Hopes multiplied amidst decline: Understanding gendered precarity in times of austerity

Abstract

Hope is not singular or fixed; instead hopes take multiple forms that constitute precarity. Drawing on interviews with white women ‘on benefits’ in the North East of England, in a period before Brexit, I explore different kinds of hope that surfaced in relation with neoliberal forces of, and beyond, austerity. (1) Multiplied hopes, hedging bets and holding several possibilities together; (2) Conflicted hopes, pulls towards paradoxical attachments; (3) Suspended hopes, framed by the limits of the now; (4) Negative hopes, invested in promises that despair could be pushed onto others; (5) Hopes for the absence of optimism, a mode of being present in the present, staying with mutual contingency and withdrawing from the cruelty of unknown futures, a strategy increasingly denied to women who were more than ‘left-behind’. By exploring the different forms that hopes take, we can better understand what hopes do. I argue that hopes in decline were not lost, nor orientated towards upward progress, but invested instead in maintaining a position. They were both sustaining and debilitating through situations of loss and uncertainty, and as such constituted a stretched-out present, tensed with decline.

Future-Making in an Uncertain World: The Presence of an Open Future in Danish Young Women’s Lives

“…A central aim has been to investigate how the orientations towards open futures both conflate and conflict with neoliberal pressures involved in performing aspirational normativity for young women. Speaking to a rich body of literature that has studied future-making as attachments to neoliberal promises of the good life (Berlant, 2011;Ravn and Churchill, 2019;Raynor, 2021;Sellar and Zipin, 2019), we have revealed less explored aspects of how neoliberalism is lived by young women, in ways that accentuate but also potentially resist its terms. Our findings confirm previous studies that have documented how future-making for young women under neoliberal conditions takes the form of cruel labours including performance demands and internalisation of the responsibility for 'success' (McRobbie, 2015;Ringrose, 2007).…”

“…This literature addresses not the content of hope but how it takes place and what it does (Anderson, 2006). As Pettit (2021) argues, hope should be studied as a series of practices undertaken in the present to sustain a sense of faith in the future (see also Raynor, 2021). Conceiving of hope as labour enables us to examine the narratives, knowledge, affects and techniques that go into future-making in the face of uncertainty.…”

“…Berlant’s (2011: 24) concept of ‘cruel optimism’ describes a situation wherein the very attachment to such promises diminishes life in the present, yet its loss is difficult to endure, because it ‘provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world’. Taking inspiration from Berlant, scholars have criticised neoliberal promises for assigning responsibility to individuals, who are led to believe that success (or failure) depends solely on talent, willpower and hard work (Ravn and Churchill, 2019; Raynor, 2021; Sellar and Gale, 2011). In highlighting individual heroics in the face of hardship, neoliberal policies and discourses elide structural conditions and disparities, thus shaping future-making into a cruel individual project entailing multiform affective labours performed to sustain such optimistic attachments (Mendick et al, 2015; Raynor, 2021; Thomson and Østergaard, 2020; Zipin et al, 2015).…”

Collective trauma? Isolating and commoning gender-based violence

“…As Raynor (2017) has suggested, austerity itself is like an abusive partner, sapping women's energy to recognise and fight it and disrupting opportunities for collective experience. Yet collective everyday practices of care continue to push back against violence, with varying effects (Raynor 2021).…”

Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms

“…The tension that Berlant confidently defined in the above quote—the opening line of Cruel Optimism (Berlant, 2011)—offers geographers and others a way into the perplexing question of why detachment from harmful lives can be so difficult, if not impossible. In particular, the concept has become a key resource for understanding the configurations of the affective and political economies that compose the impasse that followed the 2008 financial crisis, offering a way of staying with the double‐binds that subjects inhabit as they try and make a life in worlds that are failing and falling apart (e.g., Addie & Fraser, 2019; Anderson & Secor, 2022; Bissell, 2022; Brickell, 2020; Cockayne, 2016; Pettit, 2019; Raynor, 2021).…”