Abstract
This article focuses on normalization processes within a Swedish family assessment home. It discusses how normality is constructed by personnel working at Family House, a fictive name for an assessment home of parental care. The article focuses on the ways in which meanings of race/ethnicity, class, and gender are an implicit part of the normativity constructed by personnel in these institutional settings and are used to position themselves as different from the families who are there to be evaluated. The term
Is it him, or is it that I am with him more? He has become more
They are not used to [playing], but when I was watching them, we played and built houses. They are very
The children are more secure with us; they go up and greet us. We should encourage the parents to do so; they are insecure and afraid. If they are here more, it will be
The foregoing exchange was taken from a personnel meeting at Family House, the fictive name of a home for parental observation in a midsize Swedish town. Once a week, the 11 personnel (5 men and 6 women, one of whom worked mostly as a cook but also with families) met sitting around an oblong table to talk about the different families who were living at Family House. In these meetings, they shared and compared what they called “pictures” of the families they were working with. These pictures were based on their observations of the families, an important professional method of assessment used at Family House. They were sometimes prefaced by the personnel as being a “good picture” or “bad picture” and told about specific time sequences of parents’ contacts with their children or the parents’ or children’s’ behavior alone.
A social welfare institution linked to the Swedish Department of Social Services, Family House is a Swedish state home for care or living
HVB homes like the one discussed here have parallels, for example, in the British context, with the assessment done in “family centers” (Holland, 2004). Their goal is normalization in a general sense in that their aims are to protect children and to ensure that children are being properly cared for and to work for the social integration of children and families (i.e., equality and being able to live a common life; Piuva, 2005; Svensson, 2007). However, they are also spaces of control and power, which is the subject of this article. What are some of the ways in which a “helping normality” within social work institutions like Family House can also entail some of the gendered, racial/ethnic, and classed power relations that are imbued in normality?
In particular, this article looks more closely at the ways in which normalization processes are part of these settings through the normative standards that personnel use when assessing the families. As the introductory exchange portrays, understandings of the normal and the natural were deeply embedded in the professionals’ talk at Family House and contributed to the creation of an institutional world of social work meaning (de Montigny, 1995; Douglas, 1986). The norms that are discussed here are not the explicit, more bureaucratic, standardized criteria that are used in reporting forms and procedures (Holland, 2004; Webb, 2006), but the shared, taken-for-granted norms about what consists of “the good life” (Andersson, 2007; Hirdman, 2000; Payne, 2005) that are seen in the professionals’ talk about the work they do.
Methodology and Ethical Considerations
This article looks at some of the normalization processes at work within a home for parental evaluation in a northern Swedish town. It is part of a larger Swedish interdisciplinary research project called Challenging Gender and, more specifically, the subproject, Challenging Normalization Processes in Institutions, that was funded by the Swedish Research Council. This means that the research project was started with a normalization framework in mind. This particular home was chosen because one of the researchers was contacted by the administrative head of Family House, who said they were interested in having a study on the topic of gender in the home, given that there were an equal number of male and female personnel working there.
The research was conducted following ethical standards: the project was presented and discussed with the personnel during an initial meeting in which they were informed that they, along with the location and name of the institutional “home,” would be given fictive names in all publications. Participation was presented as optional, both at this initial meeting and immediately before the interviews, and the participants were told that they did not have to answer any question they did not want to and had the right to end the interview at any time. All but one of the personnel chose to participate in the project. A letter of approval to conduct the research was obtained from the municipality. Families who were staying at Family House were told that the study was about the personnel and that if they did not feel comfortable, they had the right to object, and we would leave.
