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Paper short abstract:

This paper engages Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism to explore how parents, mainly women, negotiate norms for poorer parents to aspire for their children’s upward mobility and spatial concentrations of enforced child removal in “deprived” neighbourhoods in Britain.

Paper long abstract:

If a naturalisation of motherly love underpins patriarchal allocations of childcare, then what social processes shape the emotional attachments of primary caregivers to their children? Britain in the 2010s saw calls (mainly towards women) for lower-income parents to aspire for their children’s upward social mobility, along with increasing stigma towards poorer working-class women as “bad mothers.” Such women could thus find themselves tasked with single-handedly undoing the potential effects of class inequality on their children’s futures. Since the 1980s there had also been an ongoing punitive shift in child protection social work. Practices of monitoring and, in extreme cases, forcible child removal disproportionately affect neighbourhoods designated as “deprived.” To explore the subjectivities of parents, mainly women, living on one such housing estate [housing project] in southern England, this paper critically engages Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism. Faced with the prospect of forcible child removal, women’s expressed ideas about being a good parent generally became secondary to (or even wholly subdued in favour of) defending against the possibility of coercive intervention. The paper thus argues that optimism can sometimes be defensive rather than aspirational, especially in the face of lawful expropriations, and that these two forms of optimism – aspirational and defensive – may interact and even paradoxically reinforce one another. For a critical understanding of the normative emotions often associated with unpaid labours of social reproduction, the paper highlights the value of considering how coerced dispossessions interact with the psychical attachments that in Berlant’s reading are optimism’s ground.