Draft Not for Circulation
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DRAFT NOT FOR CIRCULATION <Page i – Author biog.> Imogen Tyler is a Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Science. Her first book, Revolting Subjects (2013), was shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. Stigma: the Machinery of Inequality was supported by the Leverhulme Trust through a Philip Leverhulme Prize. 1 <Page ii – also by> By the same author: Revolting Subjects: social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain The Sociology of Stigma (edited with Tom Slater) From Stigma Power to Black Power (a graphic essay produced with the artist Charlotte Bailey) Immigrant protest: politics, aesthetics, and everyday dissent (edited with Katarzyna Marciniak) Protesting citizenship: migrant activisms (edited with Katarzyna Marciniak) 2 <Page iii – title page> Stigma The Machinery of Inequality Imogen Tyler <Zed Books logo> 3 <Page iv – copyright page to follow> An earlier version of Chapter Two was published in the Sociological Review, and an earlier version of Chapter Three was published in Ethnic and Racial Studies. Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved. The author and publisher are grateful to the Elizabeth Roberts Working Class Oral History Archive at the Regional History Centre, Lancaster University for permission to quote from interview data from the archive. 4 <Page v – Dedication> This book is dedicated to the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission whose humanity and practices of social solidarity fill me with hope for the future 5 <Page vi – blank> 6 <pp.vii> Contents List of Illustrations 00 Introduction: Stigma, the Machinery of Inequality 00 1. The Penal Tattoo 00 2. From Stigma Power to Black Power 00 3. The Stigma Machine of the Border 00 4. The Stigma Machine of Austerity 00 5. Shame Lives on the Eyelids 00 6. Conclusion: Rage Against the Stigma Machines 00 Notes 00 Bibliography 00 Acknowledgements 00 Index 00 7 <p.viii> List of Illustrations Figure 1: ‘Ann Bidlestone being ridden through the streets of Newcastle by an officer of the city’ Ralph Gardiner, England’s Grievance Discovered (1655). Figure 2: ‘Escrava Anastácia’: engraving of an enslaved woman by Jacques Arago, whom he describes as wearing a ‘Máscara de flandres’, originally printed in Souvenirs d'un aveugle: voyage autour du monde (Paris: H. Lebrun, 1868). Figure 3: ‘Inking Refugees’: refugees being numbered by Czech border police at Břeclav train station, South Moravia, Czech Republic, 1 September 2015 (copyright Igor Zehl / Associated Press). Figure 4: ‘Kristallnacht Shame’: Jewish women in Linz, Austria are exhibited in public with a cardboard sign stating: 'I have been excluded from the national community (Volksgemeinschaft)', during the anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht, November 1938 (Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images). Figure 5: ‘Post-War Shaming Punishments’: women being paraded in a Paris street in August 1944, barefoot, their heads shaved, and their foreheads and cheeks marked with swastikas (Serge DE SAZO/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images). Figure 6: ‘I Stole from Walmart’: found photograph of a woman undertaking a shaming punishment in the US in 2007. 8 Figure 7: ‘That's how the Englishman colonises’ (So kolonisiert der Engländer): cartoon from a series of four on ‘Colonial Power’ by Thomas Theodor Heine, published in the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus, 3 May 1904. Figure 8: ‘Stigma Machine’, still from an animated Gif made by Tom Morris, 2018 (copyright © Tom Morris and Imogen Tyler). 9 <Epigraph on recto if possible> The mantle of liberalism has been discarded and the most disgusting despotism in all its nakedness is disclosed to the eyes of the whole world.… It is a truth which…teaches us to recognize the emptiness of our patriotism and the abnormity of our state system, and makes us hide our faces in shame. You look at me with a smile and ask: What is gained by that? No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already a revolution of a kind.… Shame is a kind of anger which is turned inward. And if a whole nation really experienced a sense of shame, it would be like a lion, crouching ready to spring Letter from Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, March 1843 10 [CH] Introduction: Stigma, the Machinery of Inequality Stigma, noun. Figurative. A mark of disgrace or infamy; a sign of severe censure or condemnation, regarded as impressed on a person or thing; a ‘brand’. Oxford English Dictionary Every news bulletin seemed to be calling me scrounger, fraud, cheat or scum. I began self- harming, carving the words ‘failure’, ‘freak’ and ‘waste of space’ into my arms, legs and stomach. Stephanie, 2019 March 2019. I am sitting with my friend Stephanie in the corner of a bar in Lancaster, the small city in North West England where I live and