The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain

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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 defence 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 neighbourhoods. Kimberly Mair looks at how government publicity campaigns communicated new instructions for care formally, while the circulation of wartime rumours negotiated these instructions informally. These rumours, 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.

Reviews

Mairs The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain casts new light on how Mass-Observation influenced who or what considered worthy subjects of care. Using extensive archival research into treatment of various subjects of wartime rhetoric, including humans and animals, Mair underscores the malleability of our notions of what is a worthy citizen-subject, and identifies new forms of biopolitical power that emerge in the new milieu of a war with a devastating effect on British civilian populations. Mairs book is critical for scholars interested in the advancement of biopolitical power or those interested in how Mass-Observations politicization of the everyday manifests itself in rhetoric and policy. * Megan Faragher, Associate Professor of English, Wright State University, USA *
Kimberley Mairs The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain provides us with both a fresh way of thinking about the experience of the British Home Front and what is in effect a brilliant new history of the Mass Observation movement. Well-researched, critically intelligent and full of insight, this book not only consistently made me think again about topics Ive researched for twenty years but left me feeling inspired once again about the alternative futures she unearths within the legacy of Mass Observation. * Nick Hubble, Director of Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing, Brunel University, UK *

Author Bio

Kimberly Mair is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. She is the author of Guerrilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerrilla (2016).