Gendering “The Hidden Injuries of Class”: In-Work Poverty, Precarity, and Working Women Using Food Banks in Britain

Abstract

This paper presents the lived experience of white working-class women in the UK experiencing in-work poverty and dependent on food banks to survive. Although the precarious labor market emerges as a significant driver in the women's need for food charity, in-depth investigations into the lives that precarity produces and reinforces remain scarce. Contributing to this gap, our paper uses an ethnographic qualitative approach drawing on feminist research methods to identify women's experiences of in-work poverty and being in precarious work. Across 2 food banks, 10 women and 6 volunteers were interviewed, complemented by 24 months of comprehensive field notes where the lead author was a regular volunteer with the charities. The paper revisits “The Hidden Injuries of Class” from Sennett and Cobb's (1972) classic study to use as a theoretical lens to draw out the internalized impacts that the participants experienced. We complement the theoretical framing with an intersectional sensitivity, finding that both gender and class were prevailing identities that influenced the women's lived experiences of the explored themes. The combination of these frameworks helped us to discover how the women face a complex internalized struggle in accessing food banks whilst being employed, heavily characterized by classed and gendered constraints associated with precarious work and other external structural disadvantages. The women experienced guilt, shame, the suppression of emotion, and a struggle for self-validation. Interactions at the food bank were additionally found to be intersubjectively negotiated between the women and the present volunteers. The intersection of both classed and gendered identities exposes these women to ever greater inequalities both within and beyond the workplace.