work.1 Stephanie is a former school teacher and a single mum whom I have got to know through our work together on the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission, one of 13 such commissions currently running across the UK, which bring together people living in poverty with local decision makers to try to find ways to ameliorate the destitution which has followed in the wake of austerity – a programme of government reforms which have eviscerated the British welfare state since 2010. When I told Stephanie that I was writing a book about stigma, she asked if she could tell me her stigma story, so I could sh are it with others, with you, the readers of this book. She asked to meet in this bar because her wounds are raw and she feels a public setting will allow her to retain some composure, some dignity, 11 while she speaks. So here we are, two middle-aged women drinking coffee in a city centre bar; late afternoon sunlight streams in from the window behind the table where we sit, casting shadows over Stephanie’s face, as she explains how she reached a point where she began carving stigma words into her arms, stomach, thighs with a razor blade. ‘The only way I can describe it,’ she says, ‘is if you watch a washing machine go through its cycle, you have worries and then they calm down, more worries, then they calm down. Then the machine goes into the spin cycle, and you get to that point when it feel like it’s not going to stop, and the only way to get that out is to attack yourself because there is nobody else left. You have to cut that spin cycle. It’s as harsh as pulling the plug. That’s what you are doing, but it only works for a little while…for seconds…then you feel even more shame for having done it.’ The story Stephanie tells me begins over a decade ago, when her mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the same day her husband told her that he was leaving. Stephanie and her daughter, Isla, moved into her mum’s house so she could care for her. After her mum died, Stephanie got a temporary job as a teaching assistant and started to build a better life. Not long afterwards, she had a serious accident at work which left her immobilised and in chronic pain. A cycle of medical interventions and operations began, which finally culminated in a knee replacement. When she was back on her feet, Stephanie secured a new teaching post, but then Isla became seriously ill and she had to take time off work to care for her. Stephanie’s employer lost patience with the periods of parental leave, and she was forced to quit her job. There is a familiar story here, about women’s unpaid labour, the care they provide for elderly relatives and children, and how this care work can make it difficult, sometimes impossible, to sustain waged work. During these years of difficult, if ordinary, life events, Stephanie sold her home at a loss to prevent repossession. Then austerity cuts to school budgets meant that the teaching supply work she had been getting by on dried up. Before long she had sold everything of value she owned. 12 ‘The shame,’ Stephanie says, ‘is building’ throughout these years: ‘Every time the card was declined when I was shopping. I’d be standing there with £6 of shopping but it wouldn’t go through and everybody in the queue is…you know…every little thing that happens piles on more stigma and shame.’ Stephanie was really struggling now to keep a roof over her head. She was increasingly relying on charitable foodbanks to survive. In desperation, she took out a high interest payday loan and a rapid spiral into debt followed. Before long, she says, ‘We started getting letters to evict us.’ The dry mouth each time the phone rings. Her heart beating faster in her chest each time a letter drops on the door mat. The rush of anxiety that accompanies every unexpected knock at the door. Stephanie couldn’t see a way out of her situation, so she sought advice and was told she should qualify for unemployment benefit and housing benefit. She applied for the relief to which she was entitled, during the exact period when the British Government’s austerity programme of welfare reform was beginning. In February 2008, in the midst of the global banking crisis, the Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne gave a speech with the title ‘There is a Dependency Culture’ to the Conservative Party. This was the period leading up to 2010 general election, which would see Osbourne installed as ‘the austerity Chancellor’. Osbourne used this speech as an opportunity to outline the Conservative Party’s economic response to the financial crisis, which centred on plans to implement ‘the most far- reaching programme [of] welfare reform for a generation’.2 There was no evidence for the claims Osbourne made in this speech that an overly generous system of welfare provisions was responsible for the national economic outlook, which he variously described as indebted, stagnant, inflexible, vulnerable and exposed.