‘You’d Die if You Didn’t Have Fun’: Interpreting the Experiences of Long-Term Unemployed Men as Bakhtinian Death–Rebirth
研究英国长期失业男性如何通过幽默和狂欢式反抗来应对失业污名，基于巴赫金的死亡-重生概念分析其对话经历。
Death is a well-established metaphor for how individuals experience and cope with change: from organisational restructuring to job loss. However, the critical potential of death metaphors, particularly relating to job loss and unemployment, has not been fully realised. Drawing on dialogues between long-term unemployed men and their case workers at a Work Club in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, this article addresses a lack of theorisation of situated relational jobseeker resistance. Interpreting these experiences through Bakhtin’s concept of death–rebirth, metaphorical death can be understood as a feeling induced by stigmatising unemployment discourse. Rebirth represents the temporary resistance of this death through carnivalesque laughter, parody and grotesque humour. It is concluded that the men resist the stigma of blame for their own unemployment by using humorous carnivalesque reversals between death and rebirth as a form of relational jobseeker resistance.