The Place of Disgust: Disability, Class and Gender in Spaces of Workfare

Soldatić, Karen; Meekosha, Helen

doi:10.3390/soc2030139

Cited by 30 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Mead's suggestion that disciplining is needed is often depicted as a harsh misrecognition of welfare clients, since they are being withheld from participating on a par with others. It is argued that activation measures, like participants' obligation to do something in return for a welfare benefit, are experienced as 'humiliating and harassing' (Goodin 2002, p. 592), stigmatizing people as having an inferior status by reinforcing notions like 'undeserving poor,' 'welfare queens' or 'welfare fraudsters' (King 1995;Soldatic and Meekosha 2012;Trommel and van de Berg 2012). A common criticism is that the call for activation and more broadly for active citizenship depicts welfare state 'dependency' as 'bad citizenship' (Warburton and Smith 2003), which would deepen stigmatization of welfare clients (Fuller et al 2008).…”

Section: Debates On Social Justice Of Mandatory Volunteeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Obligation to Volunteer as Fair Reciprocity? Welfare Recipients’ Perceptions of Giving Back to Society

2019

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Dutch citizens on welfare have to volunteer at Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in return for their benefits. Through applying the 'worlds of justification' of Boltanski and Thévenot, this article aims to provide a better theoretical and empirical understanding of social justice of policies that obligate welfare clients to participate in CSOs. The analysis of 51 in-depth interviews with Dutch welfare recipients shows that respondents perceive these policies partly but not unilaterally as unfair. If respondents perceive welfare as 'free money' and if they are convinced that civic behavior demands interventions against free riding on welfare resources, 'mandatory volunteering' is considered as fair. Our main contribution is to the theoretical debate on recognition and redistribution by showing empirically how 'othering' plays an important role in determining when mandatory volunteering becomes a matter of redistribution or recognition.

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Section: Debates On Social Justice Of Mandatory Volunteeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Obligation to Volunteer as Fair Reciprocity? Welfare Recipients’ Perceptions of Giving Back to Society

2019

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“…In keeping with the neo-liberal mantra of the coalition government that 'we are all in this together', McIntyre's case was thoroughly depoliticised and individualised. Many of my examples, as with the McIntyre case, relate to the situation of disabled people in the United Kingdom, but I do not want to suggest that the same phenomena are not happening to other groups and in other places (Coulter, 2009;Soldatic and Meekosha, 2012). Moreover…”

Section: Q6mentioning

confidence: 98%

Living On; Not Getting Better

Shildrick¹

2015

Feminist Review

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The contemporary emergence of the concept ‘debility’, which pertains to a broad swathe of humanity whose ordinary lives simply persist without ever getting better, shares a time span with an acute critique of neo-liberal biopolitics. Where capital has historically relied on a population that through its labour necessarily becomes debilitated, the newer model of understanding references the intrinsic profitability of debility itself. The two dimensions overlap and co-exist, but what I shall pursue here are the implications of recognising that, at the most fundamental level, it is in the interests of neo-liberalism to produce and sustain bodies as debilitated and therefore susceptible to a range of market commodities that hold out the promise of therapeutic interventions into the relative failures of physical, cognitive and affective embodiment. In previous work, I have argued strongly for the inherent vulnerability of all bodies, but in considering here a more overtly politicised context, it becomes possible to readdress the questions posed by Jasbir Puar: ‘which bodies are made to pay for “progress”? Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for neoliberalism, and which cannot?’ And at the present moment, writing at a time of imposed austerity, I would add, what, if anything, is lost in the deployment of the term debility instead of disability?

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“…These 'techniques of the self' (Foucault 2001) are underpinned by required self-assessment exercises that result in recipients internalising the status of 'disabled subject' (Shildrick and Price 1996). New techniques of governance also include feelings like disgust or shame (Soldatic and Meekosha 2012). In short, these new disability policy instruments are based on subjectivisation practices (Br€ ockling 2016) typical of current social policies.…”

Section: Theoretical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%