Social reproduction,labour and austerity: Carrying the future

Abstract

For many young adults in the UK, austerity has restricted capacities to access secure housing, employment and social welfare, with sharp implications for reproduction and reproductive futures. Exploring these lived reproductive experiences, this article develops a conceptual framework that brings together social reproduction, emotional labour and relational work in new ways, specifically through the concept of ‘carrying’. Carrying, I argue, beholds a range of embodied, emotional and laborious qualities that are required for contemporary social reproduction. To demonstrate, I draw on research based in the North East of England, as an area that has seen detrimental cuts in the name of austerity and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the UK. Empirical examples come from 12 in-depth Oral History and Future interviews, a technique specifically developed to explore present-day narratives about (not) having any or more children. It is argued that the emotional, embodied and relational labour of carrying is key to understanding the experience of reproduction in this context, particularly regarding (1) carrying possibilities, (2) carrying bodies and (3) carrying instabilities. These forms of labour often go unnoticed and unchecked and yet can shed new light on reproduction. To close, I argue that because the labour of reproduction is carried forward into the life-course, reproductive futures are yet another way in which social inequalities can widen further under austerity.

Introduction

This article explores how, as the lived impacts of austerity and the global economic crisis become chronically compounded across many parts of Europe, the implications for life-courses and reproductive futures become further realised. A growing body of social science research demonstrates how austerity measures, introduced in the UK since 2010, have intensified social inequalities (Hall, 2019; Jensen, 2018; Saunders, 2020). Such measures include multiple retrenchments of public spending, which between 2010 and 2015 alone included £6.3bn from social care, £1bn from health and £13bn from schools, further and higher education (Hall, 2022a). Also of note are significant changes to local services and childcare (Horton et al., 2021), with cuts in total expenditure on welfare and benefit payments estimated to have totalled £37bn a year by 2020 (Pearson, 2019). Austerity – like all forms of political-economic change – is always socially and spatially emplaced. In the North East of England, as the geographical focus of this article, significant economic restructuring over recent decades has meant public spending cuts and retrenchment have been an aggravating and intensifying force (Centre for Local Economic Strategy [CLES], 2014; Stenning, 2020).

Attention has been drawn to the lives of children and young adults growing up in this period and the implications for their lives (Horton et al., 2021; van Lanen, 2021), with intersectional inequalities where identities and difference coalesce (Erel, 2018; Hall, 2022b; Soldatic & Morgan, 2017). Austerity reinforces pre-existing socio-economic inequalities that are ongoing, long-term, embedded and intergenerational. Intersections of class, race and gender especially dramatically shape expectations and experiences of reproduction (Briggs, 2017; Jensen, 2018; Saunders, 2020). These inequalities seep into the fabric of everyday life – rising rents, shrinking social housing stock, unsuitable cohabitations, destitution, adults living or moving back home with parents (Taylor, 2021; Wilkinson, 2020); unemployment, indebtedness, insecure and precarious work (Davis & Cartwright, 2019); retreating state support, decimated care infrastructures, welfare and local government (Hall, 2020; Pearson, 2019); and, as the focus of this article, altered possibilities and decisions about reproduction because of changing life-courses, intimacies and affordabilities (Hall, 2022a; Holmes et al., 2021; Lebano & Jamieson, 2020). Stenning’s (2020) research in the North East of England also highlights how austerity has widened the scale of socio-economic inequality, drawing in a ‘squeezed middle’ class, as well as exacerbating ongoing everyday inequalities faced by working-class people (Saunders, 2020). Classed and racialised dynamics of economic exclusion are implicitly emplaced, contributing to the socio-spatial location of bodies and subjectivities (Skeggs, 2004).

The notion of an entangled relationship between economic conditions and reproduction is not new: feminist scholars have long contended that classed and racialised reproductive politics are at the heart of economic policies (Briggs, 2017; A. Y. Davis, 1983; D. A. Davis, 2019a; Erel, 2018; Jensen, 2018). Reproductive politics are also public issues: decisions around having children, access to housing, welfare and work, means of inheritance, and so on are matters of the state and the heart (Hall, 2022a). In this article, I explore reproduction predominantly through the lens of ‘biological reproduction’ in its broadest form, to encompass gestation, adoption, fostering, abortion and more. This includes deep engagement with ideas about ‘reproduction in a broader, collective sense’, regarding ‘the activities, attitudes, behaviours and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis’ (Power, 2014, p. 1). I adopt a definition of social reproduction as biological, daily and generational reproduction (Federici, 2012; Katz, 2001), and argue that concepts of emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) and relational work (Zelizer, 2012) can help unpack the lived realities of reproductive decision-making. In the context of ongoing and largely unreversed austerity policies in the UK (Hall, 2020; Pearson, 2019), and with increasing interest in the impacts of economic policy on reproduction (BBC, 2020; Bettio et al., 2013; Eurofound, 2014, 2017; Eurostat, 2013), qualitative insights into how austerity shapes reproductive lives and futures are much needed.

With this article I aim to develop new avenues for theorising social reproduction in austerity, by bringing together work on social reproduction, emotional labour and relational work, and developing the concept of ‘carrying’ (Puwar, 2021). Carrying, I argue, beholds embodied, emotional and laborious qualities to conceptualise reproductive decisions that ideas about ‘managing’ emotions do not fully grasp. The involves bringing Hochschild’s work on emotional labour together with Zelizer’s theorisations of relational work, to understand where emotions, labour and social reproduction meet. The effect is a re-embodying of social reproduction, as a set of visceral labours that reproduce society, generations and daily life. I develop this argument by drawing on recent Oral Histories and Futures interviews with participants from the North East of England in 2020, on reproductive decision-making in an austere context. With findings developed using inductive analysis, it is argued that ‘carrying’ labour is key to contemporary experiences of reproduction in austerity. Themes include carrying possibilities, carrying bodies and carrying instabilities. To close, I argue that since the carrying labour of reproductive decisions is also carried forward into people’s life-courses, reproductive futures are another way in which long-term socio-economic inequalities widen further in austerity.

