Slaggy Mums: Class, Single Motherhood, and Performing Endurance

Abstract

This article considers how single mothers are created as abject and objectified in British culture through ideas of sexual excess and relational disgust embodied in the figure of the ‘slaggy mum’. I focus on the working-class single mother to demonstrate how motherhood becomes ideologically positioned as abject through figurative forms that serve to justify policies that overwhelmingly harm working-class women. I propose that the figure of the single mother is classed, sexualised, and raced in ways that compound her abjection and demand endurance. I examine performances and writing by single mothers Cash Carraway and Kelly Green with attention to ideas of endurance and objectification, arguing that it is through aesthetic endurance that abject objectification can be worked through from the inside by abject subjects.