This article is based on 10 audiotaped interviews and written notes from the participant observations of personnel at Family House during 2008. The interviews were conducted in Swedish by both me and the coresearcher and translated into English by me. During the interviews, the participants were asked general questions about the work they do. For example, they were asked to describe a typical day and a typical family who comes to Family House and how they evaluate parental care abilities. They were also asked more specific questions about the role that ethnicity, class, or gender play in the work that they did. The participants, in response to direct questions about these topics, answered overwhelmingly in the negative; these topics were not a part of their work. However, as the following discussion will show, these categories seeped through their narratives in implicit and important ways and thus should necessarily be unpacked.
The backgrounds of the participants appeared to be ethnically homogeneous, and, as was mentioned earlier, half the participants were women and half were men. Even though they all had the formal employment title of “family treater” (
The participants’ narratives were analyzed through a Foucaultian understanding of discourse as productive, complex, and closely embedded with power/knowledge (Chambon, Irving, Epstein, 1999; Healy, 2000). A critical discourse analytical approach (Wodak, 2001), which looks at how “taken-for-granted categories” have historical and social hierarchies embedded within them (Lind Palicki, 2010, p. 24), was used to analyze the narratives. Using this methodological approach, the article discusses Family House personnel’s professional talk with the specific aim of understanding how meanings of class, gender, and race/ethnicity are a part of the normativity constructed in these institutions and through this subjectivities differently positioned in relation to one another. Thus, the study approached normality and “the normal” not as something that unequivocally exists, but as something that is constructed discursively by the personnel at Family House.
The first level of analysis focused on how the participants constructed boundaries of difference in their narratives through a “we–you” categorization—that is, when the families were defined, overwhelmingly and most often, as different from the Family House personnel (and the interviewers). Second, attention was paid to the strategies of justification, including counterdiscourses, which the participants used when they negotiated what was portrayed as the blurring of their normative categories. Finally, the quotations that highlight the ways in which intersecting meanings of class, gender, and race/ethnicity are part of the aforementioned discursive practices are analyzed in this article.
One aim of this article is to contribute to discussions of social justice in social work (Ferguson, 2008; Pease, 1999), particularly emancipatory antioppressive social work (Dominelli, 2002; Kamali, 2002). The latter is an area of social work that uses critical theory, particularly poststructuralist theories of power, to unpack the often-implicit ways in which power is at work within social work institutions (Healy, 2000; Payne, 2005; Webb, 2006). Instead of looking at power as only top-down, with clearly demarcated and differentiated boundaries between the “oppressor” and the “oppressed,” poststructuralist approaches have argued that power is necessarily complex, complicated, and shifting, depending on the context (see Healy, 2000). By focusing on the ways in which meanings of class, gender, and race/ethnicity are embedded in professional talk in social work institutions, such as this one, another aim of the study was to increase social workers’ and researchers’ understanding and, in the long term, the quality of social work.
Still another aim of the study was to contribute to critical research and understanding by using an intersectional approach to understanding power. In an intersectional analysis, a researcher looks at the ways in which different power hierarchies, such as race/ethnicity, gender, and class, are simultaneously embedded and constitutive of each other (Hill Collins, 1990; Lorde, 1984; see, for example in social work, Fahlgren & Sawyer, 2011; Lewis, 2000; Mattsson, 2005; Mehrotra, 2010). The study did not aim to measure in a positivistic sense, however, and instead used a social contructivist approach to social categorizations and inspiration from McCall’s (2005) model of intercategorical intersectional analysis, which provisionally uses categories in an attempt to understand the complicated relationship of inequality among constituted social groups.
Norm, Normality, and Normalization
The term
Social work is, according to Svensson (2007), an institution that tries to “stabilize” norms and can thus be understood as a space of normalization in that it strives for the “normal.” That is, normalization occurs as material circumstances, values, and ways of reacting are influenced by professionals who are often driven by a desire to assist those who do not have access to what is understood to be “normal.” Piuva (2005) described how a normalization principle was implemented within Swedish social work institutions in the 1960s and was based on an understanding of statistical normality—an idea that individuals should have the ability to live “like everyone else.”