Reproduction and austerity

Segments of academia, journalism, politics, third sector and activism have been vocal about damaging post-2010 austerity measures on social reproduction in the UK. This includes devastating spending cuts to key public, social and care services, the transferral of state welfare responsibilities to citizens, divestment in community services and resources, and a lack of significant reversal or repair of austerity policies – measures that exacerbated everyday experiences of poverty, precarity and inequality. Austerity policies exploit and maintain gendered, racialised, classed and generational inequalities, with measures shown to bear down in concert on marginalised groups (Pearson, 2019). Moreover, a burgeoning body of literature highlights the impacts of austerity on the ‘biological’ components of social reproduction. Here, austerity can operate as a force of deferral or postponement of interpersonal decisions, leading to a sense of altered life-courses.

Writing from the UK, Davis and Cartwright (2019, p. 91) argue that with ‘state support greatly atrophied in the name of “austerity”’, many young people struggle to secure ‘financial independence and self-sufficiency’. Indebtedness is pronounced, leading to a ‘sense of entrapment in a perpetual present of limited economic resources and a “deferral” of life objectives until “one day” in the future’ (Davis & Cartwright, 2019, p. 96). Similarly, Lebano and Jamieson’s (2020, p. 127) study of women aged 30–35 in Italy and Spain unearthed narratives of ‘postponing having children’. They link this to ‘austerity, the threat of downward social mobility, and economic hardship affecting young adults of both middle- and working-class backgrounds’ (Lebano & Jamieson 2020, p. 124; Holmes et al., 2021). For van Lanen (2020, p. 610), in research with young adults in Ireland, austerity is argued to impact the lives people imagine for themselves, with participants comparing their ‘life-course to the pre-crisis situation’. Indeed, my own UK-based ethnographic research on lived experiences of austerity – as they cumulate and bear down in concert – revealed that austerity policies, and their shaping of welfare restructuring, debt and care responsibilities, led to default or derailment of reproductive futures (Hall, 2022a).

Added to this, research on reproductive choices for working-class women, and especially working-class women of colour, reveals deep shaming and moralising circulating within personal and political discourse, including questions of deservingness, overconsumption and deficiency. This has historically led to intense parental policing, regulation and biomedical intervention (Briggs, 2017; A. Y. Davis, 1983; Jensen, 2018). Furthermore, everyday emotional experiences of class, race and disability can be dominated by shame, disrespect and microaggressions (Erel, 2018; Saunders, 2020; Soldatic & Morgan, 2017). It is imperative to acknowledge that these social, material and moral circumstances are the basis upon which austerity policies are layered.

Gender and queer studies scholars have also highlighted the politics of ‘non-reproduction’, and the role this plays in present and future lives (Holmes et al., 2021; Wilkinson, 2020). With a focus on ‘women living in diverse “non normative” relationships’, Holmes et al. (2021, p. 735) identify how future building, in relation to having children, is shaped as much by gender as ‘economic positioning’. Critiquing heteronormative, procreational norms, Wilkinson (2020, p. 664) argues that non-reproduction is often conflated with anti-futurity, hence the need to ‘think about single life and the non-reproductive as potentially queer practices’. Angela Davis (2017) draws on Oral History interviews with women about their lives in post-1945 England, for whom the notion of reproductive choice is also a misnomer, given ‘the problems they encountered in achieving their desired family size, or their inability to do so’ (Davis, 2017, p. 123). Choice in reproduction is also a misnomer for people living with financial and material instability (see Saunders, 2020). While focused on historical accounts of infertility, Davis’s (2017, p. 124) study nevertheless offers insight into the powerlessness of some individuals to determine their reproductive choices, as a ‘hidden’ experience. Lewis (2018, p. 305) concurs that ‘there have not been many conversations framed about . . . not gestating, refusing to gestate, ceasing to gestate’ as socially reproductive labour.

Nonetheless, language around this issue is complex, whereby terms such as infertility, childfree, childless and non-reproduction are ill-fitting and incomplete. On the latter of these, Power (2014) writes how non-reproduction is more than a personal decision, and should be understood ‘in a broader, collective sense’. She contends that non-reproduction is difficult to engage in, because social reproduction is continuous and restricted not simply to the biological (Hall, 2022a). Instead, reproductive decisions have long been constrained according to who is making those decisions, whose bodies are deemed suitable to reproduce, considering matters of race, class, sexuality, disability, age, etc. (D. A. Davis, 2019b; Saunders, 2020). As Angela Y. Davis (1983) illustrates, myths of choice about biological reproduction still circulate within common discourse and infiltrate into political and civic movements. Likewise, Briggs (2017) reveals how neoliberalism manifests as structural discrimination and an obstacle to reproduction. In fact, Saunders (2020, p. 4) highlights how policies in ‘austerity Britain’ such as ‘the limiting of child tax credits’ disproportionally impacts certain social groups, thus restricting ‘reproductive decision-making of “undesirable” mothers who are poor, disabled and black and brown women’ (see also Jensen, 2018).

To consider reproduction in austerity is, therefore, to acknowledge the political-economic space-times in which reproduction occurs, and how reproductive practices – gestating, abortion, sterilisation – have to be understood together and in situ (Greenhalgh, 1995; Katz, 2001). In the context of austerity in the UK – the constellation of a certain set of policies, histories and cultures – questions are raised about how additional socio-economic obstacles shape reproductive decisions and futures. What of decisions about having children, as a result of socio-economic conditions such as austerity policies? What reproductive futures are imagined? What does it mean to not have the reproductive lives one thought one would have? What futures are being held out for? How are these possibilities balanced, managed or carried, and by whom? Retaining the language of social reproduction is, I argue, imperative to signify gendered, racialised and classed experiences, and because this sphere is so vital yet has been subjected to targeted fiscal cuts. I now expand on how various theories on social reproduction can be brought into new conversations to draw out more complex understandings of ‘labour’.

