Social policy reifies iconic citizen types into fixed subject positions

Evidence

In the imagined worlds of the government bureaucrat, as much as in the anticipated urbanisms of the city architect, a cast of citizens occupies the city stage. The nuclear family, the squatter, the single parent, the key worker, the cultural worker, the rioter, the anarchist, the class-mobile entrepreneur, are just a few of the iconic subject positions that become reified in social policy and catered for in city plans. They too come loaded with their own histories of respectability and transgression, they too might logically form the subject matter of independent genealogical volumes. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2277

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how city planning documents code certain ‘types’ (the squatter, the rioter, the cultural worker) as respectable or transgressive — a genealogy of the modern citizen.
• XREF: connects to: Governance replaces free subjects with managed, responsibilized ones — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 138; the MOC “The Forge and the Other: How Power, Discourse, and Encounter Cast the Self”