ABSTRACT
The first substantive chapter of this book utilises policy-as-discourse analysis to examine the sexual meanings and logics, and specifically the stable/troubled family binary, reproduced in British policy texts on (child) poverty published between 2011 and 2018. Within this period, child poverty both significantly increased and became increasingly problematised as a cultural and familial issue – as well as being more recently deprioritised as an issue altogether. These discourses position the ‘troubled’ family as the origin of material poverty and the ‘stable’ family as the means through which poverty can be overcome, on both an individual and national level. The solutions offered in the policy texts focus mostly on labour market activation measures, which generally tend to have the effect of privatising the cost of social reproduction. Such effects have most commonly been analysed through a gendered lens, whereas in this chapter my focus is on sexuality: specifically, I argue that the first half of the stable/troubled family binary positions the heteronormative, reproductive, two-parent family as the ideal – with those who fail to attain this ideal marked as ‘undeserving’. The valuing of certain family forms over others is thus never very far from the explicit language of the policy texts. Finally, I argue that an anti-work and anti-family political imaginary is needed to challenge the stable/troubled family binary, as neither labour market activation measures targeting particular groups (eg, women) nor family-based solutions are well equipped to acknowledge or address the ways in which these markers of (un)deservingness are (re)produced and circulated.
