‘Is this a joke?’ Exploring how care experienced people feel their way through inheritance and what their emotions ‘do’

Abstract

Inheritance provokes mixed emotions and feelings for people who engage in this ‘family practice’ (Monk, 2014; 2016). Inheritance can be a way of ‘doing’ and ‘displaying ‘family’ but can also be a way of un/making families (Edwards and Canning, 2023). The aim of this article is to explore how care experienced people ‘feel their way through’ (Ahmed, 2014) inheritance. We do this by triangulating findings from informal empirical research we undertook on social media with an analysis of the broader literature on inheritance contained within blogs, autobiographies and museum exhibitions about care experience. We make two key arguments. The first is that inheritance can be attributed as a source of feeling for care experienced people. We consider how our question on social media immediately sparked negative ‘emotional expressions’ (Bericat 2016), related to feelings of exclusion, loss and anger of inheritance not being of relevance to them. The quote in our article title – ‘Is this a joke?’ – was an expression from a person who responded to our research. Second, we argue that while marginalised and absent within orthodox inheritance practices, care experienced people are ‘feeling subjects’ (Bericat, 2016), who derive new forms and ways of creating and (re)imagining inheritance from the emotions associated with being ‘othered’ by inheritance practices. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2014: 4) question: ‘What do emotions do?’, we show that care experienced people ‘feel their way through’ and ‘do’ different things with the emotions they attribute to inheritance to forge new inheritances.