The biopolitics of care in Second World War Britain /
During the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defense by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals and persons displaced through evacuation. This book examines how the Mass-Observat...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
London ; New York :
Bloomsbury Academic,
[2022].
|
| Series: | Mass-Observation critical series.
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | During the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defense by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals and persons displaced through evacuation. This book examines how the Mass-Observation movement recorded and shaped the logics of care that became central to those daily routines in homes and neighborhoods. Kimberly Mair looks at how government publicity campaigns communicated new instructions for care formally, while the circulation of wartime rumors negotiated these instructions informally. These rumors, she argues, explicitly repudiated the improper socialization of evacuees and also produced a salient, but contested, image of the host as a good wartime citizen who was impervious to the cultural invasion of the ostensibly 'animalistic,' dirty and destructive house guest. Mair also considers the explicit contestations over the value of the lives of pets, conceived as animals who do not work with animal caregivers whose use of limited provisions or personal sacrifice could then be judged in the context of wartime hardship. Together, formal and informal instructions for caregiving reshaped everyday habits in the war years to an idealized template of the good citizen committed to the war and nation, with Mass-Observation enacting a watchful form of care by surveilling civilian feeling and habit in the process. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | xxiv, 219 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781350106918 1350106917 |