This paper seeks to advance understandings of austerity's everyday affects by examining how neoliberal welfare retrenchment is lived, experienced and resisted. Drawing on interviews with young people in housing need, we demonstrate the ways in which day‐to‐day coping with welfare reform can lead to a state of fatigue, a gradual slow wearing‐out that comes with having to endure everyday hardship. Such weariness, we argue, is an integral part of understanding the everyday impacts of austerity. Yet despite the apparent centrality of weariness to issues such as precarity and poverty, there has not yet been sustained discussion into the idea of weariness itself. A common conceptualisation positions weariness as the antithesis of political action, where individuals are slowly worn down until they no longer have the strength or capacity to resist. However, this paper offers a more reparative reading of weariness, one which does not narrowly conceptualise weariness as simply a closing down. Instead we question whether weariness should necessarily always be equated with inaction. The paper focuses on forms of suffering and violence that are felt as a kind of steady on‐going form of endurance, rather than as a sudden eruption. We foreground affective moments that are neither passionate nor intense, but instead listless and still, generating feelings of inertia, flatness, impasse. The paper concludes with some reflections on what we term “the right to be weary,” examining how weariness could be understood as a potential retreat from the relentless drive to move forwards, a form of passive dissent.
In an era of intense "entrepreneurial" city marketing, overt attempts to court LGBT consumers and investors have been made not solely through the promotion of lesbian and gay arts festivals, pride celebrations and "specialised" cultural events, but also through "mainstream" mega-events. This paper explores this with reference to London's 2012 Olympics, an event which welcomed LGBT spectators, volunteers and participants through a series of initiatives proclaiming the Games as distinctively "gay friendly". Considering this in the light of queer critiques-particularly those concerning homonationalismwe argue that this marketing of London as sexually diverse relied on the effacement of certain sexual practices and spaces not easily accommodated within normative, Western models of sexual citizenship, tolerance and equality. In conclusion, it is argued that the Olympics represented a moment when particular ideas of sexual cosmopolitanism were deployed to regulate, order and normalise the variegated sexual landscapes of a world city.
a b s t r a c tThis article explores the ways in which coupledom is promoted through contemporary family policy in the UK. It does this in the context of dominant political discourses suggesting that broken relationships are a major political problem and the cause of almost all that is wrong with British society today. The paper performs an analysis of recent family policies, revealing narratives claiming that stable coupled relationships are the foundation of a strong nation. The reverse of this narrative, therefore, is that to not be in-or even worse, to not even aspire to be in-a coupled relationship is not just a personal failure, but a failure for the nation as a whole. The article therefore argues that the UK government encourages a particular type of intimate relationship, despite an increasing recognition of 'diverse' family forms. Building upon Rich's notion of compulsory heterosexuality, the article concludes that what we are witnessing in current British society is not compulsory heterosexuality, but compulsory coupledom.
In this article I examine representations of sadomasochism in visual culture. Increasingly sadomasochistic imagery is becoming prominent and widespread in popular culture. I will ask which forms of sadomasochism are permitted and which are excluded or marginalized. The changing media regimes of visual representation will be addressed, arguing that cyberspace may provide a public forum for sadomasochists to challenge dominant stereotypical representations. Finally I will examine the impact of the current UK legislation to prosecute the viewers of 'extreme' pornographic material. This legislation reveals that certain intimate images are still denied the right to exist in visual culture.
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