Scroungers, Strivers, and Single Mothers: Reproductive Justice and the British Welfare State in Ken Loach’s Social Realism

Abstract

This chapter examines British social realist cinema as a site of critical engagement with domestic welfare policy regimes, analyzing how representations of the intimate lives of vulnerable white working-class families—and single mothers in particular—are used to drive socialist polemics on the failings of the welfare state. This chapter begins by setting out a relationship between reproductive justice theory and the British welfare state. It first discusses the ways in which the founding principles of the post-war settlement (equitable access to housing, healthcare, education, and protections against poverty) represent potentially positive opportunities for the progression of reproductive justice, before examining the gradual dismantling of the welfare state in the late twentieth century and the damaging effects of post-2008 austerity policies on low-income families and single mothers. This chapter then turns to the work of preeminent British social realist filmmaker Ken Loach, focusing on two of his most publicly impactful UK-based works, (Cathy Come Home. 1966. Directed by Ken Loach. The Wednesday Play Series. BBC.) and I, Daniel Blake (2016), to explore their use of white working-class mother figures to corporealize direct critiques of contemporaneous welfare policymaking. The aims of this discussion are firstly to use an RJ framework to examine Loach’s social realist storytelling as a form of emotive critique of the dismantling of humanist resources for safe and dignified parenting, in which vulnerable white maternal bodies are specially mobilized to generate pathos, and secondly to critically evaluate the terms of these mobilizations, questioning the extent to which paternalistic, disempowering, or universalizing approaches are taken toward mothering women.