Abstract
This paper explores the role of disgust in mediating disabled women's experience of workfare in the Australian state. As global social policy has been restructured along neoliberal lines in Western nations, the notion of ‘workfare’ has been widely promulgated. This paper draws on nine case studies from across Australia to explore how this has resulted in disabled women being coerced to participate in a range of workfare programs that are highly bureaucratised, sanitised and moralised. The findings suggest that with the advent of Australian neoliberal welfare reform, some disabled women are increasingly framed in negative affective terms. A primary emotion that appears to govern disabled women forced to participate in Australian neoliberal workfare programs is disgust. The experience of the participants interviewed for this study suggests that the naming of them in negative emotional terms requires disabled women to perform a respectable unruly corporeality to ensure that they gain and maintain access to a range of services and supports, which are vital to their wellbeing.
Highlights
This paper explores the role of disgust in mediating disabled women's experience of workfare in the Australian state
With the increasingly authoritarian structures ofcitizen‘ compliance embedded in neoliberal workfare regimes [72], our analysis suggests that these dominating political discourses of disgust have permeated boundaries down to the front-line level of the service environment as service workers are required to implement, monitor and control the shifting boundary of the deserving and the undeserving of state support with the intensification of Australian neoliberal workfare
The disabled women participants of this study reveal the ways in which disgust is not just a means to define a set ofclass relations‘ but, in particular, becomes a unique governing technology to control and monitor the behaviour of disabled women forced into Australian neoliberal workfare programming
Summary
Like many Western liberal democracies, Australia has undertaken extensive welfare restructuring with the rise of neoliberalism as social policy orthodoxy [2]. The working-class female form is reinscribed with new moral meanings, signifying the body as a space of value [50] This process of inscription is always situated against the respectable middle class, as a means of justifying the growing inequality experienced by the working class, the poor and the disadvantaged, such as disabled people under neoliberal regulatory regimes. Through the work of feminists including Haylett, Lawler and Skeggs, it is possible to identify the ways in which the moral attribution of respectability is integral to neoliberal regulatory practices, wherein the respectable woman establishesborders of the self‘ [63] to distance herself from the disgusting poor, disabled and disadvantaged woman. The disabled women participants of this study reveal the ways in which disgust is not just a means to define a set ofclass relations‘ but, in particular, becomes a unique governing technology to control and monitor the behaviour of disabled women forced into Australian neoliberal workfare programming
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