Queerly outraged: ethical practice in a neoliberal age

ABSTRACT

Moral outrage is key in working through how best to support the clients with whom we work, and in supporting possibilities for new types of livable subjectivities to emerge. This academic paper argues that practice must be informed by an ethical imperative to centre difference based on a postmodern and queer recognition of the self as incoherent and constantly shifting. By exploring the foundations of social work as a field, outrage itself is demonstrated to be an affective stance which normalizes certain narratives by overshadowing others. The paper grounds the call to conceptualize identity as an ongoing relational practice in order to open up possibilities for social work to engage with moral outrage in non-normative and queerly productive ways. A queering of outrage calls for a recognition of different and historicized forms of livability and demands that those recognitions be necessarily complicated by ongoing fissures in identity construction through place and time. Ultimately to begin from a queerly non-normative place of outrage reflects an ethical imperative to include those who are left out of discursive frames, those whose lives are made precarious through their inarticulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer
• social work
• welfare
• subject
• ethics
• neoliberal
• outrage

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Stephanie Baker Collins, Sarah Brophy, Amber Dean, Ryan Edwards and Tina Wilson for their advice and comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 767-2015-1592].