However, normalization can also be understood through a more Foucaultian perspective, in which knowledge and power are seen as intimately constitutive and constituting of each other and modern classificatory schemas dominate not through direct force, but through an individual’s self-disciplining or, in Foucault’s (1991) terminology, the “governing of the self.” Foucault (1977; see also Johannisson, 2004) discussed the particular role that a professional’s clinical “gaze” has in the reproduction of power and described how modern disciplines, such as medicine and psychiatry, entailed learning to “see” and categorize bodies in specific ways in relation to normality and deviance. A professional gaze often entails surveillance and assessment procedures that have the goal of conformity and in which the performance of individuals is assessed and made to comply with implicit normative judgments (Holligan, 2000). Discussing the institutional clinical gaze and its introduction to Swedish social work students through mental hygiene education, Piuva (2005, p. 26) stated, “It was about learning how and what one would see and in what way one should interpret what one saw.… Among many possible interpretations, one is formed as possible in the current context.” It is in this sense that one can say that a professional gaze is also a normalizing gaze; it uses specific norms as its filter and produces self-disciplining (Andersson, 2007; Foucault, 1980; Pease, 2002; Piuva, 2005). Furthermore, these normalization processes are closely aligned with the register of emotions, particularly shame (Rose, 1999; Skeggs, 1997). For example, feelings of shame encourage submission and adaptation to normativity.
Observation as a Method at Family House
Being accessible to the gaze of personnel is mandatory at Family House, and families are encouraged to come into the “shared space” of the house from their “private” apartments and rooms and allow themselves and their children to be seen by the personnel. Indeed, the participants talked about how observation is a particularly important tool for assessment, evaluation, and knowing at Family House. For example, “pictures,” like those presented at the beginning of the article, were said to be key “evidence” that they used in their discussions and eventual documentation (see Johannisson, 2004; Piuva, 2005). As one participant noted, when he arrived at work, “I always start by scanning the house.” Another described how he conducted “hidden observations,” in which “half an eye” is on the family while the other is “pretending to read the newspaper.”
Formal observation, which some participants called “obs,” was described as a key method that is closely linked to the structuring and ordering of time and the emotional register and expression of children and parents. Formal observations were based on specific parenting sequences—where certain things should happen at specific times of the day and in specific ways; for example, the participants described standard observations inside Family House as breakfast, getting dressed, lunch and dinner, getting ready for bed, and putting children to bed” (Fahlgren, 2011). There were also observations that occurred outside Family House in places that are, as one person described, “natural spaces for parenting” and the swimming pool, food shopping, in the woods, playground, and going sledding being some of the examples given for these types of observations.
The participants linked observation to what they called “the criteria,” a kind of checklist by which observations were to be related to, for example, “the parent puts the child’s needs first.” Yet other participants talked in more general terms about how observation was to be used, and more than a few expressed a bit of embarrassment that they could not remember all the criteria during the interviews. When the research was conducted, Family Home was, like many other Swedish social services that conduct investigations on children, in the process of implementing the more evidence-based BBIC (
Rather than suggest that assessment is, or ever can be, a scientific endeavor, the following analysis highlights how shared implicit knowledge is created and a part of the assessment processes that occur at Family House. Although the participants claimed during the interviews that understandings of gender, ethnicity, and class were not a part of the way they worked or thought about families, such meanings were deeply embedded within the normativity they constructed in their professional talk, as will be shown in what follows.
Svensson Normality
If, according to Petersson (2006), “poor and lone mothers” were the first categories of people who could find themselves in contact with Swedish social services and parental assessment institutions like Family House, in 2008 the personnel at Family House used categories, such as “vulnerable people,” “single mothers,” “addicts,” “people with a diagnosis,” and/or “mentally ill” to talk about the people who come to have their parenting abilities assessed. These are fairly institutionalized categories in Swedish social services that are used to describe and classify families into “types” of potentially problematic life situations and users of services. As such, they can be seen to be an explicit part of the normalization processes at Family House. However, another category emerged as important when defining and categorizing families. As one participant, Barbro, described:
What kinds of situations are they in when they come?
