mothers of obese children are subject to these judgements, either as passive and irresponsible lower‐class citizens or as morally worthwhile and responsible middle‐class citizens because of shame and fear of being judged. We conclude that the ways obesity is discursively constructed by the Danish health authorities is concerning because they build on outdated and stigmatising views on obesity. The moral implications of this might increase inequity in access to health by distributing stigma and thereby legitimating welfare retrenchment with reference to economic necessities and irresponsibility among the less privileged groups.