The labour of social reproduction

It is difficult to extract different forms of reproduction from the broader notion of social reproduction, given how tightly knit they are in practice and consequence – daily reproduction, biological reproduction and generational reproduction as the basis of the life and future of economy and society (Katz, 2001). One of the main ways in which components of social reproduction interconnect is as forms of labour. Thus, labour is a central concept but is often eclipsed by discussions of care. These are of course interrelated – care is labour, care is labouring. Conceptualising social reproduction as ‘life’s work’, Mitchell et al. (2003, p. 421) write about ‘labour-power’, unhinging this concept away from production, towards an embodied perspective situated in time and space.

Considering pluralised understandings of the labour of social reproduction, James’s (1992) writing is noteworthy. Reflecting on comparative observations from women’s domestic carework and the work of hospice nurses, James (1992, p. 488) proposes a formula to understand the complexities and balances within daily socially reproductive labour: ‘care= organization + physical labour + emotional labour’. Twigg (2000) similarly acknowledges the embodied and emotional practices involved in care as a form of body-work. However, the lack of socio-economic value placed on socially reproductive activities and their invisibility are entangled with the inequalities, injustices and violences that such labour beholds (James, 1992; Saunders, 2020). Likewise, McKie et al.’s (2002) groundbreaking work on the rhythms of care across the everyday and the life-course deepened understandings of the space-times of care and the range of physical, mental, embodied and emotional labour involved. However, one critique of both James (1992) and McKie et al.’s (2002) conceptualisations is that there is a fudging between care and social reproduction, where feminist scholars have argued that care is only part of the story (Federici, 2012; Pearson, 2019).

There are two other concepts I wish to propose as particularly significant for thinking through the labour of social reproduction: emotional labour and relational work. The notion of emotional labour can be most clearly traced to the work of Arlie Hochschild. In The Managed Heart, Hochschild (1983, p. 7) defines emotional labour as ‘the labour that requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others. . . . The kind of labour [that] calls for a coordination of mind and feelings.’ In recent work Hochschild (2013, p. 488) reflects on the application of these ideas, including in the context of austerity, arguing that ‘welfare reform is emotional reform’. Holmes et al. (2021) also make brief references to the ‘emotional work’ of managing futures and intimacies, though they do not directly acknowledge this as a form of labour. Soldatic and Morgan (2017) also use the concept of emotional labour in their reflections on disability and welfare subjectivities in the UK and Australia.

Moreover, and with the exception of James (1989, 1992), where social reproductive and emotional labour are discussed together, it is common for emotional labour to become reduced to what might otherwise be termed the ‘mental load’. Hochschild has taken issue with this, stating it is ‘overextension’ of her intended meaning (Beck, 2018); that mental organisation, balancing of tasks or planning household budgets do not constitute emotional labour per se. So the concept of emotional labour is originally confined to the regulation and management of emotions, and the ‘mental load’ is supplementary to this – often gendered, often characterised by social unevenness, but an aside nonetheless.

It is here that the scholarship of Viviana Zelizer (2012) provides new avenues for thinking with emotions as labour. Although not posited in this way, the concept of ‘relational work’ goes some way to reconciling these different types of labour involving emotions, and how they might be applied to social reproduction. Zelizer (2012, p. 149) defines relational work as ‘the creative effort people make establishing, maintaining, negotiating, transforming, and terminating interpersonal relations’. In explaining this idea, she draws on a particularly pertinent example:

. . . the growing phenomenon of ‘boomerang kids’, adult children who, for financial reasons, return home to live with their parents. . . . As they work out such financial arrangements, parents and children are negotiating new definitions of their relationship. (Zelizer, 2012, p. 156)

Understanding relational work as a type of labour, I posit, helps bridge the managing of emotions and the labour of emotional work, framing these as forms of social reproduction. With what follows, I outline how they can be further synthesised and advanced under the guise of ‘carrying’.

Carrying as concept

Going beyond a metaphorical device, the concept of carrying can tease out the simultaneously embodied, emotionally and relationally laborious qualities of reproductive decision-making. The inspiration comes from Puwar’s (2021) work on ‘Carrying as Method’. Through an empirical focus on researching archives, Puwar (2021, p. 3) argues that the ‘sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions’ researchers carry ‘stay with us and take time to appear before us’. While not aligned with the substantive topic of my argument, the way Puwar describes and deploys ‘carrying’ resonates strongly with James’s (1992) attempts to bring together embodied and emotional labour under social reproduction. Specifically, Puwar (2021, p. 4) goes to lengths to draw out the importance of carrying as having ‘a physical resonance’, as well as seeing ‘the body as an archive’ for carrying memories, incidents, relationships and intergenerational experiences. As I later show, this metaphor is particularly fitting for the compounding ‘carrying’ effect of austerity on long-term socio-economic conditions, which in turn shape reproductive decisions. Paying closer attention to ‘what we carry’, Puwar argues, ‘can help us to identify and craft what may have hitherto been fleeting attentions into a prolonged research and/or creative project’ (2021, p. 6).