They are families who have been involved with the social services for a long time . . . there are few families that work and go away to work, who live with us. They are somewhere they have like ended up a little outside of society . . . it feels like this average Svensson life. They are dependent on economic welfare; they are dependent on others helping them.
Here, Barbro described the situation of families who come to Family House and focused on their lack of work and long-term contact with social services. She introduced the term
That some participants used the term
The Personnel as Average and Normal
Although Svensson emerged as central to the participants’ categorization of families who come for assessment at Family House (they are
Måns’s description of the personnel introduced gender as important to the normality constructed at Family House. That Svensson is not only about salaried employment and economic self-sufficiency, but a particular gendered kind of normality, was also invoked by Anna when she talked about the women who come to Family House: [They] have negative pictures of men, and they have been exposed to different kinds of violence or humiliation. . . . The men who are with us are like Svenssons, ordinary men who are nice and decent and are good role models. . . . I think it is important to show that these kinds also exist, that these men are also in our society, that it is not just those who abuse and insult or whatever. So, this is why sometimes a mother has chosen male [personnel]. I do not think that they would choose a female [personnel] to have a conversation with, a private conversation. So they have chosen a man, and some of them, . . . the mothers, [seem to], how should I say, play/act out [flirt] with the men.
In her comment, Anna normalized a heteronormative understanding of gender complementarity in that the male personnel were once again categorized as Svenssons—men who embody a masculinity that is seen to be particularly important for the mothers who come to Family House (see Mattsson, 2005; Petersson, 2006). If non-Svensson men are constructed as violent and as humiliating women, Svenssons, as exemplified by the men who work at Family House, are positioned as having respectful relations with women (described as mothers).
That social workers model specific kinds of masculinity and femininity within rehabilitative institutions is problematic in that it excludes other ways of being men and women, ways that can have to do with class, sexuality, and ethnicity (Johansson, 2003; Mattsson, 2005). Through Anna’s normalization of a heterosexual logic of gender difference and sexual complementarity, it thus becomes logical that the mothers at Family House seek out these “ordinary men that are nice and decent,” choosing them over the female personnel. And thus the mothers’ attempts to “play/act out” with the men, although transgressing boundaries of professional roles of client and professional, were also normative, given the discourse that Anna used to frame their actions.
Although the boundary between the Family House personnel and the families they work with was most often presented as clearly differentiated and with discrete boundaries, one participant deviated from this norm, creating a more fluid boundary that can be understood as a counterdiscourse. This was a discourse that challenged the distinct difference between categories and instead highlighted similarity. Ingrid said, when asked to describe a good father or mother: Yes. God! [laughs]. No, well, I am myself a mother, . . . and I know that you have to be able to have your days and moments when [you are] not so super great, and that is what we are talking about by to be good enough. To be good enough and to weigh in and think about it yourself, not just demand that it should be so wonderful, but rather weigh in and think. “How am I, and how is my neighbor? . . . You maybe yell at your child, but if you yell 9 days out of 10, then that says something is not right.
Here Ingrid positioned herself as similar to the clients and described how, based on her own experience as a mother, perfect parenting is unattainable for everyone. She suggested that the normality of “good enough,” when personnel reflect on how things are in their own homes, as well as those of their neighbors, should be used when evaluating families at Family House. Yet she constructed boundaries in the end, based on the frequency of what she portrayed to be undesirable behavior—how often parents yell at their children.
