Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

Abstract

This article examines how the UK's Troubled Families Programme (TFP) works as a strategy of domestication which produces and delimits certain forms of 'family life'. Drawing upon critical geographies of home and empire, the article explores how the TFP works to manage the troubled family as part of a longer history of regulating unruly households in the name of national health and civilisation. Viewing the TFP as part of the production of heteronormative order, highlights how the policy remobilises and reconfigures older forms of colonial rule which work to demarcate between civility/savagery, the developable/undevelopable. In examining the postcolonial dimension of neoliberal social policy, the article stresses how the TFP relies on racializing and sexualised logics of socio-biological control borrowed from imperial eugenics. Reading the TFP in this way contributes to our understanding of neoliberal rule. That the troubled family can be either domesticated or destroyed (through benefit sanctions and eviction) equally reveals the extent to which domesticity works as a key site for the production of both 'worthy' and 'surplus' life.

Bordering intimacy

“…For example, in Foucault's genealogies of race, 'internal' racial threats (madness, the insane, diseased, deviants) often flatten out what he calls 'external' racial threats -those of foreigners and the colonised (McWhorter 2009;Venn 2009). In Foucault's slightly reductive analysis of race as the 'death function' , any form of abandonment or reduction in the sustenance of life can be equated with racism (see Reid and Dillon 2009;Turner 2017; for a critique see Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2019). So, whilst acknowledging that phenomena such as the anxiety caused by eugenics around vitality and racial health was formative of colonial rule, I want to go further and argue that this does not fully get at the longer historical pattern of racial hierarchies, cultural imaginaries and embodied histories of violence that colonialism enacted and that 'family' is equally wrapped up in.…”

Governing for and through harmonious community: The emergence of moral clinics in China

“…There are a number of similarities between this Chinese context and the concerns about ‘social problems’ associated with the urbanisation of European societies centuries before. The unprecedented (in terms of scale) urbanisation of Chinese society in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries has been the cause of much concern in terms of the lack of social norms and the rising ‘immorality’ of the new Chinese urban underclass (Turner, 2017: 938). On the whole, these concerns are associated with the recently urbanised rural migrants to Chinese cities.…”

“…‘These intensive family intervention projects have become an increasingly prominent mechanism within anti-social behaviour and social policy programmes in the UK’ (Flint, 2012: 345), and also, we argue, in China. These ‘troubled family’ programmes can be described ‘as a strategy of domestication which produces and delimits certain forms of “family life”’ (Turner, 2017: 933).…”

“…largely defined by the middle classes’ or the professional classes in these contexts (Van Ginkel, 2015: 2). In many respects, what these various movements or campaigns have in common is a response by society at large to the necessity of restoring domesticity (Turner, 2017: 934). This is associated with ‘a renewed emphasis on the domestic sphere [of families] as the site for policy interventions’ to tackle unaligned or anti-social behaviour (Parr, 2008: 1258).…”

Internal colonisation: The intimate circulations of empire, race and liberal government

“…In 2013, James Brokenshire MP made such a connection explicit: ‘I am keen to ensure that the government’s work to support troubled families is aligned to our work to support vulnerable individuals at risk of being drawn into terrorist activity’ (Gov.UK, 2013). Here, (armed) social work becomes another site where colonising and racialising tactics of empire are relocated and remobilised while intensifying the existing role of social work as a form of internal colonial management (Turner, 2017).…”