In drawing the piece to a close, Puwar (2021) outlines four ways of mobilising the notion of carrying, of which two stand out. Firstly, that ‘carrying is entangled in inter-generational exchanges’, and the second, that ‘carrying occurs temporally with changing dimensions across a life course’ (p. 20). These relational components of carrying are significant for comprehending how the emotional and embodied labour of carrying always involves others, occurring within and across lives. This chimes with writings on the role of relational work in everyday economic relationships (Zelizer, 2012), and of social reproduction as rhythmed by everyday life and across the life course (McKie et al., 2002). Carrying is thus a way in which to conceptually reimagine socio-economic entanglements and responsibilities, and can usefully be extended to unpick dynamics of reproduction.

Furthermore, in emphasising the body, synergies can be observed between the concept of carrying and emerging scholarship about bodies as infrastructural. As Andueza et al. (2021, p. 800) explain, ‘human bodies comprise society’s basic physical and organizational structure’, and contend that ‘fleshy and messy bodies are also forms of infrastructure’. Seeing the body as more-than-vessel and instead as the building block for maintaining social processes, the authors mirror the language of social reproduction – what Katz (2001, p. 711) calls ‘the fleshy, messy and indeterminate stuff of everyday life’. Indeed, and coming back to carrying, Andueza et al. (2021, p. 812) even refer to how bodies are infrastructural in how they ‘lift and carry’.

To consider bodies and their labour as a form of infrastructure is to also acknowledge social reproduction as infrastructural (Hall, 2022a). In previous research on everyday life in austerity, I likewise demonstrate the value of centring embodied relations within accounts of everyday social infrastructures, and the ways in which bodies and body-work (Twigg, 2000) are emplaced within (gendered, classed, racialised, generational) everyday processes of social reproduction. It is with hindsight, I note, that this included the ‘carrying’ of shopping bags, for instance, as well as emotional responsibilities (Hall, 2019, p. 93). Applying and extending the concept of carrying with empirical reflections, I bring together social, embodied and emotional labour, to consider the significance of carrying in reproductive decisions and futures.

Methodology: Oral Histories and Futures

To provide insights on reproduction and austerity – a personal subject relating to decisions made, in the making, and to be made – I wanted to deploy a methodology that was sensitive, empowering, and with possibilities to capture the passing and prospect of time. I was drawn to Oral History, as a technique that relies on participants talking through often marginalised lived experiences with ‘extraordinary potential as a tool for feminist research’ (Gluck & Patai, 1991, p. 1). I was inspired by studies using this technique to also explore reproduction (A. Davis, 2017; D. A. Davis, 2019a). Likewise, Cave’s (2014, p. 1) reflections on the possibilities of Oral History ‘in the midst’ of crises highlight how the method can expand beyond being past-facing. Cave also stresses the patience and empathy required when adopting this approach, creating a space in which interviewees can work through their experiences as they speak; what Gluck and Patai (1991, p. 222) refer to as an ‘abiding interest in, and sympathy with, other lives, times, and places’. Feminist Oral Historians also argue that there are many overlaps with ethnography, not least the potential to destabilise understandings of everyday life (Gluck & Patai, 1991; Hall, 2019).

The idea for Oral Histories and Futures interviews came from here. Oral Histories and Futures involve the recording of people’s experiences and opinions about their pasts, present and futures: a comprehensive approach to explore personal lives, situated economic, social and political contexts (such as austerity). Where Oral History interviews typically preserve unique life histories, I also wanted to consider the present and the prospective. Within Oral Histories and Futures interviews participants were encouraged to talk about personal biographies, present circumstances and future imaginaries, including thoughts, hopes, dreams, desires, possibilities and expectations. From previous ethnographic research I was cognisant that talking about the future can sometimes be difficult: it can feel abstract, scary or morbid. The adoption of biographical life mapping methods was a sensitive means by which participants could communicate with more than spoken words (Hall, 2022a). Bringing forward these learnings, Oral Histories and Futures were designed with the inclusion of a participatory component. Participants were invited to ‘write a postcard’ to their future self, and to reflect on this activity as part of the interview.

The research reported in this article took place during 2020 with participants living in the North East of England. As Stenning (2020, p. 200) states, ‘the government’s own figures demonstrate that northern England (the North East, the North West and Yorkshire and Humber) has been hardest hit by government cuts’. The North East region was chosen as an area that has historically experienced high levels of poverty and deprivation, particularly following deindustrialisation in the 1980s, and has seen significant spending cuts under austerity. In particular, ‘the economy has suffered from decades of low investment compared to other areas of the country and as a result is characterised by a predominance of low wage, lower value industries and jobs’ (CLES, 2014, p. 4). Austerity measures augmented high levels of public sector employment, high numbers in receipt of welfare support, and the predominance of lower wage employment (CLES, 2014; Stenning, 2020). The region also has some of the lowest fertility rates in England (Office for National Statistics [ONS], 2017). I focused on the experiences of people between the ages of 18 and 45 – the standard age range for reproductive decision-making amongst fertility scholars – whereas Oral Histories tend to draw on older people’s narratives and usually in hindsight, rather than contemporary experiences (Cave, 2014).

Early recruitment took place in person by visiting local community centres; however the research was quickly moved to remote methods due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital posters were shared via community gatekeepers (social centres, childcare organisations, local libraries and amenities), social media, and online networks and noticeboards. Twelve Oral Histories and Futures interviews were undertaken, mirroring the modest sample size of similar studies using oral histories or in-depth interviewing to explore reproduction (A. Davis, 2017; D. A. Davis, 2019b; Holmes et al., 2021). Participants were drawn from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and living circumstances. ¹ It was my aim to have a wide variety of participants within the sample, with parameters placed around location, age and life experiences.

Interviews included questions about reproductive pasts and biographies, present-day situations, and future imaginaries, supported by the participatory task. In accordance with government and university guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic, all interviews took place either online via Zoom (6) or over the telephone (6). While a change from my planned research, participants nonetheless embraced the method and shared stories candidly, with interviews lasting an average of 60–90 minutes. All participants were given a £20 voucher as a thank you gesture for taking part in the research.

