ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the intimate disruptions that have emerged as a consequence of the implementation of three different welfare and housing policies and practices of the post-financial crisis era: the bedroom tax; the increasing practice whereby local authorities house their social housing clients outside of the local authority area; and welfare conditionality, benefit sanctions and ‘workfare’ schemes. UK Supreme Court judgments from 2014, 2015 and 2016 related to these policies are used as sources of evidence of the decision-making and implementation processes relevant to each case – and concomitantly, of how state power functions within the intimate or private sphere. I argue that these processes entail significant implicit, naturalised judgements about the value of different kinds of intimate relations, practices and spaces – or, in other words, about the conditions necessary for an intimate life, or what constitutes a liveable life – despite seemingly being not at all concerned with the regulation of sexuality or family life. Importantly, these intimate disruptions are rarely evident in the explicit intentions of the policies; rather, they materialise as a result of the processes of implementation and/or legal judgment. Thus, the chapter also contributes to debates about neoliberal penalisation, suggesting that the punitiveness of these policies and practices emerges from the gaps and distance between national policy aims, on the one hand, and the local resources and abilities available to realise them, on the other. Finally, I argue that the intimate disruptions analysed here constitute a significant reconfiguration of the public/private divide, and investigate whether any space for political action emerges from the gaps and spaces opened up by the diffuse operation of state power that neoliberalisation entails.
