Turner, J. (2017) Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35 (5). pp. 933-950. ISSN 0263-7758
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © SAGE Publications, 2017. This is an author-produced version of a paper accepted for publication in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 07 Mar 2017 15:51 |
Last Modified: | 14 Oct 2017 15:11 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775817700630 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0263775817700630 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:113071 |