To Be Normal by Being Categorized as Sick
Yet if non-Svensson families were described as those who were the most likely to be at Family House to have their parenting abilities assessed, once in a while, the participants admitted that a Svensson family did end up there. It is not surprising that this admission represented an ambivalence and blurring of normative categories and thus required negotiation (Martinsson & Reimers, 2010; Sandell, 2001). For example, Anna introduced the language of medical discourse as a way to justify why a Svensson family might stay at Family House. In her comment, she used the physical and temporary aspect of illness to relegitimate a family morally as Svensson, and thus ordinary, even if the family was inside the space of Family House. As Anna stated: Often it is apparent that there have been deficiencies with the children, but it is seldom that a Svensson family, [an] ordinary [family] comes [here]. I think we have had blended cases; for example, we had a mother who had a knee operation who was here because she could not take care of her children at home. . . . We gave a helping hand to this mother, who had two young children, one was 6 months old, and the other was almost 2, and then it was more as a helping function for the mother to be able to rehabilitate herself after the operation, so she could have the possibility of taking care of her children because she did not have any other help.
In this case, a Svensson family was described as residing at Family House. Yet by being categorized as physically sick, in this case the mother’s recuperation from a knee operation, Anna included/reincluded this mother within the boundaries of “the normal.” At the same time, Anna also invoked the imprecise quality of observation and the blurring of the boundaries of normativity—for example, what looks like a Svensson “from the outside” can also look differently when observed more closely and from “the inside”:
But you say not a Svensson family?
Yes, maybe she was more that; it was an exceptional family. But then we have had what looked like from the outside to be Svensson families who were sick. There was a mother who . . . had cancer, and she knew she would die; they came here because the father did not have the energy to take the whole responsibility for the children. We knew this was an ordinary family for us, but then the father himself had such, not deficiencies, but maybe emotionally deficiencies. . . . At the same time, it is hard to say; when you are in a crisis, you can become very basic. . . . He was very detached, totally gone, and then he found and brought some colored woman. Then he came back in some way and said he would be a parent—she [the colored woman] would fill this empty space in some way, complement him in parenthood. It did not feel anyway that it was someone, it was not healthy, or what should I say?
Anna described how what looked from “the outside” to be an average Svensson family, instead turned out to be “not healthy” (i.e., sick) when viewed more closely. Once again, a hetero sexual family was normalized; it was through having another woman at his side that he was able to be a father again. However, Anna categorized this situation as also sick; the father’s hetero normative choice (to find another woman to be able to be a parent) became nonnormative via “race,” since whiteness was normalized in her discussion, and the new woman’s nonwhiteness was made visible.
Lasse also invoked the blurred and broad boundaries of Svensson and negotiated them in the following way:
What do you mean by ordinary?
Good question, families who have not had any contact with the authorities, like Svensson families. The Svensson scale is wide; there is always a buried dog around our families, some trauma or something more powerful. . . because it is broken around them. I have had some families where it was pretty ordinary; it was about adoption, and the mother had a psychosis. That is also really serious when it is a psychosis, even if it is an ordinary family, even if they have become really sick in conjunction with delivery.
Similar to Anna’s description and usage of Svensson, Lasse described physical illness (psychosis after childbirth and adoption) as a way to justify a families’ ordinariness, even though residing at Family House. Once again, it was a mother’s difficulties related to reproduction that were invoked and the difficulties given were given a moral aspect—that although they were at Family House and their difficulties were “serious,” the families remained implicitly included within Svensson normality. And once again, the complicated and messy aspect of negotiating normality appeared (Connell, 1995; Svensson, 2007) as both Anna and Lasse reflected on different and competing criteria linked to meanings of self-sufficiency, illness, motherhood, and reproduction. Svensson can thus be understood as being an ambivalent term that has clear class connotations related to understandings of an “orderly life.” So while the term alludes to economic sufficiency and consumption patterns, it is also closely linked to a nuclear heterosexual organization of family life and reproduction.