The interview discussions were audio recorded either via a Dictaphone or online software (for telephone calls and online discussions, respectively), and were then transcribed in full. Interview transcripts were analysed in turn using an inductive and iterative approach, reading the data multiple times, and noting down new themes as they were raised. I repeated this process until it was exhaustive, and then refined the original list of almost 50 thematic codes into 12 main themes, one of which was ‘labour/carrying’. Within this theme, bodies, stabilities and possibilities were prominent, and have shaped the writing of this article. The findings below highlight crosscutting these themes of ‘carrying’ regarding reproduction and austerity. All names are replaced with pseudonyms.

Carrying possibilities

A resounding finding across the Oral Histories and Futures was that participants identified the labour of carrying different possible reproductive futures, and in tandem. This involved a combination of emotional, embodied and relational forms of labour, to reproduce ideas of the future and possible life-courses. Jonny, ² for instance, talked about carrying multiple, entwined possibilities: to have children or not to have them; stay living where they are now, move closer to his mum (who has a chronic condition and needs daily support), or move back to Japan where his wife’s family live; keep his job or set up his own business. These decisions were related to deep entanglements of austerity in-place: care responsibilities towards family (as the ‘one of the first’ to leave the village where he grew up) in the context of a retreating welfare state, and the lack of affordable housing given rising costs of property renting and ownership. They also interconnect with longer-term neoliberal classed and racialised immigration policies that can contribute to feeling out-of-place (Briggs, 2017; Erel, 2018; Pearson, 2019; Skeggs, 2004). For Jonny, these impacts of austerity were also enmeshed within socio-material conditions of class that are intergenerational and ongoing; he talked at length about how his upbringing shaped his understanding of working-class identity and the role of family in patchworking through precarity. As a result, he was ‘putting real thought’ into reproductive decisions, and ‘weighing them up’, as well as forecasting what future carrying might be, and what could ‘make our lives a lot more difficult’. Holding these possibilities together required maintenance, or labour. Jonny carries these possibilities in tandem, alongside a sense of future decision-making: ‘when we’re about 30, 31, that sort of age’.

Holding possibilities together can also involve trying to progress certain possibilities so they remain possible future options. For Jonny, this included buying a house but holding back some of their modest savings with an offset mortgage: ‘we thought we’re probably going to need this money in the future, for the next visa renewal application’. Having grown up in a single parent family with his mum (and later step-father and step-brother) in council housing, he noted how affordable and decent housing was difficult for his generation to access or imagine. Janine ³ talked in similar ways about simultaneously carrying multiple possible futures. She spoke about wanting to start saving money, after having fallen into considerable debt in her late twenties, so that she might be able to buy her own house and have children in the future (Davis & Cartwright, 2019; Lebano & Jamieson, 2020; van Lanen, 2021). Like Jonny, she also held deep-seated worries about having moved far away from her family and working-class community (having also been raised by a single mother), and yet there being remaining parental care needs for which she felt personally and socially responsible. She expressed, ‘I’ve slowly gone further away from mum, and I feel terrible about that’. Janine was currently unemployed and claiming social security, and spoke about this as a moment in her life where she was trying to find stability, in the midst of what seemed to be feeling ‘shamed by the performance of the non-market self’ (Soldatic & Morgan, 2017, p. 113). Like Jonny, and using similar language, Janine was carefully holding these possibilities together, what she described as ‘sorting out’ her life.

As a differently insightful example, Sze-Kei ⁴ talked of carrying her desires about having a third child, and the energy and effort this requires. Retaining a glimmer of possibility, she said: ‘when you go to school, things get a bit easier. Then you start wondering whether you want another one, because you forgot about how hard it was.’ Sze-Kei seems to bear the emotional labour of carrying reminders for her future self, to remember how hard it is, how she felt about being pregnant, and draws on these experiences in decisions about having more children. This also included concerns about affordability, given a lack of state support for ‘people in the middle like us’. This speaks to Stenning’s (2020) notions of austerity measures as drawing in a ‘squeezed middle’ class, and childcare was a key issue for middle-income families. This was often about the balance between access and provisioning, managing formal and informal care alongside paid work and other caring responsibilities. Most middle-income families had moved away further from family and had to rely on paid childcare (Saunders, 2020). With cuts to childcare allowances and the rising relative cost of childcare compared to wages, austerity has ameliorated the expansion of additional financial pressures for a wider group of society.

Sze-Kei’s concerns about financial capacity were counterbalanced by future possibilities of having a third child, even as this prospect ‘dwindled’. Her use of this term is interesting, suggesting that while a dimmer possibility, it still resonates and is retained, highlighting the contradiction of ‘non-reproduction’ (Power, 2014). Nafula ⁵ expressed very similar sentiments. After having a ‘very tough’ caesarean section during childbirth, she nonetheless returned to work shortly after due to concerns about income. People often considered her consultancy work a ‘side hustle’ because it is so precarious, and yet as her main source of income and with no maternity leave, she felt compelled to return quickly. Compounding this were worries about the costs of childcare and having very few family members for support. She related this to experiences of racism that she experienced after moving from Kenya to the North East of England in her teens, which meant she still ‘will rarely go outside’ and had a limited social network. These multiple experiences led Nafula to still carry the possibility of having more children in the future, ‘maybe when I am around 35, when the baby’s already much grown and walking and going to school’.

