Introduction

Resistance and subversion are not necessarily strategic or conscious, but occur in the everyday negotiations between complex, ambiguous and often hidden desires and conflicts produced through the interplay of the professional and the social (gender, generation, ethnicity, etc). To capture this, this chapter develops a means of thinking about health and social care professionals as emotional actors. It views the emotions as connecting identity and agency, constituted through and constitutive of the social relations of power and inequality. On this view, welfare professionals, their agency and identifications are what I think of as relational. By this I mean that the symbolic and material, structural and discursive dimensions to experience become connected, but also reconfigured through biographical experience. Thus, complex biographical positionings put welfare professionals into conflict with a range of official discourses.

My feminist psychosocial approach in this chapter theorises against the notion of welfare professionals as rational actors. It claims instead that they are ‘defended subjects’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000), maintaining that what they say, do and feel are often quite different. The relational is the point at which this mix of saying, doing and feeling, the cognitive and the emotional, gets negotiated. Relational identifications constitute the felt level of experience, where this range of often-conflicting identifications and commitments is negotiated. The concept of relational agency refers to action which springs from these multiple negotiations which cannot be read from either professional or social location alone. It places as much importance on what these defended subjects do not say as on what they do say, in the belief that not speaking about things often means that they matter more.

This sort of approach provides a novel take on questions of the relationship between service users and health and social care practitioners. As I have argued elsewhere (Hunter, 2003), an important but neglected issue in this debate is that workers and users can be one and the same, in that all health and social care professionals will at some point interact with welfare services as users; that these positionings will impact on their experiences as welfare professionals; and that these dual and multiple positionings can constitute sources of subversion and resistance.