When the Gaze Is Directed Toward the Personnel
Inside Family House, the participants often described clearly demarcated roles, of themselves being role models, Svenssons, and belonging to ordinary families, in comparison to the families they worked with who were most often “not Svenssons.” There, in the space of Family House, they often portrayed their positions both as professionals and as private individuals as being within the ordinary and normal and their gaze thus as legitimate. However, when they left the physical space of Family House and moved
Moving “outside” Family House, some participants described themselves as subject to the normative gaze of “society,” rather than the sole proprietors of it, and described their desire to wear a sign that would show “society” and mark them as unlike the people they were “seen” with and reestablish their own professional role (and Svenssonness). What was unspoken was that this sign would also extinguish the possibility that there were kinship or romantic bonds between them. For example, Martin described a keen awareness of being observed when outside Family House and told of his wish to have a hat that would mark him as being unlike the family he was with:
How does it feel not to have a Family House hat on when one has to go into the library? It is really strange, but one feels it. Sometimes one feels that. . . there is no one who notices that I am out and walking in town more than those who know where I work.
mmm
No one else notices that here comes something strange either.
mmm
But sometimes you know at once that, yeah, . . . one can be out and walking with a Roma, go into a store with a Roma. Then you yourself have someone who is walking behind you and looking to see if you have stolen something because you are hanging together with this trash.
mmm
[Someone] who is walking in town and is “well now” (looked at questionably) and like that and, yeah, I mean that sometimes one wants to have a Family House hat on.
In this comment, Martin brought up the racial/ethnic aspects of the normative gaze and described how being seen with a Roma family would move him from a position of normality into a space of strangeness, of suspicion, and of being an outsider in society—a place where he would now be the one observed and followed through the store, the power of his own professional role and normative gaze gone.
Anna also described her uncomfortableness about being “out in society” with Family House families and described a gaze that threatened to envelop her into an uncomfortable kinship with the families she worked with. Like Martin, she narrated a story of being out with a family, when “one wishes one had a personnel sign.” And like Martin, her narratives revealed how a normative gaze also works through meanings of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and heterosexuality:
When one is with a real addict family. . . you can meet someone when one goes to a summer solstice celebration, and when one goes to a store, Christmas shopping with a family . . . they dress totally different than I clothe myself, and maybe they don’t clothe themselves almost at all in the cold winter, and. . . then it is almost harder than to walk with a gypsy family
mmm
I can think like that. I don’t feel that it is shameful to walk with a gypsy family, to go with them into a store, that we are seen together. I can think it is more shameful to walk with a family that is half naked. . . with a really short, short, provocative dress or
In this comment, Anna described a normative gaze that threatened to envelop her as being in kinship with a Family House family. Race/ethnicity, class, and heterosexuality hovered in her narrative as she imagined herself subject to a normative gaze when encountering acquaintances in stores and during seasonal holidays and activities. Feelings of shame lingered when she told of possibly being positioned like or as, the “abnormal” bodies and families she works with. “Gypsy” is, in her own, as well as in Martin’s narrative, a natural, given, and visible racialized ethnic “Other” in Sweden (Martin used the less stigmatizing term
A few participants described ambivalence and contradictory emotions when encountering a normative gaze when “out in society” working with families as particularly powerful, yet also, on some occasions, such as Anna’s, as possible to manipulate. For example, Anna described mothers as actively negotiating how they are to be “seen” when outside Family House when they request younger male personnel to accompany them outside, rather than those whom, she said, would be seen as “Grampas.” In this case, Anna described mothers as choosing to be seen with personnel who would allow them to be included within normative understandings of family that privilege women’s reproductive relations with men.
