Luis Jimenez

Gender, work and community after de-industrialisation: a psychosocial approach to affect

This book explores the processes of community, regeneration, relationality and affect in a small Welsh town after the closure of its iron and steel works - an industry at the heart of this community.

A psychosocial approach to shame, embarrassment and melancholia amongst unemployed young men and their fathers

This paper uses a psychosocial approach to explore young unemployed men’s resistance to work they describe as ‘embarrassing’ and ‘feminine’, in the context of the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys. In our psychosocial interview‐based study, with young men as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, we found a community riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity, projected on to the young men in such a way as to almost scapegoat them. The experience of the young men was marked by embarrassment and shame. They feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community for not being able to find gender‐appropriate work.

Identity, Life History and Commitment to Welfare

Using detailed extracts from two life histories, this article examines the nature of the personal identifications that often underpin the commitment of welfare workers to their jobs. We explore the paradox that it is those identifications such as class and gender, mediated through individual biography, that fix the ‘self as object’ and that also provide us with the resources for self-transformation. In this respect, the article not only throws light upon the psychical and emotional roots of commitment to the other, but also upon some of the impasses ‘identity theory’ currently finds itself in.

To the Future

In this volume, we have told a story of what happened to the inhabitants of Steeltown after the closure of the steelworks in 2002. In order to do this, we set the closure in the context of the 200 years of iron and steel production that preceded it. In Chapter 2, we explored what life was like for the inhabitants and the impact of the introduction of political economy and the Poor Law Amendment Act. What we focused on is the way in which the production of working people as ‘labour’ made them moveable objects that could be shunted around according to the demands of capitalist production, which, as we saw in that chapter, varied according to national and international demands for iron and steel. Labour was then further controlled by the introduction of political economy, which attempted to discipline labour by focusing on the production of wealth and the drains on wealth produced by the poor. The introduction of the workhouse meant that the poor were in great fear of entering the workhouse, thus making workers and their families accept any conditions in order to have work. It is in this way, that we introduce the idea that far from this being a 200-year period of stability, it was one of great anxiety and chronic instability. The works closed three times, and there were strikes, lay-offs, death, depression, war, disease and poverty.

Intergenerational traumatic transmission of aspects of masculinities through shame and embarrassment among unemployed young men and their fathers

Abstract This paper explores psychosocially the intergenerational transmission of aspects of working-class masculinities through the shaming, embarrassment, and bullying of young unemployed men, when faced with taking up service work they describe as “embarrassing” and “feminine.” The context is the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys, in which the mens resistance to service work is mediated by father–son relationships that dictate what counts as proper manly work. In this study, young men, as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, were interviewed. The interviews reveal a community suffering the effects of intergenerational trauma and riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity. These feelings are projected onto the young men, who feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers, and others in the community because they are unable to find gender-appropriate work. The implications of these findings for understandings of youth male unemployment are considered.

‘Shameful work’: A psychosocial approach to father–son relations, young male unemployment and femininity in an ex-steel community

Using a psychosocial approach, this paper explores young unemployed mens resistance to work they describe as ‘embarrassing’ and ‘feminine’. The context is the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys, in which their resistance is mediated by father–son relationships that dictate what counts as proper manly work. In this study, young men, as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, were interviewed. The interviews reveal a community suffering the effects of intergenerational trauma and riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity. These feelings are projected onto the young men, who feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community because they are unable to find gender-appropriate work. The implications of these findings for understandings of youth male unemployment are considered.

Communal Beingness and Affect

In Chapter 1, we saw that the inhabitants of Steeltown had to cope with chronic insecurity for over two hundred years and then the works closed and everything changed, ushering in more insecurity but without a central employer in changed work conditions, as we explored in Chapter 2. What it is important to convey is that far from witnessing a stable community with full employment and then a wrench and shift to neoliberalism, we are talking about a community that has a long history of chronic insecurity. As Christine says above, nothing is secure – but nothing has been secure for two centuries. In this sense, in many ways then, the closure of the steelworks and neoliberalism present perhaps less of a shift than one might imagine and, rather, intensification of the same – that nothing is secure. So, we are arguing in this chapter that the community developed over that two hundred years ways of coping and supporting each other that provided some sense of security, a sense in particular of continuity of being to counterpoint what was not provided by the economic and work conditions.

What about the Women

In 1984 the journalist Bea Campbell, in her book, Wigan Pier Revisited, returned to the area made famous decades earlier by George Orwell. In revisiting working-class life and communities in the 1980s, she laid bare a history of women in the area that had not been told. She argues on the basis of many conversations with women, recorded in the book, that ‘much of the good old values rested on the weary labours of women whose economic, social, sexual, cultural and political interests (we) re yet to be given any political primacy’ (p. 225). What she uncovered was a male domain in which women were largely excluded from work and industrial politics, which was understood as the men’s preserve, and that men spent little time in the house and did no domestic work. Thus, what provided a central sense of continuity for the communities was the unpaid domestic work of women. Moreover, Campbell accuses men of being heavy handed and dictatorial at home – the only place they could be masters, making the women their virtual servants.

De-Industrialisation, Suffering, Crisis and Catastrophe

When we think of the implications of an approach stressing containment, affect, beingness and rhythm for the Steeltown research, we can think of the rhythms of the works, described in Chapter 1, the arrangement of the houses, the games and the washing, the meetings of women and the help from neighbours. All of these things helped to cement a set of affective and rhythmical relations that are phenomenological in character. It is these relations that, we argue, help us to understand how the ways of relating actually produced a sense of continuity of being, which allowed the townspeople to feel part of one big family, to feel cared for and to go on being – something that could not be provided any other way, because of the constantly shifting position in relation to iron and steel production and consumption. It is not surprising in this context that both moving away and strangers moving in should create anxiety as it is the relations and rhythms of the place itself that create the ties that bind and support, and in moving away these would be lost and they would be threatened by people moving in who did not share the history of mutual support.

Two Hundred Years of Iron and Steel

Steeltown is situated at the head of a long valley in what was formerly South Wales’ major coalfield. Until recently, it was quite geographically isolated, with poor transport links. The first time I saw the town, a small community nestled at the northern end of the steep-sided valley, I was struck by the emptiness, the huge flattened area that had once been the steelworks. The eye wandered over what was a vast space, and it was hard to conjure up an image of a large works with its belching blast furnaces lighting up the town.1 After the closure, ambitious plans were made to build a hospital, housing and other facilities on the site and, although in 2008 a train service connecting Steeltown with the capital was opened, the townspeople remain sceptical.