Poverty talk: how people experiencing poverty deny their poverty and why they blame ‘the poor’

Drawing on life history interviews with sixty men and women in north‐east England who were caught up in ‘the low‐pay, no‐pay cycle’, this article describes how people living in poverty talk about poverty – in respect of themselves and others. Paradoxically, interviewees subscribed to a powerful set of ideas that denied poverty and morally condemned ‘the poor’. These findings are theorized in four ways: first, informants deployed close points of comparison that diminished a sense of relative poverty and deprivation; second, dissociation from ‘the poor’ reflects long‐running stigma and shame but is given extra force by current forms of ‘scroungerphobia’; third, discourses of the ‘undeserving poor’ articulate with a more general contemporary prejudice against the working class, which fuels the impetus to dissociate from ‘the poor’ (and to disidentify with the working class); and fourth, the hegemonic orthodoxy that blames ‘the poor’ for their poverty can more easily dominate in contexts where more solidaristic forms of working‐class life are in decline.     

THE DISABLED BODY,GENEALOGY AND UNDECIDABILITY

The received history of the disabled body is deeply problematized by a genealogy – inspired initially by Foucault – that disrupts the notion of a continuous development of ideas and images, and shifts the focus to competing, fractured and discontinuous discourses culturally embedded in particular historical periods. Following Foucault's explication of the emergence of modernist normativities and the operation of power/knowledge, disability scholarship has charted a break between early religiously-inspired models concerned with a god-given nature, a medical model that pathologizes the disabled body and, more recently, the social model of disability that effects a politicization of the problematic. Yet consistent with a Foucauldian analytic, even the latter resistant discourse gives rise to its own normativities and generates new resistances. Alongside the return of the disabled body to challenge the hegemony of socio-cultural determinations, I offer, then, a further complication. Where previous approaches speak to external discursive power – albeit embedded in the individual consciousness – as the motor of change, I seek to supplement and reconfigure the problematic by engaging with the operation of psychic elements. Within the historically contextualized transformations in the meaning of disability, there is, I argue, another current of interior and less accessible responses, which not only challenge the privileging of periodization in historical thought, but also disorder the alternative Foucauldian approach. Where his analysis is concerned with the multifarious mobilizations of the binary of self and other, a more specifically deconstructive approach seeks to uncover the other as an interior attribute of the embodied self. This essay plays over some historical moments and brings them together with postmodernist and psychoanalytic theory to show how binary differences are constantly undone by the irreducible différance of the disabled body.