Class, Care, and Welfare Reform: Reading Meanings, Talking Feelings

Chris Haylett
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Chris Haylett: School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, England

Environment and Planning A, 2003, vol. 35, issue 5, 799-814

Abstract: This paper presents a way of looking at welfare as a realm of affective well-being, which challenges dominant liberal and rationalist views of welfare as unemployment compensation or support on the route back to ‘work’. With reference to welfare-to-work reform in Britain and, the United States, I examine liberal feminist and neoliberal policy discourses on women, work, and welfare. The rationale underlying these discourses is argued to effect an erasure of meaning and feeling from conceptions of care, with serious consequences for the caring choices of poor working-class mothers. The potential of a nonreductive feminist ethics of care, to oppose the work-centric notion of welfare promoted in prevailing approaches to reform, is considered. Ethical thinking is shown to promote an expanded concept of welfare based on caring interrelations and interdependencies, and a way of seeing the emotional geographies of welfare reform. I conclude by arguing the need for labour politics to engage with the emotional geographies of welfare reform.

Date: 2003
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:35:y:2003:i:5:p:799-814

DOI: 10.1068/a35120

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