ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the theme of social representations of the undeserving poor by looking at three 'mythological' personifications of the category in the public sphere. They are the parasite, the scrounger and the welfare queen. The popularisation of poverty and welfare deservedness as public issues is but one element of a much wider process characteristic of post-modernity – the appropriation and consequent spectacularisation of 'suffering' experiences that are 'used as a commodity' to 'appeal emotionally and morally' to the audience and that have become subject to a 'cultural representation' through which the suffering experience itself is 'remade, thinned out, and distorted'. Factors such as universal suffrage, the emergence of social security schemes that transformed the majority of the population into contributors to the welfare system, mass education, trade unionism, economic and political lobbying and the increasing influence of the media have pushed the issue of the undeserving poor into the limelight.