The labour of carrying possibilities for reproductive futures also held significance for those who experienced loss, such as through miscarriage or abortion. Lauren, ⁶ for instance, lived at home with her parents; ‘I’ve virtually all my life grew up [here], in the same house since I was born.’ With a tight-knit working-class family and community, personal decisions could be difficult to keep private. She talked about possibilities of having children in the future as intertwined in a narrative about her recent experience of an abortion, alongside her partner’s debt and her lack of financial independence. Carrying the trauma of an abortion, keeping her emotions hidden from her mum (‘she completely doesn’t agree with abortion’), whilst also considering what her mum would think, and what could have been, seemed complicated and laborious. Three other participants discussed the emotional carryings of loss in this way. For example, Kate, ⁷ who like Lauren has strong family ties and has ‘always stayed around the North East’, described her miscarriage six years ago within narratives of present-day reproduction: ‘it’s still sad, you know, I still think about it’.

These examples also indicate how future reproduction is always relationally negotiated (Holmes et al., 2021). Carryings from intergenerational, racialised and classed exchanges play a key role (Puwar, 2021), alongside carrying negotiations with past and future selves about how decisions could turn out. Past experiences were constantly balanced, carried, and held together with desires for the future. The carrying of multiple, intertwined and simultaneous possibilities concerning reproductive futures – some of which were inflicted by austerity cuts, class differences and longer-term neoliberal policies – was a common feature of participants’ narratives, despite personal and situational variations.

Carrying bodies

Where the previous section highlighted the emotional and relational components of labouring reproductive futures, the theme of carrying bodies draws in embodied and corporeal labour more directly. Indeed, when Vihaan ⁸ first mentioned that his wife was pregnant, he described her as ‘carrying’. Echoing Puwar’s (2021) notion of carrying as an embodied and temporally mediated experience, participants often centred corporeal experiences in their reproductive decisions. In her narrative, Sze-Kei forefronts the very visceral labour of gestating (Lewis, 2018), the fleshiness and messiness of being a carrying body, and the impacts on the body over time (Andueza et al., 2021; Katz, 2001). She refers to this as ‘the toll’, the experience after having her second child aged 42, and how ‘age makes a difference. So just very tired.’ The lasting implications and possible future damage of this bodily toll became key in Sze-Kei’s reproductive decisions. Embodied and emotional labour are intertwined, because Sze-Kei’s corporeal fatigue was heightened by another type of carrying, that of financial worries: ‘you still have to think, at the back of your mind, you still have to think about the financial side of things. Which is why I still didn’t really make the move to have another one.’ This is mirrored in Nafula’s narrative, of returning to work shortly after a caesarean because of financial worries.

Alisha ⁹ also referenced previous pregnancy and birthing experiences as shaping reproductive decisions, and how these memories were carried emotionally and corporeally: ‘everyone has their own experience in the labour ward, but for me it was very traumatic. And I feel like one baby is enough.’ Like Sze-Kei, Alisha stressed that it was the combination of these difficult bodily experiences carried alongside the financial strain that comes with having children that shaped her decisions about not having more children. Austerity measures, particularly changes to welfare, public and community investment and childcare, were often associated with the financial strain of having (any or more) children and the decisions that came along with such changes. Indeed, with a lack of maternity pay and no affordable formal or informal childcare support, Alisha had recently resigned from her job because, in her words, ‘I needed to take care of my baby’. Relying on one household income, she became acutely aware that ‘babies come with a lot of costs’. Such reproductive decisions involved distinct and careful emotional investment, a combination of emotional labour of managing emotions and the emotional and relational responsibility for planning and thinking ahead (Hochschild, 1983; Zelizer, 2012): ‘you can’t just have any number of children you want’, Alisha explained, ‘because they also come as a whole package that requires a lot of resources, you know? That is something I’ve really thought of.’

By placing these narratives in conversation with the example of Lauren, the contours of a concept of carrying bodies can be developed further still. Having been pregnant and made the decision to have an abortion, Lauren experienced a different set of bodily carryings. This included emotional labour for how her mum – who she lived with – would react if she were to find out about both her pregnancy and abortion (‘she’s always drilled in to me that, if I ever fell pregnant, she would be heartbroken if I did that’), and her own emotions towards her mum’s attitudes and likely response (‘it grinded on me’). The language here is provocative and viscerally descriptive, and the close corporeality of living together (due to not being able to afford to rent) meant Lauren was regularly reminded of this emotional carrying. Later in her interview, Lauren also talked candidly of her worries about bodily changes during pregnancy, stating ‘I couldn’t face seeing my body change . . . it was a massive part in the back of my head’, as well as relationship changes. Specifically, Lauren expressed concerns about her partner’s feelings towards her if a child was introduced to their relationship, and how this elicited an emotional response: what happens when two bodies became three. She explained: ‘I know it sounds like so strange, but I think it’s realising that once you have a kid, that they share you partner with you . . . gets me a bit upset’.

A number of other female participants also raised this topic, whereby they seemed to carry concerns about changes to their intimate relationships, and the emotional and bodily needs of their partners once they had a child. As a case in point, Natasha ¹⁰ said that the combination of physical tiredness and being at emotional capacity when her child was born meant that her partner felt ‘kind of left out . . . because all my attention was on the child’. Carrying what appeared to be a gendered burden of worry and emotions about interpersonal problems left Natasha constantly trying to maintain some semblance of a ‘balance’. The labour of caring for a newborn mainly alone (as her family still live in the Midlands), concerns about affording everything her child needed, balanced alongside work-time demands meant Natasha carried a constant worry about potential inter-relational impacts. This included between her and her partner, but also that she might one day see her child as ‘a burden, or maybe not attend to them in the right way’.