Social Work, Assessment, and Normalization
This article has focused on the implicit ways in which normalization processes are at work within one family assessment home in Sweden and how the personnel working at Family House constructed and negotiated normality. Although the direct questions posed about the role of race/ethnicity, class, and gender were answered as not being important, the analysis of their narratives about the work they do suggested otherwise. In particular, Svensson was a key institutional term that many participants invoked to construct normality and to draw borders between different “kinds” of families—those who come for assessment at Family House and those like themselves who work as professionals at Family House. It was a deep and implicit category that was used to create borders between people—between those who come for evaluation and those who are professionals and, in this way, gave the personnel authority. Through unpacking their narratives and usages of the term, the analysis showed that Svensson is a term that is complexly embedded by personnel with normative understandings of an “orderly life” in a Swedish welfare state—wage work, consumption, limited contact with social welfare services, and reproduction of a heterosexual nuclear family. It is a term that normalizes the idea that contact with social services is neither normal nor desired and, above all, is stigmatizing. Furthermore, it was used in an overwhelmingly positive way in the participants’ narratives to position the participants as normative and average and thus to legitimate their ability as professionals to assess “Others.”
That many of the examples that the participants gave focused on women and constructed their problems through class, racial/ethnic, and heterosexual norms suggests that Svensson normality is particularly gendered and harsh on women. These findings are similar to those of Petersson (2006), who also found that mothers are more visible (and shamed) in parental assessments than are fathers, who are mostly invisible. The examples given by the participants presented the mothers as a particular focus of a normalizing gaze: their wrong or right choice of a romantic interest in men, parenting behaviors, and medical and physical illnesses related to reproduction. Furthermore, there are particularly heteronormative aspects of the ways in which normalization processes are described, since women are presented as being given meaning and value through their heterosexual relationships with men. Finally, even although Svensson was marked as a color-blind term, the marking of certain families’ nonwhiteness and foreignness suggests the complex ways in which the term is also intimately linked with understandings of “race” and migration (Mattsson, 2005; Sawyer, 2000).
Although the positions constructed through Svensson normality, of “us” and “them,” were often constructed as stable, this article has highlighted how they were also constantly under negotiation. For example, if the participants described contact with social services as a sign of being weak, alone, and dependent and thus not being part of a normative Svensson life, that some people (often mothers) who they described as Svensson did come to Family House was constructed as a moment of leakage and tension. In the participants’ negotiations of this “problem,” interesting moral hierarchies emerged that privileged illness and reproductive motherhood. In this sense, Family House may be understood not as a stable site in which norms are fixed, but as a border space, a “home” that is not a Svensson home, but instead a space in which normality is under evaluation, inspection, negotiation, and construction. Yet it is also a space in which the professional gaze of the people who work there carried a particular normative power, a power that was also shown to be interwoven with meanings of race/ethnicity, gender, and class.
These aspects became perhaps most visible when the participants described the insecurity of their own position as Svenssons when outside the protective walls of Family House. In particular, a few of the participants’ narratives of unease of now being observed suggest how easily normativity is perceived to be threatened and in need of constant reaffirmation. They also highlight how closely linked normativity is to the realm of emotions, such as shame, pleasure, worry, and unease. One never knows exactly how one is being “seen” and placed, for as the participants described, there are many different norms at work at the same time, and the borders of normativity are blurry and in need of constant negotiation.
Finally, in relation to social work discussions of power, this article has suggested that power within social work institutions is complex; ambiguous; and, above all, implicit and part of taken-for-granted shared knowledge that is created within social work institutions (Healy, 2000; Payne, 2005). Personnel in social work institutions occupy positions of power in relation to the “clients” they work with; however, they are also embedded within and negotiate some of the same implicit and intersectional power hierarchies that the “clients” they work with are subjected to.
While the personnel’s normative talk and gaze can and does have profound repercussions for families at Family House, it was shown perhaps most clearly to have repercussions for the personnel’s understanding of themselves as professionals, as well as citizens in a Swedish welfare state. The personnel’s understandings of normality, as well as investment in their own positioning within it, meant that they were also deeply involved in their own surveillance, self-governance, and negotiation of their position within “the normal.”
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Siv Fahlgren, who was a coresearcher in the study, for inspiring and productive collaboration.
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The study was part of the larger Challenging Gender Research Project funded by The Swedish Research Council, grant number 344-2006-7280.