Introduction

Loïc Wacquant focuses on sections of the urban proletariat who are ‘the most marginalised’ in the post-industrial world. He denounces, with Old Testament fury, contemporary neoliberal policies that assign men and women, respectively, to the carceral and assistantial wings of the state. Wacquant considers some very crucial and important issues, and while this chapter offers some criticism, it aims mainly to buttress the insights developed by the approach he takes. Wacquant offers relatively little detail about the pains of the daily lives of the ‘precariat’.

The central concern in this chapter is that he gives scant consideration to evidence of resistance, contradictions or ‘counter-publics’ (Fraser, 1990), arising from the ranks of the dispossessed. As Mayer observes, ‘struggles do not seem to exist’ (2010, p 98). Accordingly, my first aim in this chapter is to develop our understandings of the conditions these ‘urban outcasts’ encounter, and of the responses they make, by analysis of ethnographic data, generated in research with UK teenage mothers. This approach asserts the importance of considering the view ‘from below’, and the development of insights into the perspectives of those ‘caught in the cracks and ditches of the new economic landscape’ (Wacquant, 2009, p xiv). It is drawn from critical sociology and social history work that emphasises the study of ‘distinctive activities of freedom’ (Linebaugh, 2003, p 3) and the development of ‘vernacular publics’ (Sarkar, 1997, p 37) which indicate the continued vitality of what Bahktin has referred to as the ‘second life of the people’ (Bakhtin, 1984).

Wacquant also pays little attention to gender in this recent work (Gelsthorpe, 2010; Mayer, 2010). Accordingly, the second aim of the chapter is to consider data drawn from a study of ‘young welfare mothers’ to enhance our understandings of the significance that dimensions of gender inequality have in assembling and reinforcing the conditions of this ‘precarious fraction of the proletariat’ (Wacquant, 2009, p 310).