Austerity Talk

Abstract

This chapter investigates how women who are significantly affected by austerity and welfare reform and who are devalued and made abject by the symbolic and institutional violence of the austerity programme — single mothers, women reliant on welfare, migrant women and women with disabilities or health conditions — talk about the austerity agenda. It unpacks the role of the state in reinforcing and producing social divisions, processes of discrimination, stigmatization, prejudice, exclusion and blame in the everyday. The chapter explores the complex, contradictory and nuanced ways in which women who are closer to the stigmatized position of the 'bad citizen' simultaneously reproduce and reinforce moralistic narratives of economic productivity and moral worth and, at the same time, question and talk back to existing discourses through processes of distancing, blame, boundary formation and creation of alternative values.