Middle-class mothers’ passionate attachment to school choice: abject objects, cruel optimism and affective exploitation

This paper is based on a qualitative study about middle-class mothers’ experiences of school choice in Chile. It draws on Butler, Berlant and Hardt’s work on affects, and on feminist contributions to the intersection between school choice, social class and mothering. These contributions help us deepen our understanding of school choice as both a form of passionate attachment to the education market and affective labour. In addition, these perspectives motivate us to go beyond social research sustaining the dominant critical discourse of advantages that middle-classes gain over working-classes through their work in the education market. Our analyses suggest that school choice configures cruel passionate attachments to the education market on middle-class mothers through the construction of working-class ‘others’, and models public education as an abject object through the intensification of mothers’ affective labour, thus reinforcing their experiences of gendered and affective inequalities.