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Lookup NU author(s): Suzanne Butler
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
This study has aimed to amplify the voices of women who have grown up poor, to legitimise their experiences in the context of a profusion of literature, research, and rhetoric which has endeavoured to speak on their behalf. It was developed as a conceptual framework that situates women as emotional and agentic decision-makers within an overwhelmingly structural and causational body of extant poverty literature, and in opposition to pathologised and blame-laden popular discourse. Through life-history narrative interviews and journalling, I have worked with a small group of women who have childhood histories of poverty, to gain a deep contextual understanding of their experiences. These women have encountered the structural, material, and discursive actualities of poverty; however, the way they have experienced these differ. Therefore, as agentic but marginalised human beings, the nuances of these experiences should be foregrounded, to develop understandings of how their encounters with poverty contribute to, or conflict with, poverty as a wider structural phenomenon beyond the narratives of blame and responsibilisation. Through this study I have developed the concept of what I term Emotionalism, which I propose as a practice - or praxis: the act of emotional decision-making that shapes women’s lives. By understanding the ways in which women are limited by - or leverage - their internal and external resources through emotional decision-making, we can move beyond current understandings of poverty as a ubiquitously constraining force, and understand the ways in which women really negotiate this difficult terrain.
Author(s): Butler S
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: New Sociological Perspectives
Year: 2023
Volume: 3
Issue: 2
Pages: 9-25
Online publication date: 31/12/2023
Acceptance date: 10/12/2023
Date deposited: 13/12/2023
ISSN (electronic): 2753-118X
Publisher: Houghton St Press
URL: https://nsp.lse.ac.uk/articles/141
