Neoliberalising Disabled Subjectivities: Gender, Emotion and Spaces of Social (in)Security

In this paper, we undertake a comparative analysis of disabled women in Australia and the UK navigating a range of welfare spaces and places as their disability identity is questioned with the intensification of neoliberal austerity. Despite the time differences of the intensification of neoliberal welfare restructuring within these two nation-states, the interviews reveal that disabled women in both Australia and the UK are made to feel ashamed of their bodies, their economically constrained choices and their identity as a disabled working class woman living on welfare. The paper illustrates the affect effects of shaming as a key public emotion drawn upon by neoliberal nation states to further stigmatise, and in some instances, criminalise, bodies that are already highly marginalised by their identity of being a poor working class disabled woman surviving on welfare.