Developing further the relational components of carrying, and linking biological, daily and generational reproduction (Hall, 2022a; Mitchell et al., 2003), participants’ narratives about reproduction regularly touched on the importance of physical and practical support, co-presence and collective care (Hall, 2019; Twigg, 2000). Sze-Kei described the vital support she received from her mum when her first child was born. She came over from Malaysia and stayed for three months so Sze-Kei could return to full-time work after six weeks of maternity leave. With her second child, she ‘couldn’t cope . . . it was just hands full, with a full-time job, with no relatives to help at all’. Being part of a big family, she could not expect this help again from her mum, as a one-time offer. It also went against the cultural grain of expectations, that Sze-Kei should instead be the one looking after her parents. Thus, Sze-Kei carried and embodied intergenerational traditions (Puwar, 2021). Unable to afford time off work or to pay for a private nursery, the decimation of local children’s centres, and with no family childcare for times when a baby might be unwell and need to stay at home, a lack of other carrying bodies was a significant obstacle to having another child.

Jonny also spoke about co-presence and proximity, again gesturing to the collective labour of carrying bodies within narratives of reproduction. Carrying bodies as being together, the physicality and intimacy within reproductive futures, and ideals of raising family together, in situ, were particularly striking in his narrative. Jonny mentioned the need to ‘actually physically be with my partner before we could really think about decisions to have children’, during a period of time when she lived in Japan and he was in England, and being ‘settled down somewhere physically’. This also relates to discussions about queering families and life-course expectations (Holmes et al., 2021; Wilkinson, 2020), whereby participants would talk about frictions between what they imagined of their future and reproductive decisions versus the ‘reality’ and likely alternative futures. Moreover, where literature on social reproduction stresses the virtues of considering reproductive lives in context, in situ (Greenhalgh, 1995; Katz, 2001), these examples reinforce the importance of emplaced relations and co-presence, and the role of carrying bodies in reproductive decisions as a relational endeavour, drawing in other people, ideals and futures. Elements of this discussion continue below.

Carrying instabilities

Across all the Oral Histories and Futures interviews, without exception, participants placed themselves as responsible subjects for carrying instabilities associated with reproductive decision-making. For Lauren, these instabilities – particularly her partner’s debt – are carried forwards, as future worries to be kept in check and to ensure readiness for having children. She and her partner lived with their respective parents, Lauren was studying and working part-time, and her partner was paying off large sums of credit card debt. She did not consider this a stable ‘situation’ in which to have children, hence her decision to terminate the pregnancy. She described how she did not see anything changing for a long time. They were unable to afford a place to live together because of these debts and low paying jobs, or to secure better paid work. Nor could they afford part-time working or childcare. Instability and uncertainty were communicated in her choice of language: ‘financially, there’s just no way I can, you know . . . I’m just holding on myself.’ Here, financial instability sits alongside mental health instabilities, reminding how insecurities can overlap, making crises very personal and intimate (Hall, 2019).

Like almost all the participants interviewed, Lauren also raised the feeling of wanting to do more than survive, to be able to thrive – ‘I want to be in the position in the future where I do have a kid, that I think I can give it everything it wants. I don’t want to have to scrimp and save to be able to give it a life.’ There are multiple carryings at work here, both the labour of carrying instabilities as they currently stand and carrying responsibilities to address these same instabilities. Participants readily talked about carrying the instabilities inherent in their personal reproductive decisions, internalising neoliberal principles of individualism, responsibilisation and self-governance (Briggs, 2017; Jensen, 2018). These public-political discourses had also often been impressed on participants’ own parents, across both working- and middle-class families, as an example of intergenerational and structural inequality. They also became ever more intense, in austerity.

Likewise, when asked about ‘what he imagined’ when he thought about having children, Vihaan said ‘financial planning, stability . . . well, having enough of a financial back up so that we could afford a decent life, savings’. He expressed how growing up in India he saw his parents ‘struggling for bread and butter each day’, but that he had a sense of optimism that ‘hard work’ would be rewarded. This had not, however, been his experience living in the UK for the last eight years. While he described rent as more ‘affordable’ in the North East of England than London (where he lived previously), day-to-day living was costly and it is ‘hard to save at the end of the month’. Similarly, Carmen ¹¹ described this combined carrying of present instabilities and future worries, as part of a distinct labour in reproductive decision-making. Reflecting also on the idea of preparedness and readiness, Carmen said ‘buying a house, I’ve still got quite a few credit cards and sort of . . . I just don’t feel in a position to be able to, you know’. Despite being in more secure employment and both living in mortgaged homes, Vihaan and Carmen reported experiences of, and a growing exposure to, economic hardship, which directly impacts reproductive decisions (Holmes et al., 2021; Lebano & Jamieson, 2020).

Despite very different personal circumstances, participants’ concerns about instabilities as an obstacle to readiness to have children often related to the heteronormative sequencing of life-course events (Lewis, 2018; Wilkinson, 2020). This was especially pertinent to being physically settled in a ‘home’, considered important for planning reproductive futures. Jonny, for instance, described the need to feel ready and prepared by having certain material and practical elements in place – housing, childcare and income – before being able to make a decision to have children. He articulated this as a labour, a mental, emotional and relational concern, that was not particularly pressing at present, but was carried into the future: ‘housing and income or savings . . . it’s more sort of an on-going concern than an actual problem’. Vihaan also indicated the significance of this labour of life-planning, and how his reproductive future had originally involved ‘having our own home, I mean, we were planning a new house and then have kids’. However, with the increasing unaffordability of private rents, growth in the housing market and difficulties saving for a mortgage, and lack of social housing provision, achieving these ideals proved difficult (Davis & Cartwright, 2019; Saunders, 2020; van Lanen, 2020, 2021).

