Poverty Talk: How People Experiencing Poverty Deny Their Poverty and Why They Blame ‘The Poor’

Abstract

Drawing on life history interviews with sixty men and women in north‐east England who were caught up in ‘the low‐pay, no‐pay cycle’, this article describes how people living in poverty talk about poverty – in respect of themselves and others. Paradoxically, interviewees subscribed to a powerful set of ideas that denied poverty and morally condemned ‘the poor’. These findings are theorized in four ways: first, informants deployed close points of comparison that diminished a sense of relative poverty and deprivation; second, dissociation from ‘the poor’ reflects long‐running stigma and shame but is given extra force by current forms of ‘scroungerphobia’; third, discourses of the ‘undeserving poor’ articulate with a more general contemporary prejudice against the working class, which fuels the impetus to dissociate from ‘the poor’ (and to disidentify with the working class); and fourth, the hegemonic orthodoxy that blames ‘the poor’ for their poverty can more easily dominate in contexts where more solidaristic forms of working‐class life are in decline.

“Eating isn’t just swallowing food”: Food practices in the context of social class trajectory

“…Lastly, like Shildrick and MacDonald (2013), we found support for the mainstream dictates of healthy eating across our sample, regardless of class of origin, or current financial circumstances. Perhaps signalling the overwhelming dominance of healthy eating discourses aligned with an anti-obesity framework (Beagan et al, 2015), almost everyone distanced themselves from lowbrow pre-packaged foods and fast foods, almost always through the moral discourse of healthy eating.…”

“…Shildrick and MacDonald (2013) call this class disidentification, suggesting that people living in poverty are necessarily "drawn into conjuring up phantom Others; an 'underclass' situated financially, culturally, socially and morally below them" (p. 299). In their study too, nutrition and diet were the focus for moral judgments, depicting the undeserving poor as providing food of poor nutritional quality for their families.…”

“…Working class parents focused far less on molding children's palates, with young people's food preferences seen as their own concern (Backett-Millburn et al, 2010;Wills et al, 2011). In contrast, Shildrick and MacDonald (2013) found people living in (often extreme) poverty in Northeast England discursively positioned themselves as healthy eaters, and other (less deserving) "poor people" as unhealthy eaters. Though the distance between these studies-in time and in geography-is minimal, Shildrick and MacDonald suggest their findings reflect rising prejudice against the working class, with subsequent diminishment of working-class solidarity.…”

“…Those who feel shame in occupying a stigmatized social position (e.g., the working poor/impoverished) must work hard to assert their worth and dignity against those in a similar position, to assert their virtue in comparison with the less-virtuous masses. Thus, in a process of class disidentification, people living in poverty may take pains to distinguish themselves from "the poor" through their ability to manage, to cope, while nameless Others (the poor) are not coping due to moral failure (Shildrick & MacDonald, 2013). Similarly, those who have moved from such a stigmatized position and still feel the sting of shame may do similar moral work by distancing themselves from their pasts (Lawler, 1999).…”

The discordant pleasures of everyday eating: Reflections on the social gradient in obesity under neo-liberalism

“…A key characteristic of neoliberal societies is an increase in shaming discourses (Peacock et al, 2014;Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013), with the obese body associated with ideas of indolence and lack of control. Furthermore, the obese body is usually "classed", with poor and working class bodies embodying much that is problematic.…”