ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the reproduction of the ‘deserving/undeserving’ binary in two different media texts, Benefits Street (2014) and I, Daniel Blake (2016), using (and developing) a methodology of ‘narrative economies’ to examine the role that sexualisation plays in these narratives of deservingness. While many others have examined narratives that demonise and stigmatise welfare claimants across a range of media sites – frequently conceptualised as ‘poverty porn’ – my interest in this chapter is to delve deeper into their circulations, to explore the commonalities and repetitions that occur across two very different texts due to their production and reception within the same narrative economies. Although not necessarily intentionally, many similar sexualised and racialised narrative tropes are nonetheless present in both texts – at times to the extent that the legibility (as well as perhaps the legitimacy) of their representations of welfare claimants depends on these processes of sexualisation and racialisation. I thus argue that a logic of sexual and racial subjectivation is central to the discursive and representative processes that position certain subjects as less, and others as more, deserving. The chapter then questions the efficacy of political imaginaries that (even unwittingly) reproduce these sexualised and racialised notions of deservingness – or consequently position certain subjects as more legible or legitimate political subjects. Instead, I argue that a political imaginary inclusive of sexual and racial ‘outsiders’ is needed to challenge the ‘deserving’/‘undeserving’ binary, and the logic of sexual and racial subjectivation embedded in it.