Such instabilities had often been carried for a long time, formed through past experiences, memories and aspirations that met with new instabilities presented by austerity (Hall, 2022a; Lebano & Jamieson, 2020). As such, the labour of carrying instabilities can be understood as a temporally mediated experience and, connecting with the previous section, carried by the body as something of an archive (Puwar, 2021). When describing her past, present and possibly future experiences of financial difficulties, and how this has shaped her reproductive decisions, Sze-Kei stated that ‘at the back of your mind, you still have to think about the financial side of things’. She seemed to bear this worry more than her husband, and tellingly expressed, ‘I don’t think I can cope financially.’ It was a labour of carrying these concerns about financial stability, dealing with them, and one’s own emotions in the process. Jodie ¹² spoke of the significance of past financial instabilities regarding her husband accruing credit card debt (Davis & Cartwright, 2019), as a shared, relational responsibility. These financial instabilities were inseparable from interpersonal instabilities, with relationships between them strained as a result. This also drew in other inter-relationalities, with Jodie’s dad, who lives nearby, keeping hold of a ‘secret stash’ of money for her, and having a separate bank account from her husband, even though ‘the way I was brought up, like my mam and dad always had joint accounts’. Indebtedness, alongside ‘the size of [affordable] houses and just working, taking time out’ were cumulative instabilities that worked against decisions to have more children. Jodie seemed to carry a heavy emotional load, both presently, but also prospectively: ‘there’s definitely some issues to come in the future I think. Who knows. And if my husband carried on racking up debt and we never get a deposit, there’ll probably be a divorce as well.’

Like others, Yusuf ¹³ talked about an uphill battle of trying to become financially stable in a context where fixed term and reliable jobs were increasingly rare, making everyday survival even harder for those without intergenerational wealth (Davis & Cartwright, 2019; van Lanen, 2020). In this context, he carried a weight of expectation about his own reproductive futures, drawing on his upbringing. He explained, ‘I don’t want to go to the welfare, you know, the government to claim benefits to bring up a child. . . . I have some good high aspirations and hopes that one day I will have a child, with my own money, and bring him up.’ Here, Yusuf talks quite literally about having a (male) child, as something of a biological and moral legacy, to carry forward this ethos on life, work and family. And yet, these aspirations were weighed down by the cost of everyday living, and by a depressed, decimated local job market. Yusuf acknowledged this as the result of decades of deindustrialisation and a lack of economic investment in Northern England (CLES, 2014):

Years ago you could rely on job security, you know, where you knew your job is there for life. Whereas now, a lot of professions, a lot of trades, there’s a lot of uncertainty in, d’you know, the market . . . the impact is placed on having children or not having children. It’s put a lot of people on edge. I think about having children, and whether it’s feasible . . . it’s costly.

Austerity enters these reproductive narratives by compounding and exacerbating already-existing inequalities, impacting on people differently depending on structural and personal situations (Hall, 2022b). This, significantly, also extends to reproductive decision-making and futures, in ways that can be destabilising, arduous and laborious. Carrying future instabilities can simultaneously be about carrying the past. The conclusions below expand upon these reflections.

Conclusions

Building on and connecting ideas about social reproduction, emotional labour and relational work, I have developed and applied the notion of ‘carrying’ to articulate experiences of reproductive decisions in austerity. Carrying, I argue, beholds a combination of embodied, emotional and relational labour involved in reproductive decision-making, and their variously laborious qualities. Moreover, dealing with the weight of possibilities, bodies and instabilities, reproductive decision-making is a labour that is further carried into the future. Thinking through the ‘carrying’ of bodies in this way – as physical, relational and emotional – brings the body back into social reproduction, and connects different labours required to reproduce society, generations and daily life. The various carryings associated with reproduction and reproductive decisions can be a bodily toll, an embodied and visceral strain, and with gendered, racialised, classed, intergenerational and emplaced implications.

Using innovative Oral Histories and Futures interviews, narratives reflecting on emotional, embodied and relational carryings of reproductive decision-making have shed new light on how social reproduction is understood in situ. Findings reveal the sheer pressure of carrying multiple instabilities whilst also holding together hopes and desires for reproductive futures. These instabilities were predominantly discussed as financial such as affording day-to-day living, saving up, secure and appropriate housing, childcare, and fixed term, reliable and well-paid employment: at once interpersonal, relational and at times intergenerational instabilities. Participants across the interviews were carrying multiple elements of reproductive futures, ranging from mental preparation to emotional management and regulation, to physical labour, intergenerational and interpersonal relations, and worries, concerns and responsibilities. These reproductive labours also tied together pasts, present experiences and imagined futures.

Carrying is also key to understanding contemporary experiences of reproduction in an austere context. Austerity intensifies already existing inequalities that have long shaped reproductive decisions, and for some participants from the North East of England, public spending cuts served to add further instabilities to long-term, embedded, intergenerational socio-material circumstances. These compounding factors are widespread and multi-scalar, shaping everyday lives, futures, bodies and subjectivities. Participants spoke about a distinct labour in carrying multiple reproductive possibilities together, along with these deep emplaced inequalities, in conjunction, knowing full well that not all can be realised. These possibilities were always tied to other possibilities: a new job, a secure home, a stable relationship, affordable childcare and so forth, which again were possibilities that were being simultaneously carried, emotionally, corporeally and relationally.

Reproductive practices and decisions are highly contextualised (Greenhalgh, 1995; Katz, 2001), and these findings relate to a particular group of people at a particular time. However, it is noteworthy that, across Oral Histories and Futures with people from different situations and with varied life experiences and socio-economic backgrounds, strikingly similar issues were raised. This suggests a coalescing of experiences of reproductive decisions and futures, in which the influence of neoliberal and austerity-motivated policies is prominent in shaping both actual circumstances and future aspirations. Divestments in social reproduction under the guise of austerity, and in related communities, infrastructures and sectors, produce further labour, what in this article I term as ‘carryings’. These often go unseen and undocumented, and may serve to widen social inequalities even further. Moreover, given the widespread adoption of austerity measures across many parts of Europe, as well as the US and Australia, future research may wish to interrogate the comparative in situ emotional, embodied and relational carryings that austerity produces with regard to reproduction and reproductive decision-making.