Blaming Neither the Undeserving Poor Nor the Revanchist Middle Classes: A Relational Approach to Marginalization

Abstract

Various critical theories have been developed to contest the culture-of-poverty and rational-choice approaches to urban marginalization. This essay identifies a gap between these theories and qualitative studies of the everyday lives of the poor. Due to a lack of connectivity among various scales in such studies, the intellectual crusade against the blaming of the poor may easily slide into a blaming of the middle class—a broad and undifferentiated label. As a result, it remains unclear exactly how neoliberal regimes and policies that punish the poor are actually becoming social realities, in part because the empirical claims offered up by critical theorists share many of the limitations of mainstream theories. Building from the presentation of an ethnographic vignette, this article maintains that a relational sociology of urban marginalization may help to overcome this problem, and in the process could strengthen critical theory.

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