What is it about?
This study shows how women talk about class inequality primarily through the love and care relations in their lives; how inequality impacts on their children, their wider family, friends and significant others in their lives. Their consciousness of class inequality is framed by these affective relations. Yet, they feared that naming the love and care privations in public would not lead to political actions for change but would rather lead to a re-naming and shaming of them as inadequate working class parents or mothers. The article concludes by highlighting the need for a shift in political and sociological theory to generate a legitimate status, discourse and public framing for love and care inequalities.
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Why is it important?
The concept of care consciousness proposed in this article provides a tool for discussing injustice that speaks directly to how people experience and come to know the contradictions of the class system.
Perspectives
The motivations for this are private and political as much as intellectual. Growing up in a family reliant on social welfare meant my life experiences were shaped by class inequality through the meagre resources we had and also the little cultural capital we held. But my life experiences were also shaped by the affective: how households mediate class, not only through cultural and economic relations, but also affective relations, practices, norms and goals. Knowing the class system through affective inequalities shaped my own class journey but also, as I discovered through my research, that of the women who took part in this study. Conversations and reflections on class inequality with working class women presented a private world of love and care, where they felt value and created value, but also where they experienced pain in trying to produce and maintain affective relations with unequal resources.
margaret crean
University College Dublin
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Affective formations of class consciousness: Care consciousness, The Sociological Review, January 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0038026117751341.
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