The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain

Description

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. Cover Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Contents Illustrations Imperatives: A Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Read, Listen, Obey and Keep a Good Heart Mass Observation as source and agent Humanitarian reason on the home front Biopolitics, post-humanism and animacies Mass Observation and the biopolitics of care 1 Keeping Watch Over the Population What people say on a windy night in March Careful propaganda Mass Observation, rumours and morale on the home front Careful intelligence saves lives 2 Verminous House Guests and Good Hosts: Evacuation Stories Implementation Evacuation stories Contamination threats The good citizen and the ingrate Feckless Eve The kind warden’s wife Conclusion 3 Lazy Dogs Early days of war In the massacre’s wake ‘Aeroplanes or Bacon?’: calculations Mass Observation dog surveys Conclusion 4 Confused Animacies on the Home Front 5 Careless Homes Cost Lives Being careful Dwelling between care and security The careless home and its ‘problem family’ Mass Observation Notes Bibliography Archival collections Index