Hope is not singular or fixed; instead hopes take multiple forms that constitute precarity. Drawing on interviews with white women ‘on benefits’ in the North East of England, in a period before Brexit, I explore different kinds of hope that surfaced in relation with neoliberal forces of, and beyond, austerity. (1) Multiplied hopes, hedging bets and holding several possibilities together; (2) Conflicted hopes, pulls towards paradoxical attachments; (3) Suspended hopes, framed by the limits of the now; (4) Negative hopes, invested in promises that despair could be pushed onto others; (5) Hopes for the absence of optimism, a mode of being present in the present, staying with mutual contingency and withdrawing from the cruelty of unknown futures, a strategy increasingly denied to women who were more than ‘left-behind’. By exploring the different forms that hopes take, we can better understand what hopes do. I argue that hopes in decline were not lost, nor orientated towards upward progress, but invested instead in maintaining a position. They were both sustaining and debilitating through situations of loss and uncertainty, and as such constituted a stretched-out present, tensed with decline.

希望不是单一的或固定的；相反，希望采取多种形式构成不稳定。在英国脱欧之前的一段时间里，我通过对英格兰东北部“受益”的白人妇女的采访，探索了与紧缩乃至紧缩的新自由主义力量相关的各种希望。（1）希望倍增，对冲赌注，并把几种可能性结合在一起；（2）寄希望于冲突，趋向于自相矛盾的依恋；（3）悬念寄托于现在的极限；（4）消极希望寄托在将绝望推向他人的承诺上；（5）缺乏乐观的希望，这是目前的一种模式，相互依存，并摆脱了未知未来的残酷，这一策略越来越多地被那些“留守”的女性所拒绝。通过探索希望采取的不同形式，我们可以更好地理解希望所做的事情。我认为，下降的希望并没有失去，也没有朝着进步的方向发展，而是投在了保持地位上。它们在损失和不确定性的情况下都在维持和使人衰弱，因此构成了目前的延伸，并随着下降而紧张。