Doing the Right Thing: Welfare Reform Narratives and the Crafting of Consent

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the narrative of a crisis of ‘welfare dependency’ and the need for radical welfare reform. It looks at how consent for this centrepiece of Coalition policy is elicited through the repeated appeal to and construction of an ideal reader who ‘does the right thing’ by forsaking any sense of entitlement to social support and who, instead, embraces neo-liberal austerity’s appeal to autonomy from the state. This narrative politics of address works to produce a vision of the citizen-subject and of that subject’s entitlements, which is multiply marked by gender. The narrative relies most obviously on a targeting of the non-normative family as burden on the state, and on a championing of traditional marriage as the bedrock of society. But there is also a less obvious gendering of the narrative in the ways in which the crisis of welfare dependency is cast as resulting from the excess that the reproductive itself represents, and from the mobilizing of the gendered binaries of independence vs. interdependence, productive labour vs. reproductive care.